Igor Graovac - Centar za politološka istraživanja

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Prošlost, povijest i društvo
ments become part of the so-called historical memory of a society.
There is mostly a wide discrepancy between the collective memory of a
group and "the way it really was". All the more reason to differentiate
between the images of the past and history (history as a result of
methodical research).
History as a science also uses the filters, which result from the
researchers' questions and the profession's methods. Still, historians are
in a difficult and conflicting situation. As members of a nation they are
contaminated by its cultural arrangements, and at the same time, they
research what they have created themselves. The problem of the distance
between researchers and the researched arises here; historians,
as the elite among interpreters, have frequently sinned in this respect.
The historians' guild is divided into two groups: the ones, who are
primarily committed to the society, i.e. the nation - its myths and
expectations, and the others, who are primarily committed to science.
Unlike the primeval nation (i.e. the prototype of the modern closed
society), an open society is considered to be the product of change.
From that viewpoint, the nation is neither constant in time nor in
composition, and the past also presents itself in a completely different
way. There is neither the re-birth of a nation, nor the historical rights.
There are also no centuries-long rivalries among nations. This is why
the national movements, which resort to a cyclic understanding of
time, the nation as a primeval community and historical rights have a
different understanding of "justice" and "legitimacy" than the national
movements, which are committed to a linear understanding of time
and the concept of an open society.
The history of South East Europe should be re-written all over again,
because people and societies only come up in that history if they are
considered to be part of a nation, or if they are made equal with it. In
the process of separation, however, historians have played a conflictinstigating
role over and over again, which can be best seen on the
example of former Yugoslavia, especially on the examples of the
ahistorical perceptions of the past and time, which have as little in
common with history as science has with myth.
What is still to be done? Before all, one has to give up myths and
homogeneity and open oneself to pluralism and multiculturalism,
which requires abolishing the images of enemies. And "mastering one's
own past" was and is an indispensable part of this process of dealing