THE POLITICS OF HISTORY IN CROATIA AND SLOVAKIA 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 Tudman and the Movement for Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) led by Vladimir Meciar 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-lenght 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.