In 1991, the world watched in amazement as the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) began what was seemingly a fratricidal civil war. Formerly peaceful republics, joined for almost five decades under the banner of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’, would soon end their coexistence when the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) rolled into Slovenia to prevent Slovenian independence by force. In Croatia, Serbian irregulars instigated violent clashes with Croatian paramilitary forces, followed once more by the intervention of the JNA. As the fighting spread from Eastern Slavonia to the Krajina, and then south-east to Bosnia-Hercegovina, it was clear that Europe was witnessing...

For serbian and Croatian nationalists, the manipulation of myths and national history performed an incredibly important role during the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1980s, and the wars of succession that followed after 1990. Before analysing these national myths, and their specific political objectives, it will be useful to understand what species, or general types, of myths have been used – and why. Reviewing the works of many major nationalism theorists, this chapter introduces a useful analytical model to help understand the nature of Serbian and Croatian myths, the types of imagery they invoke, and how they are structured. This will...

I argue throughout this book that negative imagery has been a crucial building-block in Serbian and Croatian national myths. These myths have been used to legitimate the forced shifting of borders, the ethnic cleansing of populations, and various other violent aspects of state formation. Equally important has been the frequent use of the Jewish Holocaust as a template for restructuring nationalist histories. The Holocaust as the archetypal national Fall of the twentieth century has arguably left a lasting impression on philosophers and historians, as well as nationalist leaders. In this chapter, three concepts are of importance: firstly, the universalisation (or...

This chapter charts the rise of Serbian nationalism, while examining many of the important myths that evolved as a concomitant to it. The above citation, from a statement by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, encapsulates what became a dominant view of Serbian history after 1986 – a long-suffering, but heroic nation, struggling for centuries against annihilation. I will begin by exploring elements of the Battle of Kosovo, a battle fought between Serbian and Turkish forces on 28 June 1389, which ultimately resulted in Serbian subjugation to five centuries of Ottoman rule. In legend, the Battle was also a Serbian...

Serbia was certainly not alone in its revision of history, nor in its use of national mythology. The Croatian government also saw the merits of reinterpreting history to buttress their own political objectives. Many of Croatia’s most interesting national myths were created well before the collapse of Yugoslavia. Franjo Tudjman’s rise to power in 1990, and the eventual independence of Croatia, after almost five decades of Communist federalism, engendered a fertile climate for national myth creation.

Croatia’s national propaganda evolved within an authoritarian context, and many of the central themes favoured by Croatian writers were similar to those advanced by...

Throughout the Serbian–Croatian conflict, the comparative genocide debate was of particular importance. For both countries, the success of nationalist regimes depended on their ability to present national history as one of righteous struggle against persecution. For both Serbs and Croats, the revision of the history of the Second World War provided a wealth of myths of heroism and persecution. Continual portrayals of enemies as either Četniks or Ustaša, as well as constant references to Second World War atrocities as precursors of events in the 1990s, demonstrated the centrality of German and Italian occupation to contemporary conceptions of national identity....

Chapter 5 outlined some of the principal myths of victimisation and persecution stemming from the wartime activities of the Serbs and Croats. By invoking images of historic genocide and persecution, both sides portrayed their actions in the 1990s as defensive only – a reaction to either ‘Serbophobia’ or ‘Greater Serbia’. This chapter reviews two of the most important persecution myths emerging from the Second World War. Revising the history of the Ustaša-run death-camp at Jasenovac was a useful means of casting Serbs as the victims of a ‘Holocaust’ by Croats. On the Croatian side, the massacre at Bleiburg (Austria) by Communist...

After the Second World War and the devastation caused by German and Italian invasion, the Yugoslav peoples had the task of rebuilding their society after it had been torn apart by occupation and fratricidal warfare. The legends surrounding Tito’s Communist Partisans and their war of liberation are well known, immortalised in such works as Milovan Djilas’ Wartime , Fitzroy Maclean’sThe Heretic, and Frank Lindsay’sBeacons in the Night. However, as has been seen in the preceding two chapters, contemporary Serbian and Croatian reinterpretations of this period were often negative. The Croatian myth of Bleiburg maintained that the foundations of...

While this study has focused on the continuous and vitriolic debate over history and current events pursued by Serbian and Croatian politicians, historians, and journalists, another aspect of the war of words and images deserves special consideration. The debate over Bosnia-Hercegovina was of immense importance throughout the crisis. Both Milošević and Tudjman, together with their nationalist supporters, dreamed of creating their respective ‘Greater Serbias’ and ‘Greater Croatias’. In the Bosnian crisis, Serbs and Croats often worked together, and, as early as 1991, Milošević and Tudjman had carved up Bosnia on paper. At a diplomatic cocktail party with Western leaders in...

When auden penned this cynical projection early in the last century, he reflected on a new state of affairs that was coming to pass, a cultural transformation privileging the victim over the aggressor, the loser over the winner. This extract adequately encapsulates the importance of the Yugoslav conflict as yet another era when the aestheticisation of the victim was paramount, along with the demonisation of the powerful and the proud. In Yugoslavia, Serbs and Croats cast themselves as the natural heirs to much of Yugoslavia’s land mass – through the argument that their historic persecution gave them the right to expand...