A Journey Westward: A Poststructuralist Analysis of Croatia's Identity and the Problem of Cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹The parliamentary elections held on 3 January 2000 resulted in the defeat of the Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica, HDZ) to the coalition of the Social Democratic Party (Socijaldemokratska partija Hrvatske, SDP) and the Croatian Social Liberal Party (Hrvatska socijalno liberalna stranka, HSLS). The coalition won 71 out of 150 seats (46%) while HDZ gained 46 seats (30.46%). Together with a bloc of four other parties a comfortable majority of seats was won which secured the defeat of the HDZ.

²My theoretical approach is based in Laclau and Mouffe's work. For a detailed overview of poststructuralist discourse theory and its application see Laclau and Mouffe (1985); Der Derian and Shapiro (1989); Finlayson and Valentine (2002); Glynos and Howarth (2007); Howarth (2000); Howarth and Torfing (2005); Howarth et al. (2000); Hansen (2006); Taylor (1990) and Waever (2002).

³For examples of poststructuralist analyses of case studies I suggest Howarth et al. (2000); Neumann (1999); Hansen (2006); Howarth and Torfing (2005); Finlayson and Valentine (2002) and Norval (1996).

⁴For a more detailed account of different conceptions of the concept of discourse consult Foucault (1972); Laclau and Mouffe (1985); Wodak et al. (1999); Fairclough (1995, 2003) and Howarth (2000).

⁵ Jutarnji List, 19 February 2000.

⁶ Nacional, 23 May 2000.

⁷The official discourse did not exclusively see the EU as the centre of the Western world. For example, NATO membership was put forward as another foreign policy goal that would cement Croatia's position in the Western world and was discursively linked to EU membership as something that was inseparable from it. For the purpose of this study however, I only focus on EU membership as the primary goal for the new regime in 2000, where working with the ICTY was one of the accession criteria. The European Union is explicitly articulated as ‘the West’ in that particular context and all claims made in the analysis follow from that reading of data.

⁸ Novi List, 13 January 2000.

¹⁰ Jutarnji List, 28 January 2000.

⁹ Jutarnji List, 28 January 2000.

¹¹ Slobodna Dalmacija, 6 April 2000.

¹²For a more detailed account about sovereignty from poststructuralist and critical perspectives consult Walker (1993), Bartelson (1995, 2006) and Der Derian (2009).

¹³ Novi List, 20 April 2000.

¹⁴ Jutarnji List, 14 March 2000.

¹⁵ Slobodna Dalmacija, 15 April 2000.

¹⁶It is important to note that the study of official government discourse is concerned with its representations of the Tuđmanist discourse, rather than with that discourse itself. The distinction is significant but the emphasis in this essay is on the way that the official discourse of the immediate post-election period attempted to discursively reconstruct some fundamental features of Croatian identity by challenging existing constructions.

¹⁷ Jutarnji List, 16 September 2000.

¹⁸ Jutarnji List, 16 September 2000.

¹⁹ Jutarnji List, 14 December 2000.

²⁰Justice in this context refers to the relationship of Croatian victims and Serbia as the aggressor.

²¹ Slobodna Dalmacija, 31 January 2000.

²²In July 2004 his sentence was changed to nine years' imprisonment. The verdict and the case itself never ceased to be controversial among the Croatian people as well as among politicians since it demonstrated the difficulty of reconciling the demands of the international community with national perceptions of the injustice of the trial and its verdict (http://www.icty.org/).

²³ Slobodna Dalmacija, 4 March 2000.

²⁴ Slobodna Dalmacija, 4 March 2000.

²⁵ Jutarnji List, 15 April 2000. On 16 April 1993 Bosnian Croat armed forces entered the village of Ahmići and massacred over 100 Bosnian Muslim civilians.

²⁶It is interesting to note that the same discourse appeared in the area of minority rights protection where it served as a basis for acknowledging the necessity to accept other nationalities as Croatian citizens who deserve equal rights. Also, the category of ‘victim’ was then open to all who suffered in the war, regardless of their nationality.

²⁷ Jutarnji List, 3 May 2000.