Politics of Memory

Almost twenty years after the end of the Yugoslav wars and with the resurgence and consolidation of reinvented (and often fragmented and contested) national identities and heritages, is Europe closer or farther to the countries of former Yugoslavia? On the one hand, Europe seems to be the manifest destiny of all Western Balkan countries. Croatia already acceded to the EU in 2013, all the other Western Balkans countries are involved in the Stabilisation and Association Process. This includes Serbia, Montenegro and FYROM, considered as candidate, and Bosnia Herzegovina as potential candidate. On the other hand the Balkans sometimes still seem to play the role of ‘internal Other’ in Europe (Todorova 1997, Hammod 2004), in media representations, collective perceptions but also political actions. This aspect becomes evident when looking to the practices and politics of representation (self- and other- representations) of the past (especially with regard to war heritage and recent armed conflicts’ memory) and therefore of collective identities.
In his lecture, Mazzucchelli  will examine some ‘places of memory’ (commemorating different historical events, from First and Second World War to the more recent Yugoslav conflicts) in Serbia, Bosnia Herzegovina and Croatia. Here local, national and European collective identities and narratives collide, sometimes balancing, at other times opposing, each other.
http://www.uva.nl/en/disciplines/political-science/agenda/archive/item/mazzucchelli-lecture.html

This paper discusses the over-focalisation on the Mediterranean area of historians of the early modern Euro-Ottoman relationship and it offers a critical assessment of the numerous studies conducted by historians of the Habsburg Monarchy over thirty years. It shows that the histories of the Austrian monarchy and of the Ottoman Empire were interdependent and that war is a marginal element in their relationship. This paper emphasises the political use of the Ottoman history by Austrian scholars from Hammer-Purgstall’s essential enterprise to the violent contestation of Samuel Huntington and his civilizational pattern. Cultural history, trade and diplomacy appear as the three ways of the Austrian historiographical shift, which nevertheless calls nowadays for a more pragmatic approach.

The article undertakes a diachronic microhistorical analysis of commemoration practices in Čačak municipality dedicated to the Serbian victory in the First World War, as well as of public discourse and media narratives connected to these practices, embedding it into the wider context of Serbian/Yugoslav history and within the theoretical concept of political memory. During the interwar period, the commemoration practices were marked by a strong prevalence of Orthodox religious rites, entwined with the glorification of the Serbian military traditions, which was occasionally challenged by emancipatory social circles, however without a profound reexamination of the official memory politics. The Nazi occupation brought the attempts to eradicate the remembrance of the Serbian victories in the Great War, whereas the socialist revolution instituted the parallel memory paragon of the People’s Liberation Struggle, which not only prevailed over, but practically replaced the ritual status of 1918 in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It was only in the late 1960s that the First World War commemorations retained their place in the official memorialisation canon, earning its own “precursory” place within the teleological narrative of self-managing socialism and brotherhood and unity. Such an amalgam of two world wars’ traditions started crumbling in the late 1980s, when the public memory of the First came to be increasingly “rediscovered” and “emancipated” from the partisan struggle and effectively (re)appropriated by the Serbian nationalist narrative, nostalgic of monarchist traditions, eventually juxtaposing the mythologised perception of 1918 as a victimised “counter-memory” to the still-lingering remembrance of multiethnic Yugoslavia and socialist system.