Schedule

Friday, 19th of October:

Faculty of Social Sciences, room 6 (Kardeljeva ploščad 5)

17.00: József Böröcz: We Were China's Guests: Intimate Internationalism and Histories of the Socialist Self


Saturday, 20th of October:

Scientific Research Centre, Prešeren's hall (Novi trg 4)

Session 1: What to Make of History? (moderateur: Primož Krašovec)

10.00 - 11.00 Andrej Kurillo: Revisionism in Historiography: Bête Noire or Ugly Duckling?

11.10 - 12.10 József Böröcz: Whitened Histories, Global Colours

12.20 - 13.20 Alberto Toscano: Lenin Dancing on the Snow: Periodisation against History

Lunch

Session 2: Interventions into Contemporary Slovenian Historiography and Public Uses of History (moderateur: Primož Krašovec)

15.00 - 16.00 Mateja Ratej: Relativization of the Author (Historian) as a Premise of Post-Modern Historiography in Slovenia after 2000

16.10 – 17.10 Lev Centrih: On the Significance of the Communist Party of Slovenia during The Second World War and its Aftermath

17.20 – 18.20 Rastko Močnik: Slovene Historians on the Destruction of Yugoslav Federation

Dinner

Sunday, 21st of October:

Scientific Research Centre, Prešeren's hall (Novi trg 4)

Session 3: Making Revisionism History (moderateur: Lev Centrih)

10.00 - 11.00 Ozren Pupovac: Nothing Took Place but the Place: Đinđić's Yugoslavia

11.10 - 12.10 Slobodan Karamanić: "Truth and Reconciliation" as Historical Revisionism

12.20 - 13.20 Nebojša Jovanović: Anti-Fascism between Two Deaths: Bosnian Intellectual Elite and its Civic-Liberal Revisionism

Lunch

Session 4: Yugoslavia from Afar (moderateur: Lev Centrih)

15.00 - 16.00 Catherine Samary: "Immediate History" in Socio-economic Research in/after the Cold War: The Yugoslav Issue

16.10 – 17.10 Geoffroy Pascal Geraud: The Genesis of Mainstream Historiography of Yugoslavia in France: "Media Intellectuals" at War in the 90's

Entrance to the conference is free. There is no application required. The language of the conference will be English.

Credits

The conference is organized by:

Lev Centrih
Jernej Kosi
Primož Krašovec
Lidija Radojević
(infantry)

and

Scientific Research Centre at Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts
Franc Rozman - Stane Establishment at Union of Associations of People's Liberation Struggle Fighters
Department of Sociology at Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana
Departments of Sociology and History at Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana
(financing and infrastructure)

Special thanks goes to dr. Oto Luthar, dr. Mateja Ratej, Maja Stipar, Alenka Koren, Ciril Oberstar, Irena Naglič, Jani Kikelj, dr. Tanja Rener, dr. Mirjana Ule, Tanja Prosen, dr. Rastko Močnik, dr. Igor Škamperle, Maja Božič, dr. Bojan Balkovec and dr. Marta Verginella, whose generous help made this conference possible.

József Böröcz: We Were China's Guests: Intimate Internationalism and Histories of the Socialist Self

The Performing Arts Ensemble of the Hungarian People's Army—an emblematic official cultural institution of late-Stalinist Hungary—left Budapest on 7 September, 1956, for a much-publicised, three-and-a-half-month tour of the People's Republic of China. The travelling party consisted of a symphonic orchestra, a men's choir and a folk-dance group (the latter including its own band), a number of vocal and instrumental soloists, and it also included a few journalists, a graphic artist, a group of young Sinology and Hungarian Studies students from the two countries acting as interpreters, a laryngologist, and a few political officers. Covering the trip was a small group of Hungarian cinematographers led by Jancsó Miklós, a promising film maker—on the staff of the People's Army Film Studio—at the time who would embark on a much decorated, international career as a director of art cinema in the year after the group's return to Hungary.

