European Security

ISSN: 0966-2839 (Print) 1746-1545 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/feus20

Political memory, ontological security, and

Holocaust remembrance in post-communist
Europe

Jelena Subotic

To cite this article: Jelena Subotic (2018) Political memory, ontological security, and
Holocaust remembrance in post-communist Europe, European Security, 27:3, 296-313, DOI:
10.1080/09662839.2018.1497980

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09662839.2018.1497980

Published online: 13 Aug 2018.

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EUROPEAN SECURITY
2018, VOL. 27, NO. 3, 296–313
https://doi.org/10.1080/09662839.2018.1497980

Political memory, ontological security, and Holocaust

remembrance in post-communist Europe
Jelena Subotic
Department of Political Science, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Post-communist states today are dealing with conflicting sources Received 5 December 2017
of ontological insecurity. They are anxious to be perceived as Accepted 4 July 2018
fully European by “core” European states, a status that remains
KEYWORDS
fleeting. Being fully European, however, means sharing in the EU; memory; ontological
cosmopolitan European narratives of the twentieth century, (in)security; Holocaust;
perhaps the strongest being the narrative of the Holocaust. Croatia; post-communism
Influencing the European Union’s own memory politics and
legislation in the process, post-communist states have attempted
to resolve these insecurities by undergoing a radical revision of
their respective Holocaust remembrance where the memory,
symbols, and imagery of the Holocaust become appropriated to
represent crimes of communism. By rejecting the cosmopolitan
European narrative of the Holocaust, post-communist states have
also removed anti-fascist resistance from the core memory of the
Holocaust, allowing for a revival and ideological normalisation
of contemporary fascist ideological movements. I illustrate the
argument with an overview of contemporary Holocaust
remembrance practices in the EU’s youngest member, Croatia.

In August 2017, Croatian government was in severe crisis, the ruling coalition on the brink
of collapse. The crisis erupted after a group of Croatian war veterans affiliated with the
Croatian Defence Forces (HOS)1 erected a memorial plaque with the unit’s call to arms
“Ready for the Homeland!” (Za dom spremni!) in the town of Jasenovac, near the memorial
site of the Jasenovac concentration camp.2 The problem was that Za dom spremni! is the
same slogan used by the Ustasha, Croatia’s fascist militia, which had killed more than
80,000 Serbs, Jews, and Roma at Jasenovac death camp during World War II. Such a
plaque outside Jasenovac was as offensive as would be a plaque saying Sieg Heil!
placed outside of Auschwitz.
Ustasha’s symbols, however, are not banned in Croatia, and the ruling coalition led by
the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) faced an internal rebellion over the scandal. The
minority Independent Democratic Serb Party (SDSS) and the liberal Croatian People’s
Party (HNS) threatened to leave the government if the plaque was not removed, while
various war veteran associations insisted that it remained. The government collapse was
averted when the plaque was moved a few miles down the road to the town of Novska

CONTACT Jelena Subotic jsubotic@gsu.edu Department of Political Science, Georgia State University, 38 Peach-
tree Center Avenue, 1018 Langdale Hall, Atlanta, GA 30303, USA
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 EUROPEAN SECURITY 297

and the government announced the formation of a special Council for Dealing
with Consequences of the Rule of Non-Democratic Regimes, which was to provide the
final ruling on acceptable memorialisation of both fascism and communism
(Milekic 2017b).
And while the immediate political collapse was avoided, Croatia remains a state in crisis.
The obvious crisis is economic, where high unemployment rates and a dropping standard
of living have been a rude awakening after the high expectations following accession to
the European Union in 2013 (Bogdanic and Husic 2014). But more deeply, Croatia is a state
acutely divided about its past, its role in WWII, its place in the larger European history, its
status as a full member of the EU, and its relationship to the multilayered legacies of
fascism, communism, and the ethnic war of the 1990s.
To explain how states such as Croatia arrive at these crises and how they try to over-
come them, this article explores ways in which states make strategic use of political
memory in an effort to resolve their contemporary ontological insecurities. My principal
argument is that post-communist states today are dealing with conflicting sources of
ontological insecurity. They are anxious to be perceived as fully European by “core”
European states, a status that remains fleeting especially in the aftermath of the openly
anti-East European rhetoric of the Eurocrisis and Brexit (Spigelman 2013, Favell 2017,
Browning 2018). Being fully European, however, means sharing in the cosmopolitan
European narratives of the twentieth century, perhaps the strongest being the narrative
of the Holocaust. They are also anxious about their unsettled mnemonical map of their
own role in the Holocaust, which includes both the extensive local complicity in the gen-
ocide but also its major demographic consequences, which have turned once multicultural
societies into overwhelmingly ethnically homogeneous ones.
Influencing the EU’s own memory politics and legislation in the process, post-commu-
nist states have attempted to resolve these insecurities by undergoing a radical revision of
their respective Holocaust remembrance where the memory, symbols, and imagery of the
Holocaust become appropriated to represent crimes of communism. By rejecting the cos-
mopolitan European narrative of the Holocaust, post-communist states have also removed
anti-fascist resistance from the core memory of the Holocaust, which has allowed for a
revival and ideological normalisation of fascist ideological movements in the present.
To explain these developments, I apply the ontological security theoretical framework
which, with its emphasis on crisis, anxiety, and the need for narrative stability can provide a
deeper understanding of these contemporary political phenomena, an understanding that
goes beyond simply stating that Europe’s memory is “at war,” but actually analyzing why
this is the case.
The article proceeds as follows. I first offer a brief snapshot of the ontological security
literature and make a theoretical link between this scholarship and the literature on pol-
itical memory. I then trace the shifting Holocaust remembrance in post-communist
Europe, including the way in which post-communist states influenced the EU’s own Holo-
caust and communist remembrance and legislation in the process. I illustrate these argu-
ments with short snapshots from contemporary Holocaust remembrance narratives in
Croatia. I conclude with the broader view of the relationship between contemporary pol-
itical anxieties in Europe over the rise of the populist far right and the continuing contesta-
tion over Holocaust remembrance.
298 J. SUBOTIC

