Nationalisation of memory in late Yugoslavia and Slovenia

The article deals with the negative sides of the transformation and destruction of the socialist, federal and antifascist Yugoslavia. In the field of ideology and memory, the author argues that the concept of ›the primitive accumulation of national memory‹ could be useful for understanding how political and economic changes were fuelled and intensified by ›mnemonic wars‹ in the late 1980s. What used to be seen – in public memory and history discourse – as the antifascist consensus of the former state became disputed by nationalist revisionism that manifested either as national reconciliation (reconciling fascists with antifascists in the respective nation) or as the open rehabilitation of local fascist collaborationism. The dominant revisionism was characterised by an openly negative attitude towards the Yugoslav, socialist and Partisan past and was organised around performative commemorative actions from below in the early 1990s, from the iconoclastic destruction of Partisan and socialist monuments to the renaming of streets and the destruction of books. The primary case study in this article entails an analysis of a seemingly humanist discourse on public memory in the Slovenian context: national reconciliation. By the end of the 1980s, it had already become a major national memorialisation project that aimed to heal the nation. The departure from appeasing the passions and antagonisms over the past became a battle cry, a vital part of the mnemonic wars. The article analyses a monument in the centre of Ljubljana that commemorates the victims of all wars, which brings to the fore the whole troublesome ideological operation of equating fascists with antifascists in the name of the reconciled nation, Slovenia. The nationalisation of memory in the post-Yugoslav context is a response to public memory and a frame for ethnic cleansing and ethnic wars.