In this project I use the trip as a historical archive from which one could begin to apprehend histories of the ways in which societies imagine alternative futures. As part of the workshop, I will screen one of the four short films Jancsó released from the footage shot during the trip—We Were China's Guests (1957)—as a text with which to think through some, rather fundamental questions regarding state socialism, the place of politics and art in social life, the possibility of intimate dimensions to "socialist internationalism," uses of the "popular / folkloric" element in the construction of modern, urban identities, and the applicability of the binary contrast of "the west" vs. "the east" under conditions of an alternative, in some significant respects non-capitalist, modernity.

On author

Geoffroy Pascal Geraud: The Genesis of Mainstream Historiography of Yugoslavia in France: "Media Intellectuals" at War in the 90's.

The armed conflicts that begun with the dismembering of socialist Yugoslavia gave rise to many reactions and mobilizations amongst French intellectuals all through the 1990's.

Despite the diversity of viewpoints, the public expression on Yugoslav issues was monopolized by a group of "media intellectuals"[1], composed of journalists, political essayists, moralists, the most active being philosophers belonging to the self-proclaimed or media-defined group of »New Philosophers«. At the same time, experts and specialists on Yugoslavia (historians, economists, etc) were marginalized, or sometimes even excluded from the public debate.

Materialized by numerous articles, books, information and political campaigns, documentaries and even movies, these repeated interventions of the "media intellectuals" durably (re)shaped the imaginary about Yugoslavia; moreover, these productions had deep influence over the contemporary making of Yugoslav historiography in France, both by revising the historiography of socialist Yugoslavia and by producing a discourse about its dismembering.

Crossing internal reading and contextual analysis, the present essay aims to identify some of the mechanisms of production, reception and circulation of such an "immediate historiography", as well as its political efficiency.

This paper will start by an overview of the political language of "media intellectuals". Special emphasis will be placed on identifying the uses and the origins of "paired concepts" (such as "Orient" in opposition to "Occident", "artificiality" of socialist Yugoslavia opposed to the transhistorical nature of entities such as "Nations" and "Europe" etc…).

Attention will also be paid to the mechanisms of "migration of ideas", i.e. the circulation processes by which political and ethnical representations carried out by the nationalist discourses produced in the Yugoslav space were echoed and universalized by the French "media intellectuals".

The last part will attempt to put into light the political economy of the mobilization of the French "media intellectuals".

Our presentation will explore the political uses of the Yugoslav conflicts in a context of restoration in both political and cultural fields in France.

It thus will be argued that, far from belonging to the tradition of "engagement" which characterized the autonomous French intellectuals from the times of the Dreyfus affair to the 1970's, the involvement of the "media intellectuals" during the Balkan conflicts can be seen a crucial moment in the process of heteronomization of the French intellectual field.

As a conclusion, this paper will invite to a comparative reflection about the consequences of the subversion or disparity of the figure of engaged intellectuals on the making of Yugoslav historiography.

On author

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[1] Translation proposed of the term defined by Pierre Bourdieu.

Slobodan Karamanić: "Truth and Reconciliation" as Historical Revisionism

According to today’s liberal-democratic agenda, the process of "Truth and Reconciliation" (T&R) seems to be the most desirable way of dealing with the historical legacy of wars and bloodshed in ex-Yugoslavia. In order to secure the lasting peace and prosperity in the region it is necessary to reach the objective truth about the painful reality of the wars, to come to a basic consensus on "what really has happened". Only in this way it might be possible to overcome conflicting and particular visions of any respective national group.

