Croatian Politics

The article is dealing with the ideology of integral Yugoslavism of the Organization
of Yugoslav Nationalists (Orjuna) during the time of its existence
1921-1929, approaching the topic from the perspective of the new cultural
theories about fascism, which defines fascism as the ideology advocating the
notion of the palingenetic national revolution. The article analyses Orjuna’s
concept of the palingenetic national revolution, subsequently showing that the
organization failed to develop in a fully blown fascist movement, due to the
fact that it failed to constitute itself as the autonomous political agent tending
to revolutionary overtaken of political power. Subsequently, the article is focused
on the Orjuna’s central ideological concept of integral Yugoslav nation. It
is shown that Orjuna, on the contrary to other fascist movement, was focus on
the process of creation the new unitary Yugoslav nation. Hence, the analysis
shows that the privileged position of Serb national mentality within the concept
of Yugoslav unitarism is not mere and simple expression of Orjuna’s
exclusive anti-Croatism, but originates from the labeling of the Croatian national-
integration tradition to be inadequate ground for modeling of integral
Yugoslav revolution, on the contrary to the Serb national mentality.

Detecting the gap in the existing literature of Franjo Tuđman’s political
thought, this article comprehensively analyzes Tuđman’s nationalist ideology
prior to the 1990s. Using a morphological approach to ideology, the article
presents three main clusters of concepts regarding Tuđman’s ideology: the
narrative on the nature of humankind as teleological struggle to achieve independent
national states; the narrative of supranational ideologies – such as
liberalism and communism – acting as a pure geopolitical means used by the
great nations to subjugate small ones; and finally the narrative of the Croatian
thousand-year long struggle to achieve an independent national state. Moreover,
the article exposes how Tuđman already by the 1970s created the idea of
an all-embracing national movement grounded in the synthesis of abovementioned
teleological concept on Croatian history, which would eventually bring
about a national reconciliation of Ustaša and the Croatian partisans in a final
struggle for the independent state.

The chapter demonstrates how the Slovak left- wing nationalist populist Movement for Democratic Slovakia (Ľudová strana—Hnutie za demokratické Slovensko, HZDS) led by Vladimír Mečiar gained power in the early 1990s by appropriating the national identity-building discourse developed by Slovak national- communist intellectuals in the post-1968 “normalization” period. Briefly outlining the basic pre- communist concepts of the Slovak national identity- building process, the chapter shows its appropriation by the communist national identity-building narrative, symbolized at best by the writer Vladimír Mináč, the main cultural ideologist of the Slovak plebeian national communist myth. The analysis shows the intriguing twists of the nascent left-wing populist politics represented by Mečiar and his search, strengthened by the breakup of the Czechoslovak federation in 1993, for a full-blown national identity-building narrative. The suitable historical narrative was eventually found in nationalism distanced from the “dark legacy” of the Slovak war-time fascist state. The regime appropriated the Minačian narrative built on the anti- Czechoslovakist reading of a progressive Slovak left-wing tradition (exemplified mainly by Mináč’s interpretation of the 1944 Slovak National Uprising), which proved to be the most flexible. It successfully delegitimized Mečiar’s political opponents and mobilized the potentially broader popular support that his Movement gained in the 1990s.

This book compares the politics of history and the national identity-building ideologies used by the ruling parties in Croatia and Slovakia in the 1990s. Drawing upon various sources, The Politics of History in Croatia and Slovakia in the 1990s shows that the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) led by Franjo Tuđman and the Movement for Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) led by Vládimir Mečiar gained and maintained power by convincing the electorate that they were the best state-creating agents and, hence, the “saviors of the nation”, which could protect their nations against the resentment that was exercised by the “senior” partners - the Serbs and the Czechs - towards the respective Croats' and Slovaks' claims for sovereignty. Both parties conceptualized themselves in an anti-civic fashion as all-embracing national movements that would bring about the reconciliation of the historically fractioned nations by embodying the synthesis of the entire nations’ historical statehood-building legacies. These similarities of the politics of history and similar patterns of historical legacies were characterized by the “junior” partner roles the two nations had in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia respectively, as well by the traumatic legacies of the respective Croat and Slovak WWII Nazi satellite states; while the differences stem from the more traumatic Croatian twentieth-century legacy in comparison with Slovakia's.  Exposing the operation of the politics of history in the political legitimizing processes as well as in the transfer of the politics of history into the various policies of history - including national symbols, commemoration policies, public spaces, as well policies of transitional justice - this is the first full-length study on the nexus between history/memory and the political power with respect to the Croat and Slovak nations’ historical legacies as well as to the contexts of Yugoslavia's and Czechoslovakia's respective dissolution processes

