Fragmented memories in a fragmented country: memory competition and political identity-building in today's Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

Bosnia and Herzegovina is politically fragmented, and so is the memory landscape within the country. Narratives of the 1992–1995 war, the Second World War, Tito's Yugoslavia, and earlier historical periods form highly disputed patterns in a memory competition involving representatives of the three “constituent peoples” of Bosnia and Herzegovina - Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks – but also non-nationalist actors within BiH, as well as the international community. By looking especially at political declarations and the practices of commemoration and monument building, the article gives an overview of the fragmented memory landscape in Bosnia and Herzegovina, pointing out the different existing memory narratives and policies and the competition between them in the public sphere, and analyzing the conflicting memory narratives as a central part of the highly disputed political identity construction processes in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. The paper also discusses the question whether an “Europeanization” of Bosnian memory cultures could be an alternative to the current fragmentation and nationalist domination of the memory landscape in BiH.