Operation museum

Abstract

This chapter discusses a case rarely debated by domestic or foreign experts – The Museum of the Macedonian Struggle. The Museum was depicted as an extension of the Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity’s memory politics of the communist past but is also placed in the wider scope and context of “museum politics” in contemporary North Macedonia. It is argued that the Museum is a memory-institution, which even if promoted as a “reconciliatory” project, failed to bridge the divergent set of historical narratives of 20th century Macedonian and presents a peculiar case of ethnocentric “populist mobilization.” The micro-history of the establishment of the Museum, from 2006 to 2011, illustrates these two claims. To grasp the particularities of this formative period, media texts, personal accounts of involved experts and political discourse during this period are triangulated. The discussion begins with the initial political attempts for “historical reconciliation” in North Macedonia from the early 1990s as a contextual prehistory to the museum project in 2006. The chapter concludes that a wider understanding of populist mobilization is needed that shows it is not just a movement or regime type, but rather a more flexible way of vitalizing political support.