In my contribution, I will try to question whether the concept of T&R represents an effective alternative to the partition of historical truth divided among different nationalist interpretations of history, or is it rather inevitably caught within the same limits of national imaginary? Because, we should note that the T&R norm of objectivity entirely depends upon the category of nation. As the discourse of T&R indicates, objective truth can be derived only from the framework of national truth: every particular nation, which has been involved in conflicts, should accept a part of the responsibility for the crimes committed in their own name. Consequently, the problem of T&R is understood as a problem of national consciousness. The central ideological mechanism of reconciliation therefore takes the form of national recognition, the recognition of one's own belonging to the part of national responsibility or blame. Within this structural limitation, the concept of T&R functions as another type of historical revisionism in a double sense: on the one hand, desingularising the very political nature of the "post-socialist" nation, and, on the other, neglecting or denying a whole set of contradictions, tensions and violence that came up during the course of the second historical encounter of the principles of nation-State with the complexity of Yugoslav situation.

On author

Ozren Pupovac: Nothing Took Place but the Place: Đinđić's Yugoslavia

Taking an excursion from the strict domain of historiography, I will try to show how the problem of uneventment figures in another theoretical field, that of political philosophy. One of the exemplary moments here, at least in what concerns the history of socialist Yugoslavia, is Zoran Đinđić's Yugoslavia as an Unfinished State. Đinđić's analysis is, undoubtedly, a veritable sign of the times – being one of many scientific and philosophical works that were produced in response to the crisis that Yugoslavia was experiencing in the 1980s. At the same time, however, this attempt at a philosophical panacea is also a remarkable example of historical, or, as we can say with Badiou, evental revisionism. Đinđić's response to the destructive economic and sociopolitical tendencies that were visibly tearing the Yugoslav federation apart by the late 1980s was to question the very political foundations of the Yugoslav project. The source of the crisis of the eighties, in other words, spans back to the very act of foundation of socialist Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia, according to Đinđić, was created as state without a clear dimension of legality and statehood – without a clear articulation of sovereignty to the political community. And moreover, it was created as an illegitimate political construction. Everything that took place in the event of 1943, the moment of AVNOJ and the emancipatory politics of the People's Liberation Struggle, represents but a set of particular political and historical circumstances, circumstances which fall short of proper political or juridical coordinates. The very act of foundation of Yugoslavia entailed no clear decision about political unity, let alone a decision to create a viable construction of a nation-State.

Now, if the ironic dimension of these conclusions already speaks for itself - as we can say that Đinđić's gambit to recreate Yugoslavia as a nation-State was truly 'verified' in the violence of the nineties, in the violence of nationalist projects which sought to 'finish' the Yugoslav State – a more interesting question here is the question of Đinđić’s method. Does Đinđić's evacuation of the emancipatory content of Yugoslavia reveal some more general problems pertaining to political philosophy in its encounter with politics? Does it reveal an obscurantist dimension of political philosophy, its structural incapacity for registering political singularity? In concluding my paper, I will try to offer an answer to these questions whilst formulating, together with Althusser and Badiou, the opposition between politics and the political.

On author

Andrej Kurillo: Revisionism in Historiography: Bête Noire or Ugly Duckling?

While history has been subject to revision since times immemorial, the negative meaning of the term "revisionism" gained currency mainly in the years after World War Two. After all, no rational person today would pronounce Theodor Mommsen's Römische Geschichte as a definitive and non-ideological representation of the Roman era. Revisionism has been thus particularly connected to the denial of the Holocaust and the reinterpretation of the Nazi period of German history.

Holocaust deniers have, for the most part, remained on the lunatic fringe of both politics and historiography, with perhaps the exception of David Irving who was recently convicted to a jail term in Austria for "trivialising the Holocaust". However, what we might call a softer version of revisionism acquired a similarly ominous aftertaste in the light of the Historikerstreit of the late 1980s, a battle over the interpretation of not just "the course of German history" but of both National Socialism and Communism.

The last years of decaying Communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe and their eventual collapse, provided another outlet for historical revisionists. New histories sprang up from the fertile ground of former Communist states, adjusted to the atmosphere of anti-Communism and/or nationalism. These histories tended to subscribe to simplified narratives and ahistorical concepts of "reawakened" and "liberated" nations. Thus they provided an ideological tool for the legitimisation of the new (and in some cases, old) political elites of these countries. In methodological terms, this kind of revisionism meant a return to pre-positivistic historical paradigms.

