Constructing an Interactional Model of Collective Memories Formation: The Case of Collective Memories of Yugoslavia in Post-communist Croatia

Much of the memory research focuses on the production or institutionalization of collective memories, and particularly on the role of political elites and media in influencing the dominant perspectives of the past. However, some recent works have pointed out that such approaches, which prioritize "from above" influences on public remembering, face serious challenges when they need to explain how some collective memories fail to achieve legitimacy. What is missing from such approaches is the consideration of how the active audiences re-interpret the narratives "from above". Neglecting the reception of collective memories leads to an incomplete understanding of how the collective memories are formed. In particular, this misses out on how individuals' social belongings and experiences modify the narratives of the past they acquire within a wider ideological context. Therefore, my study attempts to construct a model of collective memories formation that addresses these issues. For this purpose, I examined the collective memories of the communist Yugoslavia among two young Croatian generations (b. 1978-81 and b. 1989-91). Croatia was one of the Yugoslav republics and its post-communist transformation in the 1990s co-occurred with a war for independence and the nation-building under an authoritarian anti-Yugoslav regime, which was then followed by democratizing changes in 2000s. Both of the examined generations were too young to form their own meaningful evaluations of the Yugoslav past, but they differ in their distance from this period (one spent its early childhood in Yugoslavia, while the other had no personal experience) and in their formative years experiences (one experienced the war and the authoritarian post-communist Croatia, while the other spent its formative years in the liberalizing post-Yugoslav period). This enabled me not only to compare the generational differences between their collective memories of Yugoslavia, but also to examine how these collective memories were influenced by their personal and educational experiences, different family histories and their perceptions of public discourse on Yugoslavia during their growing up. Furthermore, I have also examined the production of collective memories on Yugoslavia in post-Yugoslav Croatia by examining the history textbooks and four Croatian newspapers in the period 1991-2007. The latter allowed me an explicit comparison between "from above" narratives of Yugoslavia in post-Yugoslav period with the individual narratives of these two young generations. Therefore, my research brought together three levels of influences on the individual narratives of the past: the macro level of elite narratives of the past (history textbook and the journalistic narratives), the interactional level of mnemonic communities (e.g. stories from parents), and the micro level of idiosyncratic experiences that may influence the perspective on the recent Yugoslav past (e.g. various regime types or war experiences). I use these data to evaluate which factors (the dominant public discourse vs. specific family experiences vs. formative years' experiences) carry greater weight in influencing personal narratives of the past and how these factors interact with each other. This then informs the construction of the interactional model of collective memories formation, which is the main theoretical goal of this project.