Political memory and ontological security

Building in large part on Laing (1960), and then on Giddens (1984, 1991), the growing
ontological security literature is premised on the assumption that states care as much
about their ontological security, the security of being, as about material, physical security,
the traditional purview of international relations inquiry (Kinnvall 2006, Mitzen 2006, Steele
2008, Zarakol 2010). To continue feeling secure, states need predictability and order; they
strive for routine and stable relationships with others (Huysmans 1998, McSweeney 1999).
It is through these routinised relationships with their significant others that states con-
struct their identities (Mitzen 2006).
While this stability is desirable, it is, however, fleeting. Crises or “critical situations”
rupture state routines and bring fundamental questions about state self to the front, creat-
ing stress, anxiety, and ontological insecurity (Ejdus 2017). Giddens defines critical situ-
ations as “a set of circumstances which – for whatever reason – radically disrupt
accustomed routines of daily life” (Giddens 1979, p. 124). The “whatever reason” caveat
does much of the work here because it allows for critical situations to be meaningful
locally while largely irrelevant globally. In other words, it allows for states to experience
ontological insecurity as a result of crises that may be perceived, or self-inflicted, or exag-
gerated. Whether the critical situation truly is a “crisis” is beside the point – what is signifi-
cant is how meaningful it is to the actors themselves, and what actions it produces (Steele
2008). Critical situations, however, do not only lead to ruptures in routines, they also
produce questioning of one’s self-identity, one’s view of self, and most importantly,
one’s autobiography and biographical narrative (the story about the biography). To
resolve this incredibly destabilising sense of ontological insecurity, actors “act out,”
often defensively, as “anxieties can no longer be controlled” (Rumelili 2015, p. 11).
Not all states, however, will act out the same when experiencing ontological insecurity.
It is especially states with unresolved or uncertain identities, or states with internalised
feelings of stigmatisation and peripheral status that will act out most forcefully (Zarakol
2011). Their, often extreme, response to critical situations, then, can be understood as a
form of “ontological self-help” (Ejdus 2017).
It is here that I want to propose that conflict over political memory can be seen as an
example of a “critical situation” that destabilises both the state’s view of self and its
relationships with its international others. Memory is critical to ontological security. Just
as our own individual memory constitutes our identity, political memory is what constitu-
tes state identities (Olick and Robbins 1998). Political memory helps create and sustain a
particular biographical narrative through the use of historical signposts, and careful curat-
ing of select events, setbacks and triumphs, myths, and symbols (Volkan 1997, Kinnvall
2004, Berenskoetter 2014). It orients political community through time, by “providing a
sense of where ‘we’ come from and what “we” have been through” (Berenskoetter
2014, p. 270). In other words, it creates the identity, the “person” of the state (Steele
2008). Political memory, therefore, is never about the past but is very much about a par-
ticular political project in the present that it supports and maintains, which of course was
the principal insight of Maurice Halbwachs (Halbwachs 1992; also Nora 1989).
Securing a “desirable” memory, one that presents the state and the nation as heroes
and not villains of some commonly shared and recognisable international story (of a
global war, for example) is necessary for a state’s continuing sense of stability, but also
 EUROPEAN SECURITY 299

for its status seeking, for membership in prestigious international clubs (such as the EU),
and for securing all sorts of international reputational benefits. In fact, national memories
of a violent past almost exclusively operate within one of the three normatively acceptable
frames: the nation as victorious over evil, the nation as a resistor of evil, and the nation as a
victim of evil (Assmann 2014). A “desirable” memory of the Holocaust, as I discuss later in
the article, is an example of a type of memory that is important for states to maintain and
promote in order to belong to the international society of liberal European states.
If we understand political memory to be a core stabilising element of state identity and
a provider of state ontological security, then radical challenges to this memory will lead to
a profound sense of insecurity. Challenges to a settled biographical narrative remind the
state collective of things it would rather forget, of things it may have done wrong. This
puts in question the state sense of self, its relationships with others (“what if others
found out this alternative history?”); it lowers state self-esteem and can open the state
up to international admonishment.
This anxiety may be particularly acute at times of political transition, such as the col-
lapse of federations, regime change, newly independent statehood, and even peace
after lengthy conflict. At times of such great stress, states may be insecure about their
international status, or about their alliances and friendships, or about their secure identi-
ties, or about their biographical continuities (Kinnvall, Manners and Mitzen 2018). Such
anxieties can be contained by transference into manageable fear (through securitising a
concrete policy issue over which a state can assume control) or by constructing stable
systems of meaning (such as hegemonic narratives) (Rumelili 2015, p. 14). State identity,
then, is defined by the incorporation of past injury and trauma into contemporary state
biography (Wang 2008).
As I argue in the next section, the attempt to introduce a “European,” cosmopolitan,
pan-national memory of the Holocaust into post-communist states in Europe has
created an especially acute case of ontological insecurity in these states themselves, but
also in the larger EU. It is to this process that I turn next.

