Memory Politics and Populism in Southeastern Europe

Jody Jensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000378856
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

This book explores the politics of memory in Southeastern Europe in the context of rising populisms and their hegemonic grip on official memory and politics.

It speaks to the increased political, media and academic attention paid to the rise of discontent, frustration and cultural resistance from below across the European continent and the world. In order to demonstrate the complexities of these processes, the volume transcends disciplinary boundaries to explore memory politics, examining the interconnections between memory and populism. It shows how memory politics has become one of the most important fields of symbolic struggle in the contemporary process of "meaning-making, " providing space for actors, movements and other mnemonic entrepreneurs who challenge and point to incoherencies in the official narratives of memory and forgetting.

Charting the contemporary rise of populist movements, the volume will be of particular interest to regional specialists in Southeastern Europe, Balkan and postcommunist studies, as well as researchers, activists, policy-makers and politicians at the national and EU levels and academics in the fields of political science, sociology, history, cultural heritage and management, conflict and peace studies.

1Introduction

Memory politics and populism in Southeastern Europe – toward an ethnographic understanding of enmity

Astrea Pejović and Dimitar Nikolovski

Dissatisfaction with the socialist system in former Yugoslavia was articulated through nationalist demands already in the late 1980s, while it reified in its most extreme form during the 1990s wars. Parallel to warfare, the delegitimation of socialism in the 1990s was successfully orchestrated by nationalist political elites through memory politics. Successor states changed anthems and state symbols and rewrote history textbooks (Bacevic 2014; Mihajlović Trbovc and Trošt 2013). Monuments of the People’s Liberation Struggle in WW II went from neglected to demolished (McConnell 2018), leaving space for new, renationalized monuments (Kuljić 2019). Diligent work on the nationalization of memory politics by political elites in the region swapped Yugoslav lieux de memoires for nationalist memory spaces. The struggles for nationalization, however, did not finish with the end of the armed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. While nationalism in the 1990s was supplied with heavy weapons, by the end of the wars it had moved to the cultural sphere attaining its banal form (Billig 1995), easily penetrating the domain of everyday life in the successor states. While nationalism was naturalized as the dominant expression of identity, different political actors learned to employ it efficiently to achieve diverse goals.

To present just one of numerous examples of this process, we can look at an event from December 2016 when a scandal that took place in the city of Dubrovnik shook the Croatian Homeland War Veterans Day. Then President of Croatia, Kolinda Grabar Kitarović, went to a kindergarten to distribute presents as part of the Veterans Day program when someone noticed an uninvited guest. The intruder, however, was neither among the members of the president’s entourage nor among the kindergarten children, parents, priests or journalists. The uninvited guest was hidden inside the goody bags that Grabar Kitarović was distributing. Among different sweets and an autographed photo of the president, there was a chocolate bar called “Mony.” That small bar of chocolate, worth not more than €0.30, managed to overshadow the entire commemorative celebration and created an international scandal. What happened? First, a parent spotted the chocolate in question and complained on Facebook. Then, the parent’s dissatisfaction spread throughout the region leaving people in shock. Some laughed about it, but others were seriously offended – it left no one, however, indifferent. Public pressure was so great that Grabar Kitarović had to officially apologize to Croatian citizens and promise that she would distribute a new set of presents.

But what is “Mony,” and how was a bar of chocolate able to attain the power to intervene in international politics? It is just another confectionery product that can be purchased in any shop in Croatia, not much different than its more popular neighbor on the shelves – Snickers. “Mony” is, albeit, cheaper, because instead of peanuts it uses rice that is produced by the Serbian company “Pionir.” Even though it is regularly available in Croatian supermarkets, as are countless other Serbian products, in the context of the Homeland War Veterans celebration, “Mony” was “nationalized” and turned into a representation of the Serbian enemy – an important symbol against which the Homeland War narrative was constructed.

This form of nationalism, which haunts even the most mundane aspects of everyday life, paved the way for the contemporary rise of populism in the region. The flooding of the political landscape by populist politicians and political parties owes to the nationalist mythologization of enemies as the archetypical evil “Other.” Memory politics plays a key role in this process, as it legitimizes and institutionalizes history that emphasizes enmity, placing it on a continuum that reaches back to ancient times. New commemorations, monuments, museums, textbooks, novels, historiographies and other “vectors of memory” (Wood 1999) reinvent and renarrate enmities, leaving the region in a permanent state of hostility.

The idea behind this volume is to triangulate enmity, memory politics and populism to understand how hostilities are perpetuated and utilized by politicians to maintain hegemony over the political landscape. It aims to understand the matrix of reproduction and political exploitation of enmity after the dissolution of Yugoslavia by looking at the intersection of memory politics and populism. While enmity is a common trope in everyday conversations and popular culture, it is widely understudied and neglected as an analytical and operational concept in the social sciences (Pudar Draško et al. 2018). One of the reasons could be that it is most thoroughly conceptualized by Carl Schmitt whose work is highly stigmatized by contemporary social scientists because of his closeness to national socialism. Schmitt (1996) postulated that at the core of the political field is the division between friends and enemies. This idea continued to linger unchallenged as only a few thinkers tackled the issue after Schmitt. First Jacques Derrida argued that “the enemy figure persists and, more so, remains somewhat constitutive for Europe,” without which it would lose its political being (Pudar Draško et al. 2018: 5). Chantal Mouffe is another thinker who revisited Schmitt’s ideas. Working on the concept of enmity, Mouffe came to her famous concept of “antagonistic pluralism” that she coined as a critique of liberal political theory that, in her view, omits to recognize “the constitutive role of antagonism in social life” (Mouffe 1993: 2). The idea behind this work was to advocate for the exchange of enmity as a constitutive element of the political field for “adversary” – an opponent whose ideas must be recognized as legitimate in a pluralistic democracy. This work was attacked from many angles by numerous scholars (Beckstein 2011), and later there was no major attempt to reexamine the concept.

