Making YuRope. The tension between new memoryscapes in Western Balkans and European politics of memory

Lecture by ACCESS EUROPE visiting scholar Francesco Mazzucchelli

Lecture

Francesco Mazzucchelli, visiting scholar for the ACCESS EUROPE theme 'European Identity and Culture' gives a lecture on Europe's relationship with former Yugoslavia.

Almost twenty years after the end of the Yugoslav wars and with the resurgence and consolidation of reinvented (and often fragmented and contested) national identities and heritages, is Europe closer or farther to the countries of former Yugoslavia? On the one hand, Europe seems to be the manifest destiny of all Western Balkan countries. Croatia already acceded to the EU in 2013, all the other Western Balkans countries are involved in the Stabilisation and Association Process. This includes Serbia, Montenegro and FYROM, considered as candidate, and Bosnia Herzegovina as potential candidate. On the other hand the Balkans sometimes still seem to play the role of ‘internal Other’ in Europe (Todorova 1997, Hammod 2004), in media representations, collective perceptions but also political actions. This aspect becomes evident when looking to the practices and politics of representation (self- and other- representations) of the past (especially with regard to war heritage and recent armed conflicts’ memory) and therefore of collective identities.

In his lecture, Mazzucchelli  will examine some ‘places of memory’ (commemorating different historical events, from First and Second World War to the more recent Yugoslav conflicts) in Serbia, Bosnia Herzegovina and Croatia. Here local, national and European collective identities and narratives collide, sometimes balancing, at other times opposing, each other.

About the speaker

Francesco Mazzucchelli, Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy and Communication of the University of Bologna, is visiting scholar at ACCESS EUROPE for the European Identity and Culture theme. He holds a PhD in semiotics and his research interests range from cultural theory and memory studies to cultural geography and discourse analysis. He conducted research in Western Balkans, with special regard to the transformations in collective identities and memories in some former Yugoslavian countries. 

Published by  ACCESS EUROPE