Holocaust remembrance and ontological insecurity in post-communist Europe

The Holocaust holds a central place in the global public memory of the twentieth century,
especially in the West (Novick 1999, Alexander 2002). It is the foundational narrative of the
European Union (Assmann 2014). Holocaust remembrance is so central to European iden-
tity that it has become a “contemporary European entry ticket” (Judt 2005, p. 803), where
joining, contributing, and participating in a shared memory of the Holocaust defines what
a European state is, especially for late East European entrants to the Union (Mälksoo 2009).
The Holocaust has come to be seen as a “universal ethical problem,” an example of de-ter-
ritorialised “cosmopolitan memory” (Levy and Sznaider 2010). European Holocaust
memory, in other words, has taken on an “established mnemonic code” of its own
(Mälksoo 2014, p. 83). The memory of Jewish suffering is a critical element of this code,
as, in the poignant words of Tony Judt, “the recovered memory of Europe’s dead Jews
has become the very definition and guarantee of the continent’s restored humanity. It
wasn’t always so” (Judt 2005, p. 805).
The problem with the cosmopolitan Holocaust memory narrative, however, is its funda-
mental lack of fit with the very different set of Holocaust memories in post-communist
300 J. SUBOTIC

Europe. The Holocaust, simply put, is not the central defining memory of the twentieth
century experience across the post-communist space – the memory of Stalinism and
Soviet occupation is (Assmann 2013). The memory of the Holocaust in post-communist
Europe, therefore, is qualitatively different from the memory of the Holocaust in the
West because the Holocaust simply does not signify the central good vs. evil narrative
in the same manner it does in the West. The role of evil in post-communist Europe is,
instead, reserved for communism, as the more recent and immediate source of oppression
and victimisation. The European centrality of the Holocaust, then, replaces the centrality of
communist victimisation as the dominant organising narrative of post-communist
societies, and is therefore threatening and destabilising to these state identities.
The centrality of the Holocaust as a foundational European narrative is also soundly
rejected across post-communist Europe because of its perceived elevation of Jewish vic-
timhood above victimhood of other regional majority ethnic groups, a move that is
increasingly openly resented (Baer and Sznaider 2017). In the absence of almost any
Jews across vast swaths of the East, post-communist national identities were built first
on a rejection of the communist pan-national identity project (where the organising nar-
rative is loyalty to the socialist and not the ethnic subject), and instead on an ethnic major-
itarian, and therefore very homogeneous basis, that leaves almost no room for the
incorporation of minority narratives. As Antonin Weiss-Wendt has explained in his study
of Estonia, Holocaust remembrance is linked exclusively to the Jewish minority, as “the
Jewish issue.” Holocaust remembrance simply does not matter for the majority ethnic
population, and when brought up, brings about ethnic resentment, and often new
waves of anti-Semitism (Weiss-Wendt 2008). It challenges the security of a nation’s identity
because it problematises the very biography on which this identity was constructed.
Further, the European Holocaust memory’s focus on Jewish suffering is also rejected in
much of post-communist Europe because it brings about discussion about extensive and
deep local complicity in the Holocaust and material and political benefits of the complete
Jewish absence across Eastern Europe (Himka 2008). Jewish businesses, homes, and prop-
erty have over decades of looting followed by communist seizures slowly morphed into
the general economy, with difficult and sporadic attempts at restitution (Charnysh and
Finkel 2017).
The fact that post-WWII Jewish communities in these countries are negligible in
numbers and have limited political clout is not incidental to this narrative.3 Once thriving
multicultural societies with large Jewish minorities are now mostly ethnically homo-
geneous.4 This very fact of post-war ethnic homogeneity is a problem of “cultural intimacy”
(Herzfeld 2005, Subotic and Zarakol 2013) – an issue of domestic identity building, the
“thing” that builds the nation together, but simultaneously an issue of international embar-
rassment and sometimes even shame. This is why much of Eastern Europe is a purposeful
“site of nonmemory” (Bartov 2008), a site of “dismembered multiethnicity” (Follis 2012).
It is against this background that the stunningly rapid collapse of communism over only
two years (1989–1991) created profound ontological insecurity across Eastern Europe.
Since a coherent, stable, and hegemonic system of meaning basically vanished overnight,
all of the routine relationships these states had established and maintained with their sig-
nificant others became immediately disrupted, and new ones needed to be built from
scratch. This deep crack in the political order provoked profound anxiety in insecure
post-communist states, anxiety also driven by internalised feelings of backwardness and
 EUROPEAN SECURITY 301

inferiority vis-à-vis the West (Mostov 1998). Political memory of the old state no longer
served its legitimising purpose, new histories needed to be constructed to make sense
to the new polities (Evans 2003). It is especially deeply contested memories, such as the
memory of the Holocaust, that have created stress both within states and with its signifi-
cant others.
As I demonstrate in the next section, a way out of this condition of ontological insecur-
ity for post-communist states was to connect the “undesirable” remembrance of the Holo-
caust with the “desirable” remembrance of communism and its crimes. The consequence
of this move was a new, “inverted” memory of the Holocaust where the crimes of fascism
came to be represented as crimes of communism.

