Challenging the Past: Serbian and Croatian Aggressor-Victim Narratives

Abstract

Using the example of former Yugoslavia, specifically the Serbian and Croatian nations, this article examines the transformation of collective memory of aggression and victimhood by focusing on the content of national narratives. The article begins by examining narratives developed at the founding of Yugoslavia and proceeds to trace the reinterpretation of these narratives as a function of their political instrumentality—especially in Serbia and Croatia—for respective nationalist projects. In the end, the article provides tools with which to frame two questions: first, whether political and social stability is being created at the cost of forgetting and repression; second, whether a "policy of remembrance" is socially "desirable" in practice. Both forgetting and an instrumental "policy of remembrance" based on the power of revelation perpetuate aggressor-victim divisions: what is needed, rather, is a stable, systematic process of remembrance and reconciliation.