The aim of this volume is not to engage in conceptual debates surrounding enmity but to offer a sociological and relational understanding of the concept by looking ethnographically at a region that has experienced civil war and that today, 20 years after the last armed conflict ended, still generates social categories based on enmities. The main framework employed is memory politics that is here broadly defined as the organization of history in the present by actors that claim power. The underlying premise of this volume is that memory politics serves as a potent set of meanings for the creation of specific economic, social and political agendas of interested groups involved in contemporary political processes. The analysis focuses on populism and populist politicians, bearing in mind that during the last decade populism crystalized as a main current in contemporary global politics that manipulates enmity as one of its main discursive strategies. This holds true for the former Yugoslav region as it does for India, Italy, the United States or Brazil, just to name a few. Contributors to this volume unpack the relationship between populism, memory politics and enmity and consider these political dynamics that are becoming increasingly prominent worldwide. While the book gives specific case studies from the Yugoslav region, the triangular approach that it applies is relevant for application to other regions marked by populist aspirations. For this reason, the volume proposes an intersectional approach (Bilge and Collins 2016) that does not see enmity, populism and memory politics as monolithic or isolated phenomena but seeks to understand how they are intertwined in a mutually reaffirming relationship.

The intersectional approach is inspired by two marked developments or “booms” in the social sciences and humanities – the study of memory and populism. While the interest in these two frameworks of analysis has been on the rise for the last ten years, there have not been many attempts to bring them closer, to see how these two frameworks interact, and what type of knowledge outcomes result, even though we can easily spot this in political practice. The Memory Studies Association established a working group on memory and populism in 2018, but no major results have been published. Several attempts observed countries from Western Europe in these two frameworks (Caramani and Manucci 2019; Cento Bull 2016), while a recent edited volume by Kaya Ayhan and Chiara de Cesari (2020) discusses how European memory feeds populism in a wider geographical scope than Europe. As Carami and Manucci (2019: 1160) rightly point out, populism is more often explained through political-institutional and socioeconomic frameworks than through cultural and historical frames. Keeping in mind that populist politics are on the rise globally and that memory politics play one of the key roles in the manipulation of historical narratives by populist politicians, an approach that offers a cultural reading of populism through the framework of memory politics seems essential.

In order to reveal the complexity of these processes, the volume transcends the strict disciplinary boundaries between history, anthropology and sociology that mostly contribute to the interdisciplinary field of memory studies and political science that deal with populism by borrowing their methodologies and placing them into debate. The overarching interest of the chapters is to understand how populists push enmities into the political arena through memory politics. For the purposes of this volume, memory is understood in its collective form. The very concept of social or collective memory is epistemologically rooted in the tension between the psychological conceptualization of memory as an individualistic process and the sociological, rather structuralist, definition of memory as a social fact (Olick 1999).

The founding father of memory studies, Maurice Halbwachs, in the 1925 (c1992) book, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire [Social Frameworks of Memory], argued that memory is inherently a collective phenomenon because even the most private memories are dependent on social structures. The present volume is less interested in how collective memory is formed or what challenges personal recollections pose to collective remembering; rather, it seeks to understand how memory is employed and manipulated in particular populist agendas. Memory politics, therefore, is not a unit of analysis but observed as the backdrop to a dynamic process in which history is manipulated for political gain. Ashplant et al. (2017) warn that analyses of memory politics are often impoverished by researchers’ attention to either a top-down perspective or insistence on personal recollections that, instead, ignore the political dimension of memory. They believe that “it is necessary to theorize the inter-relations between the elements which have been separated out in these competing models; thereby generating a more complex, integrated account of the interacting processes that link the individual, civil society and the state” (Ashplant et al. 2017: 11–12). With this critique in mind, our volume evenly balances between analysis of how collective and personal memory reflect official memory politics and, at the same time, interact with populism in the context of political changes after socialism and the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

The relationship between history and memory is understood within the framework elaborated by Jan Assman (1995) who defines “cultural memory” as “a form of collective memory, in the sense that it is shared by a number of people and that it conveys to these people a collective, that is, cultural identity” (Assman 2008: 110). Assman stresses that memory only exists in interaction with symbols, and that groups create memory “by means of things...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Editorial preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Memory politics and populism in Southeastern Europe – toward an ethnographic understanding of enmity
• 2 (Not) Remembering a populist event: The Serbian Antibureaucratic Revolution (1988–1989)
• 3 The modernist abject: Ruins of socialism, reconstruction and populist politics in Belgrade and Sarajevo
• 4 Whose is Herceg Kosača?: Populist memory politics of constructing “historical people” in Bosnia and Herzegovina
• 5 Of (anti)fascists and (anti)communists: Constructing the people and its enemies at the Partisan Memorial Cemetery in Mostar
• 6 Populism versus working-class culture in the memory politics of Korčanica memorial zone
• 7 The “War for Peace”: Commemoration of the bombing of Dubrovnik in Montenegro
• 8 Contested narratives of Bleiburg in the context of WW II remembrance in Croatia
• 9 Populism, memory politics and the Ustaša movement 1945–2020
• 10 Operation museum: Memory politics as “populist mobilization” in North Macedonia (2006–2011)
• 11 Integration versus identity: Memory politics, populism and the Good Neighborliness Agreement between North Macedonia and Bulgaria
• 12 Lukov March as a “template of possibility” for historical revisionism: Memory, history and populism in post-1989 Bulgaria
• Index