Legislating Holocaust remembrance in the European Union: from West to East

and back
Much of contemporary post-communist Holocaust remembrance is a product of a very
specific way in which communism narrated the Holocaust over its longue durée. In com-
munist Eastern Europe, Holocaust remembrance was exclusively produced through the
framework of antifascism because this link provided the communist regime its ongoing
legitimacy. Communist Holocaust remembrance was built on “Marxist orthodoxy which
placed the Jewish question on the margins of the class struggle, viewed anti-Semitism pri-
marily as a tool to divide the working class (rather than as a belief system with auton-
omous and widespread impact) and fascism as a product of capitalism” (Herf 2002,
p. 192, also see Himka and Michlic 2013). Communism strictly regulated Holocaust remem-
brance, by absorbing it as an event within the much larger story of WWII, and a narrative
that was mostly about communist triumph over fascism, the uniqueness of Jewish
suffering completely absent as a mnemonical marker. Also, due to the region’s inter-
national political isolation, communist Holocaust memory developed and solidified in
almost complete marginalisation from the cohering European Holocaust narrative in the
West.
Post-communist European states first encountered the European push for a unified cos-
mopolitan memory of the Holocaust as they tried to join various European organisations
after 1991 – foremost in their applications for EU membership, but also membership in
other European institutions such as, for example, the Council of Europe. Already in
1995, the European Parliament passed a “Resolution on the return of plundered property
to Jewish communities,” which contained explicit demands from East European states to
return property looted in the Holocaust, but also “welcome[d] the fact that certain Central
and Eastern European countries have apologised publicly for the crimes committed
against Jews during the Second World War and have recognised their responsibilities in
respect of these crimes” (European Parliament 1995). Implied in this statement was that
the rest of East Europe should do the same (Kucia 2016).5
A major European institutional push, however, was the Stockholm Forum on the Holo-
caust in January 2000, convened by Sweden to define a common framework for European
Holocaust remembrance, research, and education. The Forum established the Inter-
national Task Force on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research, renamed Inter-
national Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in 2012. It remains the most explicit
international organisation that “constructs, institutionalises and diffuses” transnational
302 J. SUBOTIC

Holocaust memory in Europe (Kucia 2016, p. 105). In 2005, the European Parliament
adopted its most complete Resolution on the Holocaust, “on Remembrance of the Holo-
caust, Anti-Semitism and Racism,” which established 27 January, the day of liberation of
Auschwitz in 1945, as the “European Holocaust Memorial Day across the whole of the
EU” (European Parliament 2005a).6
And while post-communist states accepted this new regulation, signed documents, and
adopted major parameters of the memory framework, not wanting to jeopardise the deli-
cate process of EU accession, once they were safely in the EU (after the major wave in 2004,
followed by smaller accessions in 2007 and 2013), the new Europeans demanded a
thorough renegotiation of European memory politics, one that denies the Holocaust its
centrality for postwar European memory and instead places it on par with the other
major totalitarianism of the twentieth century – communism (Mälksoo 2009, Littoz-
Monnet 2013). Significantly, East European states forged alliances with the Western Euro-
pean right, most directly the European People’s Party in the European Parliament, in
pushing for EU resolutions and proclamations that would de-centralise the Holocaust
from pan-European memory and add crimes of Stalinism as the second leg of this
memory stool (Littoz-Monnet 2012, Neumayer 2015). These campaigns then gave the
“new Europeans” the opportunity and platform to elevate their presence in the European
Parliament on issues of great importance (Neumayer 2015).
The first in a series of EU Resolutions on the crimes of communism came in 2005 – “The
Future of Europe Sixty Years after the Second World War.” Ironically, this expansion of tota-
litarianism to include all of communism also led to the return to communist-era interpret-
ation of the Holocaust, which deemphasises the uniqueness of Jewish suffering. The
European Parliament’s 2005 “Resolution on the 60th anniversary of the end of the
Second World War in Europe on 8 May 1945” therefore no longer referred to Jews as
the Holocaust’s principal victims, but refers to “all the victims of Nazi tyranny,” thereby ele-
vating the victimisation of non-Jewish ethnic majorities in Eastern Europe (European Par-
liament 2005b).
The push to commemorate, side by side, the two twentieth century totalitarianisms cul-
minated in two European Union documents – the 2008 “Declaration on the proclamation
of 23 August as European day of remembrance for victims of Stalinism and Nazism” (Euro-
pean Parliament 2008) and “Resolution on European conscience and totalitarianism”
(European Parliament 2009) which built on the 2008 Prague Declaration of the same name.
The Prague Declaration is perhaps the most explicit document that lays out the ideo-
logical framework post-communist European states have used regarding the place of
the Holocaust and communist memory. The rhetorical move of referring to “communist
crimes” instead of “Stalinist crimes” is critical here as it implies that terror was commun-
ism’s central organising feature (Hilmar 2016, p. 311), which then makes it easily narratively
equated with fascism. Indeed, while the Declaration’s first article states that “both the Nazi
and the Communist totalitarian regimes [should] each be judged by their own terrible
merits,” the Declaration then goes on to make this claim: “exterminating and deporting
whole nations and groups of population were indivisible parts of the ideologies they
availed themselves with,” which explicitly equated the specifically genocidal aspect of
Nazism – extermination of whole nations – and attributed it to communism. This equation
of the two regimes as being structurally the same even led one European Member of
 EUROPEAN SECURITY 303

