Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies

Cultural policies, identities and monument building in Southeastern Europe
city. Up to that moment cities were usually without symbols of Serbian national identity.
Monuments to partisans, even if they were Serbs, were considered as Yugoslavian
monuments, as well as the old Tesla monuments which celebrated sciences and not his
“ethnic Serbian genius”. 8
The changes in monument policies can be seen clearly from the biography of Miodrag
Živković. From the beginning of his career he participated in public competitions for
the memorials and monuments devoted to the Second World War. Since 1990 he has
realized projects devoted solely to Serbian medieval or heroic 19th-century history, and
in the late 1990s and at the beginning of the millennium the majority of his projects were
created for cities in the Republika Srpska (Brčko 1996; Bjeljina 1997; Derventa 2001;
Mrkonjić Grad 2003). This represents a clear change in memory policies celebrating
historical narratives that are important for only one ethnic group.
The only monument created by the Milošević government, the Eternal Flame
monument, erected to remember the NATO bombing in 1999, is a sign of the
incapacity of Milošević’s policy to create a monument which might mobilize emotions
and become a symbol of his “independence” policy. Instead, it became an “empty hole”
in the Belgrade urban landscape, an object of irony and vandalism, marginalized and
away from public attention.
Provocation of “the other” strategy
The most important changes regarding monument policy after 2000 happened
in Macedonia. As the last European nation liberated from Turkish rule (1912), then
occupied by the Bulgarian army during the Second World War, and treated in the
Kingdom of Yugoslavia as a south-Serbian province, Macedonia has not had time to
create a national identity alongside other Balkan nations. In the 19 th century, Balkan
Slavic countries had usually taken four pillars for the creation of their national identities:
national (Slavic) languages, folklore, the cultural legacy of ancient Greece and the legacy
of Renaissance humanism (even if these “belonged” to the Eastern world of Byzantium
culture). This tradition of acceptance of ancient Greek culture as a model has been
introduced into European national cultures during the enlightenment and romanticism
periods (Assmann, 1993).
Macedonia has had its chance only since 1945 to develop its distinctive south-Slavic
identity. Its roots are in its Slavic origins and folkloric traditions. In dispute with its
neighbours (Serbians do not accept the autonomy of the Macedonian Church, Bulgarians
dispute the specificity of the language and Greeks even the name), the Macedonian state,
at this very moment of nation-building, decided to claim succession rights from the ancient
Macedonian state – claiming that the contemporary Macedonian nation had been developed
8
In Croatia appropriation of Tesla as a part of the national canon is even more complex (see
Buden, 2006)
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