Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies

Cultural policies, identities and monument building in Southeastern Europe
environment even destroyed the possibility to keep the memory alive (Connerton,
2002: 54).
The new nationalistic ideologies have meant that most of the monuments and memory
sites defined in the previous socialist system became “dissonant heritage”, as well as the
buildings and sacral objects linked to the “memory of other”. Even the bridge in Mostar,
built in Ottoman times and once the pride of the city community regardless of ethnicity,
became, in the war situation, just a symbol of one group and was then destroyed by the other.
Model of anti-culture
There were several models (approaches) used in reconstructing the new social, cultural
and national identities in the newly created nation states of the former Yugoslavia,
through implementing “monument policy” as a main state cultural policy.
The first model – anti-culture – sought to destroy all traces of the common socialist,
anti-fascist and communist past and had two major strategies: appropriation and
annihilation.
Appropriation strategy can be seen in the disappearance of red stars from monuments
(repainted in yellow as in the case of the Slovenian Route of Friendship, or covered with
Catholic crosses in Croatia), 2 the covering of anti-fascist slogans with slogans in homage
to Croatian people (this often preceded the visit of recently elected Tuđman to a certain
city). Through all these activities of re-contextualization of monuments their original
meaning was lost and, instead of memorializing an anti-fascist battle, for example, they
became monuments to the glorious Croatian past.
The second way of dealing with a past and its monuments was a “spontaneous”
cleansing of the territory through the destruction of all elements which might seem non-
Croatian, non-Slovenian and non-Serbian – annihilation strategy. With the exception
of Istria, this happened throughout Croatia where, even in the Serb Krajina, people saw
monuments from socialist times as symbols of “denationalization”, “Yugoslavization” and
atheization, the three major issues which were “threatening and destroying” Croatian or
Serbian identity.
Those battles for new identities through memory policies have taken two different
paths: Serbian identity in Croatia was “protected” by the Serbian Orthodox Church and
intellectuals from “motherland” Serbia (from the Academy of Science), while for a new
Croatian identity a whole state framework was developed, as was also the case in Serbia.
The difference was that the Serbian state officially proclaimed continuity with Yugoslavia,
that is, officially the policy towards the socialist past should not be changed. However, the
monument to Boris Kidrič, the Slovenian communist and statesman, was removed from its
2
Similar events happened later in Serbia when the opposition took over the city of Belgrade in
1997, when a red star from the city parliament was taken down at a public event.
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