To introduce a book about the politicization of history in the former Yugoslavia, it can be useful to shift vantage points and examine how Yugoslav history, including the pre- and post-Yugoslavia periods, is presented in schools in another European country. In the “old democracy” of France, history teaching has been made one of the foundations of national and civic sentiment.
Yugoslavia’s Collapse in the New French History Curricula
In France, history curricula are applied on a nationwide basis and are subject to frequent reforms and passionate, even virulent, public debate. Debate does not focus on the textbooks—numerous and never compulsory, these are chosen by teachers freely—but on the curricula themselves. The curricula are thus ultimately the product of negotiations involving an ever-growing number of stakeholders: teachers’ associations, academics, pedagogical specialists, experts, the Ministry of Education, politicians, and interest groups. History has been taught in France using a thematic and issues-based approach for several decades. Curricula and textbooks emphasize students’ need to acquire tools and methods, and to increase their critical thinking skills, more than simply acquiring factual knowledge.
The most recent reform of the history-geography curricula for French high schools, in 2011, brought about a mini-revolution by ending the previous breakdown of the twentieth century into two periods, pre-1945 and post-1945. Now, students in the last two years of secondary school (première and terminale) learn about the entire twentieth century (and even a portion of the nineteenth) through three to five major themes that aim to shed light on “questions for understanding the twentieth century” and provide “a historical perspective on today’s world,” as indicated in the titles of the official programs.1 In première (the next-to-last year of high school), the curriculum comprises these five themes:
- Theme 1: Economic Growth, Globalization, and Changes in Society since the Mid Twentieth Century
- Theme 2: War in the Twentieth Century
- Theme 3: The Century of Totalitarianisms
- Theme 4: Colonization and Decolonization
- Theme 5: The French and the Republic
In French history curricula and textbooks, communism has traditionally been dealt with by looking at the Soviet experience. The new curricula, by sweeping away an overarching view of the twentieth century in favor of a thematic approach, assorting and comparing Nazism, Fascism, and Communism, has strengthened this focus.2 The multiple forms of socialism existing in actuality are thus largely ignored. As colonization and decolonization are handled separately (in theme 4 in première), based primarily on French examples, the Non-Aligned Movement is not addressed either. A unit about the “workers’ movement and socialism” is included, but only for terminale students and only as part of a theme about German history; as a result it comes after the unit on “totalitarianisms,” which all students in première must cover.
The main Yugoslav topic in new French history curricula is Sarajevo. It appears twice—both times within the theme “War in the Twentieth Century.” The city is first mentioned as the site of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, on 28 June 1914. This event is noted for having triggered a diplomatic crisis, but its analysis rarely goes any further than that. The reformed curricula give decreased importance to the settlements that ended the two world wars, with the formation of new states in Europe in 1919 (and the birth of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, renamed “Kingdom of Yugoslavia” in 1929) and the partition of Europe after the 1945 Yalta Conference (with the birth of people’s democracies and the reshaping of Central Europe and the Balkans). This is because these curricula de-emphasize chronology and instead highlight the “combative experience” of the wars.
Sarajevo is mentioned a second time with regard to the city’s siege in the 1990s—the only time Yugoslavia appears in the new French history curricula. This is towards the end, as part of three “case studies” of the post-Cold War “new conflictuality.” These case studies respectively cast light on a “place” (the Siege of Sarajevo, 1992–1995), an “armed conflict” (the First Gulf War, 1990–1991), and a “terrorist act” (the attacks of 11 September 2001).
No mention is made of other phases or aspects of the Yugoslav Wars. Nothing is said about the war in Croatia or Kosovo, and almost nothing about what happened elsewhere in Bosnia. The Srebrenica Genocide is mentioned in only one of five textbooks. The victim count is often ambiguous and sometimes even wrong; some textbooks indicate that 10,000 people were killed, without specifying that this is the toll for the siege of Sarajevo victims alone, excluding the many others killed. The political actors are also absent: Slobodan Milošević, Franjo Tudjman, Alija Izetbegović, and Radovan Karadžić, for example, are rarely mentioned. One teacher’s manual, listing “traps to avoid” for teachers dealing with the subtheme “From the Cold War to New Conflictuality,” warns against giving a lecture “on the history of Germany and not that of Berlin, [or] on the history of the former Yugoslavia instead of Sarajevo.” It also specifies the question that should act as a “guideline”: “How is the Siege of Sarajevo a typical example of intrastate conflict in the post-Cold War era?” (Mellina 2011, 47). The textbooks generally present the role of the “international community” during the Bosnian War (1992–1995) in a positive light, noting its backing of the Bosniaks against the Serbs.
By comparison, the pre-2011 curriculum for terminale classes gave greater importance to post-1989 Europe, including the Yugoslav conflict and issues related to enlargement of the European Union. What’s more, this unit was taught in the year that students took their baccalauréat exam. Starting in the 1990s, Central and Eastern Europe, which had traditionally been side-lined in French history curricula, received renewed attention due to political will to unite Europe and the need to shape a European citizenship. The collapse of the Yugoslav Federation was covered—not just one event—in a similar format (two or four textbook pages). However, the main cause of Yugoslavia’s breakup was already presented as intercommunity dissension.