Most scholarship on post-Communist Croatia claims that the first Croatian president, Franjo Tuđman, intentionally rehabilitated the legacy of the World War II (WWII) Croatian Ustaša and its Nazi-puppet state. The rehabilitation of the Ustaša has been linked to Tuđman’s national reconciliation politics that tended toward a particular “forgetting of the past.” The national reconciliation was conceptualized as a joint struggle of both the Croatian anti-fascist Partisan and the Croatian WWII fascist Ustaša successors to achieve Croatian independence. However, the existing scholarship does not offer a comprehensive explanation of the nexus between national reconciliation and the rehabilitation of the Ustaša. Hence, this article will present how “Ustaša-nostalgia” does not stem from Tuđman’s intentions, but rather from the morphological gap occurring in Tuđman’s nation-building idea. Namely, Tuđman’s condemnation of the entire idea of Yugoslavism and Yugoslavia eventually brought about the perception that any historical agent advocating the idea of an independent Croatia is better than any form of Croatian Yugoslavism. Finally, the article will present how contemporary Croatian society is still seeped in “Ustaša-nostalgia” due to the hesitation of the post-Tuđman Croatian politics to come to terms with the legacy of his national reconciliation politics.

U članku se prikazuje vizija Mediteranizma Bogdana Radica. Uvodno se daje skica za portret možda i najvećeg splitskog novinara i publicista 20. stoljeća. Zatim se prikazuje kako su na Radicu utjecala komunikacija sa intelektualnom kremom međuratne Europe, a osobito s teorijama poznatih talijanskih liberala Guglielma Ferrera i Benedetta Crocea. U aktivnom dijalogu sa tadašnjim aktualnim teorijama Mediteranizma, prije svega Provansalizmom Frederica Mistrala, fašističkim vitalizmom Gabriela D' Annunzia te idejom mediteranskog mentaliteta Miguela de Unamuna i Jose Ortega y Gasseta Radica izgrađuje svoju originalnu teoriju o Mediteranu, te osobito mjestu Dalmacije na Mediteranu. Polazeći od ideje Mediterana kao tvornice civilizacija, Radica konceptualizira Dalmaciju kao unikatno mjesto skladnog stapanja slavenske i romanske kulture, koja svojim bogatim naslijeđem obogaćuje hrvatsku kulturu, a ne ide nasuprot njoj. Razmatrajući mjesto Mediteranizma Dalmacije u suvremenim hrvatskim nacionalno-integracijskim procesima, Radica konceptualizira dvije Dalmacije: pučko-puntarsku koja izgrađuje suvremeni demokratski nacionalizam, te gosparsko-isusovačku obilježenu kampanilističkim anakronizmom i političkim pragmatizmom. Zaključno se ističe kako intelektualna publicistika Bogdana Radice nema svog suvremenog nastavljača u Dalmaciji, uslijed intelektualnog provincijskog autizma regije.