Parliament to declare, “I ask the European Parliament to stand in solidarity with the victims
of Fascist Communism” (Neumayer 2015, p. 353, emphasis added).
The full equation of fascism and communism and their levelling as “two European tota-
litarianisms” has gotten its physical manifestation in the House of European History, which
after decades of delays finally opened in Brussels in May 2017. This Museum narrates the
history of European “unity” by weaving together the stories of the Holocaust with the
stories of communist totalitarianism, again subsuming the huge diversity of communist
experience under the Stalinist narrative, therefore retroactively totalitarianising all com-
munisms. This narrative choice, then, makes both the Holocaust and communist terror
integral to the history of Europe and leading, teleologically, toward European integration
– the issues that Rumelili takes up straight on (2018).7
For post-communist European states, this insistence on equating crimes of Nazism with
crimes of communism indicates their profound ontological insecurity over their true Euro-
pean identity, where they do not feel fully integrated, fully appreciated, and fully accepted
as “real Europeans,” but are stuck on the periphery of Europe, still looking from the outside
in (Mälksoo 2009; also see Jones and Subotic 2011). Shedding their legacies of commun-
ism would then make them more readily and clearly “European” in the eyes of their Euro-
pean others. It is out of this ontological insecurity that they act out in ways that
fundamentally challenge European political memory project, including a very specific
and important memory of the Holocaust.
The problem, however, is that this desire to historically jump over the illegitimate com-
munist period and find national legitimacy in mythical glory days of pre-communist
regimes also immediately exposes the collaborationist and often murderous quality of
much of these regimes, including fully homegrown fascist regimes in Slovakia, Croatia,
and Romania, and many collaborationist forces across all other Eastern European states.
The search for the buried memory, then, also further stigmatises the national body
politic. Looking for good memories, only worse ones are found.
Because it is difficult to erase or deny these memories, an easier path is to invert them –
and claim that crimes of Nazism and their local collaborators were in fact crimes of com-
munism. The criminal past is not fully denied, but the responsibility for it is misdirected,
accomplishing two things: absolving the national criminal past and criminalising commun-
ism. What this process has produced, however, were new ruptures within states and rup-
tures within the EU, where Holocaust memory is still pan-European and cosmopolitan, and
nationalised, particularised memories are threatening. Post-communist memory politics
therefore had a boomerang quality to it: the European push for cosmopolitan Holocaust
memory created a national particularistic backlash, which then created further insecurities
both in the states themselves and between the post-communist states and the larger
European Union.
Removing the centrality of the Holocaust from European memory, therefore, destabi-
lises the core European Union, which was built on the narrative of WWII – no WWII, no
European Union. Because the Holocaust is a “constitutive element of the European
polity” (Littoz-Monnet 2013, p. 490), we can even posit – no Holocaust, no EU. What
post-communist European remembrance demonstrates, however, is that it is not only
post-communist states that are facing narrative crises. It is also the EU itself – first by
being confronted with the fact that its foundational narrative is no longer the central uni-
fying narrative in Europe and, second, that its foundational narrative of peace as being the
304 J. SUBOTIC

Union’s cohesive reason d’être has also collapsed after it so thoroughly failed to prevent
war and genocide in Europe in the 1990s. Post-communist remembrance, then, has caused
self-doubt within core European states, destabilised relationships with the “new Eur-
opeans” in the East, and produced conditions that contributed to old and new types of
Holocaust revisionism, denial, and neo-fascist resurgence.
In the next section, I illustrate these arguments with a short overview of contemporary
Holocaust remembrance debates in Croatia, and the domestic and international crises
Croatian practices have produced both within Croatia and within the larger EU.

Holocaust remembrance practices in post-communist Croatia

Contemporary Croatian ontological security is built on three stable identity pillars: ethnic
nationalism (security of the ethnic body politic), Europe (security of belonging to the
European cultural space), and mnemonic security (security of memory of its indepen-
dence war, 1991–1995) (Subotić 2011). To stabilise these identities, post-communist
(therefore, post-Yugoslav) Croatia carried out multiple efforts at distinguishing itself
from the former communist federation but also from its former federation members,
especially from Serbia. These efforts focused on the official principles of “Croatisation”
and “Europeanisation” (Croatian Ministry of Education and Sports 1999), and included
such projects as determining the ethnic origin of Croats as proto-Aryans, with ancestral
land in Iran, and not in the Balkans (Hedl 2000) or officially distinguishing Croatian from
the very similar Serbian language as a separate linguistic family altogether (Greenberg
2004). The fifty years of life together in a multinational socialist federation were erased
overnight.
These efforts were so heavy handed and ahistorical that they clearly reflected a deep
sense of anxiety about what kind of polity will post-communist Croatia be, but also
anxiety over whether Croatia’s significant others – the European Union, most importantly
– will ever accept it as really, truly, European. This is why much of Croatian foreign policy
after 1991 was dedicated to one single goal – accession to the European Union. However,
as is the case with most anxieties, achieving the one deeply desired goal does not make
the anxiety go away; anxiety just develops over something else. After finally joining the
European Union as the newest member state in 2013, anxieties in Croatia continued,
but were activated around other issues.
A cause of particular anxiety in Croatia is its contested and violent past – both the
recent war of the 1990s which made Croatia independent, but in the process left it
highly ethnically homogeneous, as its once large Serbian minority disappeared through
a combination of intimidation, forced deportations, and ethnic cleansing, but also its
more distant past, especially the Holocaust.
As was the case with other post-communist states, Croatia after communism joined a
European cultural space in many ways defined by its foundational narrative of the Holo-
caust but also, as discussed above, an increasing openness to delegitimising communism
as a totalitarian system akin to fascism. Croatia was well positioned to prove its European
credentials on the carcass of communism. An important piece of Croatia’s new identity
construction post-1991 was a complete rejection of the communist past and conflation
of this past with Serbian hegemony. The first changes in the way in which Croatia remem-
bers the communist past occurred in the early 1990s, when streets, schools, and public
 EUROPEAN SECURITY 305

