dismembering Yugoslavia: nationalist ideologies and the symbolic revival of genocide

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Abstract
The violent dismemberment of Yugoslavia has added the term “ethnic cleansing” to the global vocabulary. This article interprets the ideological and historical context within which these practices erupted, focusing on the symbolic dynamics of genocide as a critical underlying issue in the ethnic war that began in Croatia in 1991, spreading to Bosnia‐Herzegovina the following year. The World War II Croatian state's extermination policy against Serbs is examined in terms of the history and structural logic of mutually exclusive 19th‐century Serbian and Croatian nation‐state ideologies. The post‐Titoist revival of these ideologies was involved with symbolic revivals of both the wartime Croatian state and the memory of genocide, but with contrary meanings for Serbs and Croats. The “forgotten” burial sites of massacre victims provided a powerful reservoir of traumatic memory, subject to manipulation on the part of all who seized the “disjunctive moment” to reconstitute the state according to nationalist definitions. [nationalist ideology, genocide, ethnic conflict, cultural memory, Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia]

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