U članku se uspoređuju politike povijesti Drugoga svjetskog rata u Estoniji i Hrvatskoj poslije državnog osamostaljenja. Pokazujući kako su estonski i hrvatski nacionalno-integracijski procesi dominantno bili obilježeni "potragom" za samostalnom državom, temeljna je teza članka da revizionističko sjećanje na estonske i hrvatske osovinske borce kao na "borce za naciju i državu" opstaje zbog isključivog shvaćanja Sovjetskog Saveza i Jugoslavije kao velikoruske odnosno velikosrpske "tamnice" estonskoga i hrvatskog naroda. Iako službeno sjećanje u objema zemljama ističe europsko antifašističko nasljeđe, oklijevanje vlasti u odmicanju od ekskluzivističkih državotvornih politika povijesti potiče pozitivnu interpretaciju estonskoga i hrvatskog fašizma. Autori zaključno prikazuju razlike među dvjema zemljama te upućuju na pogubnost aktualnih europskih politika spram totalitarizma kao obrasca suočavanja s Drugim svjetskim ratom, a koje Estoniju i Hrvatsku još više udaljuju od suočavanja s prošlošću.

This article offers a comparison of the politics of history of WWII in Estonia and in Croatia after their independence. Following an introduction demonstrating how Estonian and Croatian national integrative processes were predominantly marked by their "pursuit" of independency, the main thesis is exposed – that the revisionist memory of Estonian and Croatian Axis fighters as "fighters for the nation and the state" has survived primarily due to the exclusivist understanding of the
Soviet Union and Yugoslavia as the Greater-Russian or Greater-Serbian "dungeons" of Estonian and Croatian people, respectively. Although the official historical memory in both countries highlights the European anti-fascist heritage, the authorities’ reluctance to move away from the exclusive statehood politics of history serves to promote a positive interpretation of Estonian and Croatian fascism. The authors in conclusion depict the differences between the two countries and warn of the fatal consequences of the current European policies towards totalitarianism as a pattern for dealing with World War II, which are pushing Estonia and Croatia further away from facing the past.

One of the most common historical claims present in the Croatian public has been that the (Croatian) Serbs occupied between two-thirds and three-quarters of posts in the ranks of the civil service and the police during communism. These claims haven’t been supported by any comprehensive evidence. Statistical data show how Serbs occupied up to 30% of the posts while they represented between 12-18% of population in Socialist Croatia. There are rather comprehensive arguments explaining the overrepresentation: the fact that the Croatian Serbs unanimously sided with Tito’s partisans during WWII , while the Croats were divided between support for the Partisans and for the Nazi-puppet Ustaše regime. In Western Europe, the myths take on the structure of the narrative of the glory of the nation in history, where the French or the English history is conceptualized as a history of enlightenment and progress, while simultaneously neglecting the dark spots, like colonialism for example. To what extent can national history serve as a political battlefield in a similar way to what has been happening in the European East was nicely exposed in the case of the Great Britain by the book History Teaching, Nationhood and the State by Robert Phillips. Not even to mention how painful the process of coming to terms with the past in contemporary France has been, as is well highlighted by the book The Vichy Syndrome by Henry Rousso, or by Emanuel Macron’s speech delivered on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Holocaust in France.

World War I has been quite extensively studied in the Croatian historiography hitherto. However, most of the scholarship has been devoted to political history, or to the study of a single political faction. Thus, this paper will offer a comparative study of the adversary ideas on the nexus between World War I and Croatian nation- and state-building ideas. It will be shown that three main ideas had crystallized during World War I. The idea advocated by numerous young intellectuals of the Croatian Yugoslavist orientation was anchored in the concepts of a single Yugoslav nation adjacent to eastern Slavic messianic tradition, where the future South Slavic state should act as a bulwark of the East against German imperialism. The adversary idea was advocated by the Croatian national exclusivists  most notably by their most outstanding intellectual Ivo Pilar  with a central concept of the supremacy of the German kultur concept whereby Croatia should serve as the outer frontier of German Mitteleurope against “Byzantine East”. Finally, there is a third intellectual discourse, the one of the Peasant Party leader Stjepan Radić, presenting a peculiar synthesis of the aforementioned adversary ideas. In order to make the exposed ideas more comprehensive, the paper will start with the outline of the Croatian national identity-building processes until the war.