buildings that carried the names of famous partisans or communist leaders – as was the
practice across communist Eastern Europe – were overnight changed into names of
famous pre-communist Croatian public figures. These were the everyday manifestations
of ontological insecurity as everyday routines and practices in people’s daily lives –
names of their streets or their children’s schools – changed to represent the new state bio-
graphy that citizens had to quickly adjust to (Rihtman-Auguštin 2000).
This move was important because the legitimacy of post-communist Croatia was
based on a complete rejection of communism and a renewed connection to the pre-
communist, mythically “nationally pure” character of its statehood. This is why the
new post-communist elites insisted on rehabilitating many anticommunist public
figures, including many pro-fascist allies. The goal behind this national project was to
sidestep the communist past as a legitimate period of the country’s history and institute
a clear historical connection with the pre-communist state, as an inspirational model for
contemporary manifestation of ethnic statehood (Subotić 2015), stabilising Croatia’s state
identity through time.
More problematic, however, and a source of even deeper state anxiety, was Croa-
tia’s memory of the Holocaust. Croatia’s relationship with the Holocaust is deep,
broad, and incredibly contentious. During WWII, Croatia declared an Independent
State of Croatia (NDH)8, a Nazi puppet state governed by the homegrown fascist
movement, the Ustasha. The NDH implemented fascist racial laws in large part auton-
omously and sometimes even more brutally than the German Reich. Anti-Jewish laws,
“Aryanisation” of Jewish property, followed by the deportation and extermination of
Croatia’s Jews were carried out with great speed and efficiency, earning much
praise from Berlin (Yeomans 2013). Significantly, however, the NDH was not interested
only in the annihilation of Croatian Jews – the central part of its project was also the
full-scale destruction of Croatia’s large Serb, and smaller Roma minorities. Across a
vast network of Croatian concentration and extermination camps, the largest of
which was Jasenovac, as well as through summary executions across the country
and deportations to other Nazi camps, some 32,000 (95%) Croatian Jews, 320,000–
340,000 (17%) Croatian Serbs, and almost all Croatian Roma (25,000) were killed
between 1941 and 1945.9
Croatia’s “bloodlands” are, therefore, not in dispute. During Yugoslavia’s communism,
however, NDH crimes were mostly subsumed under a general remembrance of crimes
of fascism, where the responsibility for the atrocities was squarely placed on Nazi
Germany, and the crimes of NDH’s Ustasha were presented as crimes of German occu-
pation, or at most, as crimes of the few isolated individuals in the fascist NDH regime.
The very local character of these crimes and the strong support the NDH had among
large groups of Croatian population were often downplayed, in line with Yugoslav
overall ideology of minimising ethnicity and ethnic conflict as an organising principle of
society, instead focusing on ideological cleavages (fascist vs. communist) and promoting
the supra-national ideology of “brotherhood and unity.”
Post-communist Croatia, however, needed a new narrative that would not rely on the
discredited communist ideology but would simultaneously continue to absolve Croatia of
moral and political responsibility for the crimes of WWII. This was a critical issue if Croatia
was to maintain its ontological security, its sense of self, its understanding of who it truly
was.
306 J. SUBOTIC

Political memory and permanent ontological crisis

To preserve its ontological security, post-communist, post-Yugoslav Holocaust remem-
brance in Croatia followed two paths. The first was to remember the crimes of WWII,
and, within it, the crimes of the Holocaust, as crimes against Croats, and not by them, a
mnemonical move that serves to strategically divert attention from serious addressing
of mass crimes committed by the NDH (Cvijic 2008). The second path was to completely
separate NDH genocidal crimes against the Jews from those against the Serbs and Roma,
and reserve Holocaust memorialisation for “Nazi” (not Croatian) crimes against the Jews,
while completely erasing NDH crimes against the Serbs and Roma from any remembrance
at all.
As part of the first, “inversion” strategy, Croatian leaders often used official Holocaust
remembrance events to establish that it was the Croats who suffered the most during
the Holocaust. For example, the former Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader used the Holo-
caust commemoration event at Jasenovac memorial site in 2005 to claim, “We should not
forget the aggression that Croatia endured because we too were victims of a terrible
madness of Nazism and fascism, and we, Croatian citizens, Croats, know the best what
it is like to suffer from aggression” (Banjeglav 2012, p. 15). Sanader then repeated this
speech during his visit to Yad Vashem in 2005, firmly affixing the memory of the Holocaust
to Croatia’s victimisation, first during WWII and then during the war of Yugoslav succession
in the 1990s (Banjeglav 2012, p. 12).
Similarly, Croatia has since independence in 1991 begun to regularly commemorate the
1945 massacre of Croatian prisoners of war (mostly, but not exclusively, the fascist
Ustasha) by Yugoslav partisans at Bleiburg (in today’s Austria). This event is often refereed
to in Croatia as “the Holocaust of Croatian martyrs,” which again is the direct appropriation
of the Holocaust to memorialise Croatian fascists (Banjeglav 2012, p. 109). This appropria-
tion of the Holocaust is also evident in pseudo-academic publications, where the term
“Croatian Holocaust” is used to describe the killings of POWs at Bleiburg (Prcela and
Živić 2001). In the absence of any serious research of this crime, and complete silence
that covered it during communism, the narrative of the massacred Ustasha POWs at Blei-
burg has after communism been replaced with the larger narrative of ethnic Croatian
suffering. The claim that Bleiburg was “the Holocaust of Croatian Catholics” has fully
entered the Croatian public narrative and goes mostly unchallenged in the public
sphere (Moll 2013, p. 920). Public Holocaust remembrance in Croatia, therefore, has
been retold as a history of Croat suffering, which excludes any stories of Croats perpetrat-
ing atrocities.
The second path of Holocaust memory reconstruction, the separation of NDH crimes
against Jews from crimes against the Serbs, is even more interesting. This strategy can
be partly explained by the narrative possibility available to Croatia of simply deflecting
the responsibility for the Holocaust to Nazi Germany, and placing it within a larger Euro-
pean story of the Holocaust, a story to which, in this reading, Croatia has very little, if any-
thing to contribute – a strategy used by other East European states, perhaps most explicitly
by Hungary (Laczó 2016).10
This strategy is also manifest in Croatian history textbooks which, while dutifully, albeit
briefly, reporting on the horrors of the Holocaust focus almost exclusively on the larger
Holocaust of European Jews, with only one textbook currently in use discussing the
 EUROPEAN SECURITY 307