This idea has remained dominant. The teacher’s manual mentioned above, published by the Ministry of Education, indicates the “phases” teachers should emphasize. First, the “multicultural character” of the “Balkan capital” (i.e. Sarajevo) before the war. Second, the siege itself, when “the Serbs organized ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the districts they occupied by force,” it explains, continuing: “The city was divided into homogeneous ethnic districts, and the populations were torn apart based on their ethnic and confessional belonging. Interventions by the European Union, which supported Bosnia, then by the UN, were initially in vain. NATO intervention against Serb forces shifted the balance of powers.” The third phase, according to the manual, began in 1995 and was that of the “Bosnized” capital: “The war had ruined the city. The Dayton Agreement freed the districts occupied by Serb forces, which withdrew to Pale, while the Serb and Croat populations left the reunified Sarajevo, which was populated by peasants and refugees or displaced Bosniaks” (Mellina 2011, 49).
Indeed, analyzing the Siege of Sarajevo through the angle of conceptual, thematic history, with more a focus on the kinds of conflicts than on their causes, clearly results in a more ethnicized view of the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. It also tends to extract these conflicts from the chronological and spatial contexts that link them to wider Europe. Many of the European issues that had been introduced or developed in the 1990s and 2000s were removed during the 2011 curriculum reform, and those that remained were scaled back and handled superficially. Unlike issues related to historical memory—such as remembrance of the Algerian War, colonialism, or the Holocaust—these themes did not give rise to any particular public debate.
New Conflictuality, the Nation, and Citizenship
What has been debated, openly and at length, with regards to French school curricula is the way in which the nation is taught and the role the subject (history-geography) plays in educating the citizenry. In fact, this debate appears to have been exacerbated in recent years, fuelling calls for a return to the great historical narratives, or even prompting ministers to demand that schools promote “the values of the Republic and the defence of secularism [laïcité].” The French conception of history teaching in connected to the Republic: It is education about political citizenship.
A concern that this form of civic education is increasingly disconnected from students’ experiences and how they understand the world has recently gathered strength. Controversies involving the place given to the nation, or to chronology and “major milestones,” have erupted repeatedly. Another stumbling block is the pedagogical vs. scientific dimension in school curricula, and therefore the connection between research and teaching, between a school subject and an academic discipline. These various issues are interconnected, because there appears to be a consensus, within the school system and outside it, that the aim of history in the schools is to produce a “shared history” that enables people to “form a society.”
The notion of “new conflictuality”—that is, intrastate wars involving a wide range of participants, waged within the civilian population—in recent historiography, as well as a new focus on the experiences of combatants and the memory of conflicts, illustrates how research innovations quickly impact how history is taught in schools.
Yet reducing the Yugoslav Wars to the Siege of Sarajevo replicates the breaks in intelligibility that characterized French school curricula and media conversations about the conflict in the 1990s. This lack of intelligibility was clear in the focus given to ethnicity as the source of violence, and “ethnic cleansing” as the only way to describe the conflict—in the French conception of a civic nation, the very term “ethnicity” is ambiguous, and therefore does not clearly explain these events to a French audience. Indeed, the concept of a civic nation—the idea of voluntary adhesion to the political nation—precludes giving any political value (and often by extension any value at all) to forms of belonging based on birth, a group’s unique history, or any language other than a national language. If claims are ever made involving these other forms of belonging, they are considered to apply to “others” and often seen as illusive.
The way French history curricula have treated the collapse of Yugoslavia since 2011 clearly reflects the specific problems in understanding this event in France at the time. The breakup of Yugoslavia is seen as an entirely new event, despite the importance of references to the past, and no connection is made between this collapse and its context: the end of socialist regimes and the end of Yugoslavia’s socialist regime specifically. The curricula’s approach to this event is reminiscent of the media discourse of the 1990s, including abundant historical clichés, pervasive nationalist explanations, and a focus on the city of Sarajevo, which had become an ambiguous symbol—both of the guilty conscience of Europeans, who had allowed “nationalist demons” to be unleashed, and of civic resistance in a “multicultural” or even “multi-ethnic” society, although the meaning of these terms was quite vague.
An Orphaned History
Examining communism through the prism of totalitarianism and the Yugoslav Wars—through “new conflictuality”—reflects the disappearance of an entire mode of thought, including a system of beliefs dominated by certain religious and political references, namely socialism, emancipation, utopianism, and ultimately the very idea of progress. As François Furet noted back in 1995, in his famous book about the concept of communism and the end of the people’s democracies in Eastern Europe (Furet 2000), the rapid pace at which these ideas disappeared has actually threatened our capacity to understand twentieth-century history. The absence of references to the particular forms of Yugoslav self-managed socialism and to the Non-Aligned Movement in French history curricula reflects the way that the experience of the deuxième gauche—France’s “second left,” which sought to break with the Soviet “totalitarian” left—has been overshadowed in France’s collective memory.
We must recognize that the changes in perspective on and interpretation of communism, as well as the post-1989 events and the recent transformations of Europe, are very important in history teaching. When I sat the French baccalauréat in 1987, the USSR was more a subject of geography than of history. We studied “Soviet power” just as students today study “Chinese power...