engleski

In Search for One- Thousand- Year Statehood: The Politics of History in Croatia and Slovakia in the 1990s.

This paper will compare the political use of historical discourse by nationalist regimes in Croatia and Slovakia in the 1990s with the primary aim to legitimize their own power. Since both countries share a very similar history, the analysis shows that both regimes used a very similar self-legitimizing historical discourse: the myth of uninterrupted one-thousand-year statehood finally accomplished in the 1990s, and the twentieth-century nations’ victimisation by Serb/Czech hegemony contested by the partial rehabilitation of the Croatian and Slovak states in World War II. These discourses in the two countries produced a very similar path of the non- democratic political culture characterised by the constructs of ‘external other’ - Serbs and Czechs - as well as ‘internal enemies’ - national minorities and the opposition. However, the research indicates differences originating mostly from the different Slovak and Croatian ‘minor’ experiences in the Yugoslav and the Czechoslovak federation, with final differences in the experience of the federations’ disintegration processes. Moreover, they differ considering the long durée structures of the national collective memories as well as with regard to the different roles of the radical right.

politics of history; collective memory; transition; democratic deficit; HDZ; HZDS

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