Holocaust in Croatia in any meaningful detail. If they mention Jasenovac at all, the text-
books always emphasise that its victims were also Croats (not only Serbs, Jews, and
Roma), often in literal bold font, so as not to escape the reader’s attention (Pavasović
Trošt 2013).
Pursuing a similar strategy, Croatia’s president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović paid a visit to
Yad Vashem in 2016, and in an emotional statement apologised for crimes against the
Jews committed by Croatian fascists during WWII. The same year, however, she refused
to attend the annual commemoration at Jasenovac (Milekić 2016). And in another
display of Croatia’s attempt to resolve its fundamental narrative inconsistency, the city
of Zagreb in 2017 announced plans for the construction of the Museum of the Holocaust
in Zagreb. The Museum, however, would not focus on victims of the Holocaust in Croatia
(in fact, the Croatian Jewish community was never consulted on any phase of the project
and learned about it in the media),11 but instead would be dedicated to all six million Jews
who perished in the Holocaust. The obvious strategy here is to plug the Croatian narrative
of the Holocaust into the larger European narrative, while at the same time completely
avoiding the memory work necessary to be done at home.
This particular kind of Holocaust remembrance, which some scholars in Croatia have
called “Holocaust yes, genocide no” (Milekić 2016), also serves as a form of “screen
memory” (Freeman et al. 2013), which absolves Croatia from both the NDH crimes of
the Holocaust as well as the more recent war crimes against Croatia’s Serb minority in
the 1990s. This removal of Serbs as possible victims of any Croatian atrocity then also
serves other Croatia’s ontological security needs: it further legitimises Croatia as an
ethnic homeland, and it removes the “bad past” from its statebuilding, stabilising Croatia’s
view of self and its place in the European society of states.
This strategy, however, has produced a permanent narrative crisis within Croatia, as well
as a crisis in Croatian international reputation. This has played out in a seemingly endless
string of controversies, such as the banning of the Anne Frank exhibition in the city of
Šibenik in January 2017, when a high school where the exhibition was to be displayed can-
celled it because of six panels that presented the local context of the Holocaust in Croatia
(Milekic 2017c). The banning of the exhibition produced swift international rebuke, with
the Simon Wiesenthal Center proclaiming, “pro-Nazi nostalgia was perfectly legitimate
in modern-day Croatia” (AFP 2017), greatly embarrassing the Croatian government.
Croatia’s memory practices have also caused a rift with its traditional ally, Austria. The
government sponsored commemorative ceremonies at Bleiburg are held in a town that is
in today’s Austria, causing great consternation and unease within this country. Austria has
its own highly contested relationship with the Holocaust and the annual reminder of
fascist symbols, insignia, and chants that the Bleiburg ceremony brings to town is a
cause of significant embarrassment and ontological insecurity there.
Keenly aware of the symbolic and political importance of disassociating Austria from
fascism, a political and civil society coalition has formed in Austria to try and ban the Croa-
tian Bleiburg commemoration, calling it “the largest neo-Nazi congregation in Europe,”
and “the largest meeting of revisionists, neo-Nazis and followers of a fascist state”
(Milekic 2017a).
Croatia’s remembrance practices are, therefore, threatening to destabilise Croatia’s
relationships with its significant others, above all the EU. These practices, which are part
of the strengthening and increasing visibility of the Croatian far right, have only increased
308 J. SUBOTIC

since Croatia’s EU accession in 2013, and have started to get mainstreamed into major
Croatian institutions since 2016, with the formation of a new centre-right government.
Instead of serving as a politically stabilising force, the EU instead has provided the Croatian
far right opportunities to network with like minded groups, but also model its practices
after successful far right movements in Hungary and Poland (Ristic et al. 2017). Now
that Croatia is safely in the EU, the EU has lost its accession conditionality leverage. This
has allowed Croatia free reign in this arena, and the Croatian far right has certainly
taken advantage of this permissive international environment, creating a state of perma-
nent crisis over how Croatia deals with its contested past.
This crisis, however, is not only of Croatia’s own making. In fact, much of Croatia’s mem-
orialisation practices follow the narrative framework offered in the 2008 EU Prague
Declaration. The Declaration’s statement on “two totalitarianisms” is frequently referred
to whenever a discussion arises about proper remembrance of Croatia’s fascist legacies.
This is evident in the title and framing of the new government Council for Dealing with
Consequences of the Rule of Non-Democratic Regimes, which mandate is to propose
acceptable ways of remembrance of Croatia’s “two totalitarianisms” – fascist and commu-
nist – the framing that will certainly be contested by conflicting Croatian narrative actors.
This, however, is not to say that there are no committed dissenting voices. The Jewish
community remains small, but vocal and active, in organising its own, distinct commem-
orative manifestations, including running a Shoah Academy, an education programme on
the Holocaust. The problem is that these independent activities, as well as remembrance
projects by civil society groups such as Documenta and the Center for Holocaust Research
and Education,12 are taking place in a political and legal environment at best disinterested
and often hostile to the memory of the Holocaust.

Conclusion
Croatia’s political crisis can best be understood as a feeling of profound ontological inse-
curity, insecurity of Croatia’s identity, its view of self, and even its state biography. Croatia’s
political memory, especially memory of the Holocaust and memory of communism, is
deeply contested, and the cleavage between the “red” and “black” Croatia is the crack
at the state’s foundation.
To overcome this ontological insecurity, Croatian principal memory actors – right wing
political parties, intellectual elite, the media, historical commissions – have engaged in sus-
tained historical revisionism that directly attributes to communists the atrocities com-
mitted (often against them) by Croatian fascists. This long term systematic effort to
criminalise the communist regime and retroactively burden it with fascist crimes has
been an incredibly successful project of delegitimising both the entire legacy of Yugoslav
socialism, but also its biggest achievement – Yugoslav multiculturalism. This then provided
further legitimacy for Croatia’s construction of its post-communist identity as an ethnically
homogenous Catholic state.
However, it is not just Croatia, but also the European Union as a whole and EU member
states as its constitutive part that are in crisis – uncertain about their identity, the cohesion
of their union, the strength of their mutual commitments, and about each other. This
article argued that an additional contributing factor to this sense of general unease
within the EU is its contested political memory, especially memory of the Holocaust and
 EUROPEAN SECURITY 309

