Framing and reframing the past: Ethnic relations, political legitimacy and the legacy of the Second World War in socialist Yugoslavia, 1945–1991

At the core of the League of Communists\u27 claims to political legitimacy in post-World War II Yugoslavia was a carefully cultivated history and memory of the wartime Partisan National Liberation Struggle against the forces of fascism. The Partisan\u27s defeat of those forces—both foreign and domestic-served as the primary founding myth of the state as well as the socialist regime\u27s basis for political hegemony in the newly re-established country. This dissertation explores one particular aspect of the Communists\u27 treatment of the history and memory of Yugoslavia\u27s World War II experience, namely the burial of any open discourse of the fratricidal nature of the war fought within the country. Specifically, the dissertation examines Communist Party attempts to de-ethnicize all public discourse dealing with the war and the effect this had on inter-national relations in Tito\u27s Yugoslavia. It argues that the Communists\u27 \u27policy of memory\u27 with regard to the war not only aggravated ethnic tensions in the fragile state but indeed facilitated the development of chauvinistic and hostile nationalism within certain segments of the population. The dissertation looks at both how the Communist Party established a Manichean \u27historical paradigm\u27 in dealing with the memory of war and the process by which nationalists in Serbia and-to a lesser but equally important extent-Croatia first undermined, then assailed, and finally supplanted that paradigm in the decade following Tito\u27s death in 1980. The Party\u27s management of the history and memory of the war not only precluded a successful \u27coming to terms with the past\u27 for many within Yugoslavia, it allowed unresolved issues from the war to be magnified and manipulated by nationalist leaders in Yugoslavia once the legitimacy of the state began to wane in the 1980s. Although this failure alone did not cause Yugoslavia\u27s disintegration in 1991, it contributed greatly to the fierce war which accompanied the multi-ethnic state\u27s demise