memory of communism. As the EU has enlarged to the East, a completely new set of mem-
ories and mnemonical practices was introduced to the European narrative. This process
has been neither easy nor smooth, and it is far from resolved. It has also produced tremen-
dous narrative re-writing, relaxing some of the most established mnemonical canons of
the twentieth century, which has all created a political environment fertile for mnemonic
challenges, disruptions, and revisions. Croatia here is hardly alone – some of the most high
profile examples of this revisionism are the contemporary developments in Poland, where
the government is attempting to criminalise any research into Polish complicity in the
Holocaust.13
The contestation over Holocaust memorial practices, and especially the success of the
European People’s Party in the European Parliament in legislating remembrance of the
twentieth century as remembrance of “two totalitarianism” is an expression of deep and
unresolved European anxieties, making the European Union itself an “anxious community”
(Mitzen 2018). These anxieties are over competing experiences of the twentieth century
that threaten to undermine EU’s foundational narratives, as elaborated more fully by
Della Sala (2018). The un-anchoring of the principal post-WWII narrative from the EU’s
sense of purpose has opened political space for far right normalisation and mainstreaming
across Europe – in Hungary, Poland, Austria, France, and elsewhere. In its global anticom-
munist moment, Europe has lost its common antifascist moment, and it has done so at its
peril.
Holocaust remembrance, then, is no longer about the Holocaust at all, but is about very
acute ontological security needs of new states which are building their identity as funda-
mentally anticommunist, which then in turn makes them more legitimately European.
Holocaust remembrance does not only provide a state its ontological security needs; it
also secures its ideological legitimacy.
Political memory, therefore, can be both a source and a product of state ontological
insecurity. It destabilises identities within states themselves, by radically changing
accepted state biographies and biographical narratives, but it also destabilises state
relationships with its significant others, other states and international actors, relationships
that gave the state a sense of routine, familiarity and calm. At the same time, new versions
of political memory can be produced by state ontological insecurities. When states are
insecure, they try to affix a certain memory in place, or replace bad memories with
those more favourable to the state view of self. These radical mnemonic ruptures,
however, then further destabilise state internal and external relationships, to significant
international political effect.

Notes
1. HOS (Hrvatske obrambene snage) was a paramilitary unit active during the Croatian war of
independence (1991–1995), as the militia wing of the far-right Croatian Party of Rights. It
also shares the acronym HOS with the WWII-era Croatian Armed Forces (Hrvatske oružane
snage) – the armed forces of the Ustasha, the fascist movement of the WWII-era Independent
State of Croatia.
2. According to the veterans’ groups, the plaque was mounted to honour 11 soldiers from the
HOS paramilitary unit killed in the 1990s Croatian war (Milekic 2017b).
3. Hungary is the only country in the region with a sizeable Jewish population (100,000). Jewish
communities in the rest of post-communist Europe are largely non-existent (Shafir 2002).
310 J. SUBOTIC

4. For example, Jews made up almost 10% of the pre-war population of Poland, and at least 30%
in major cities of Warsaw, Krakow, and Vilna. Hungary’s capital Budapest was 23% Jewish
before the war.
5. As Kucia notes, none of the European Parliament documents have ever issued a similar
demand for apology for local complicity in the Holocaust from any Western European govern-
ment – France, Belgium and the Netherlands would certainly be candidates for inclusion on
this list.
6. The European Parliament was very active on this front. Between 1989 and 2014, the Parlia-
ment adopted twelve separate documents on Holocaust remembrance (Kucia 2016).
7. House of European History, https://historia-europa.ep.eu/en.
8. Nezavisna država Hrvatska.
9. Axis Invasion of Yugoslavia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://www.ushmm.
org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005456.
10. Hungary has pursued this strategy aggressively and most obviously in the House of Terror, the
popular museum that opened in 2002, and which truncates Hungary’s twentieth century to
1944–1989, so that the fascist era begins with the German occupation in 1944, and not in
1940 when Hungary joined the Axis alliance. This shift therefore completely removes the
history of the Holocaust in Hungary before 1944, the period that left 60,000 Hungarian
Jews killed as early as 1942, the extermination carried out not by Germans, but by Hungarian
forces under the rule of regent Miklós Horthy, a vocal anti-Semite.
11. Author interview with Ognjen Kraus, director of the Jewish Community of Zagreb, October 24,
2017, Zagreb, Croatia.
12. Documenta maintains a website that discusses memorialisation of the Dotršćina mass grave-
site. It also runs an oral history project, which includes oral histories of Holocaust survivors.
Belgrade-based CHRE is working with Croatian partners from the University of Rijeka to
create a comprehensive map of killing sites in the NDH, www.killingsites.org.
13. In 2018, Lithuania has also proposed a law similar to the one in Poland.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank editors of this special issue Catarina Kinnvall, Ian Manners and Jennifer Mitzen,
participants in the workshop at Ystad, Sweden in October 2017 where the first draft of this paper was
presented, two anonymous reviewers, as well as Dario Čepo and especially Sven Milekić for extre-
mely helpful comments, suggestions, and clarifications that greatly improved this article.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Jelena Subotic is a Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University. Her research is on inter-
national relations, transitional justice, memory politics, and the Balkans. She is the author of Hijacked
Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans (Cornell University Press, 2009), and is currently writing a
book on Holocaust Remembrance After Communism.

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