Nevertheless, while positioning a critique of revisionism, we should be careful not to lose sight of the necessary re-evaluation and re-questioning of historical paradigms. Here I shall concentrate on the fruitful results brought about by recent debates on German and Austrian history, particularly the Sonderweg thesis. I will accordingly attempt to show that not all re-evaluations of the past should be considered as "revisionist" in the above mentioned sense. Ultimately, the paper will consider some of the dangers posed by postmodernist approaches to historical research, which might in the worst scenario lead not merely to destruction of historiography as a discipline but also hinder a faithful and judicious sense of our past.

On author

Lev Centrih: On the Significance of the Communist Party of Slovenia during The Second World War and its Aftermath

For the last two decades we have been witnessing an immense debate on the character of the Second World War in Slovenia which usually gets even more intensified each time when there are media reports on fresh discoveries of (mass) graves containing the remains of anti–partisan fighters. Every time these new discoveries mobilize all spheres in or out of the establishment, from journalists to political parties, artists, war veterans, survived victims and their relatives, clerics and theologians, philosophers, professional historians etc. Consequently we face polyphony, a wide range of interpretations, in many cases connected with moral–juridical problem about the accountability of mass killings. They include discourses on class racism, genocide and also demands of contextualization of atrocities with all–European inter/after war (political–military) situation. The vast majority of these interpretations share the same point of departure for their claims, no matter how different they may appear otherwise. This point of departure is the Slovenian nation and its historical journey to freedom, which had recently resulted in an establishment of an independent state.

It is obvious that Slovene historiography – as a network of scientific institutions – has no publicly recognized monopoly on the subject in question, yet it is possible to see its existing efforts to win distinguished unbiased position beyond sphere of politics and ideology. I argue, for example, that such an endeavour might be detected from a two volume book, written by a group of historians, entitled Slovenska novejša zgodovina 1848 – 1992 [Slovenian Contemporary History 1848 – 1992], especially concerning the relation between the National Liberation Struggle and socialist revolution in Slovenia during the Second World War. Relying on pure narrative approach, with no critical epistemological background whatsoever, the authors reach an apparently simple and neutral conclusion that the Communist Party of Slovenia won the hegemony over the National Liberation Movement and used Slovene partisan army as its most important instrument of power to realize its strategic political goal, a socialist revolution. I argue that this limited perception of the socialist revolution - as the solo project of the Communist Party of Slovenia - implicitly attempts to establish ideological distance towards a similar synthesis of the past historiography, which was, at least partly, influenced by proto-theoretical enterprise of Edvard Kardelj. In his materialist point of departure Kardelj challenges – although contradictorily – the very ideological essence of the nation as a natural category on which current official history of the Slovenian nation is being built.

On author

Nebojša Jovanović: Anti-Fascism between Two Deaths: Bosnian Intellectual Elite and its Civic-Liberal Revisionism

From the perspective of the majority of benevolent Western observers, the main antagonism that characterizes post-socialist Bosnia and Herzegovina is that between the antidemocratic ethno-nationalists and their democratic civic critics. The arena of historical science and its institutions is one of the most picturesque domains wherein this antagonism can easily be detected: ethno-nationalist historians, prone to misuse the past events in order to recreate the history of their individual ethnic groups (within a wider nationalist project of the reinvention of ethnic tradition), are confronted by the "civic" historians who insist that history must not be ideologically "contaminated", but should be seen as an unibased sphere of objective knowledge.

However, I would like to question this apparent confrontation in order to offer a different perspective from which this opposition is revealed as false, and those "civic" intellectuals are shown to be no less problematic than their proverbial ethno-nationalist villains. On a closer look, with their insistence on the meta-ideological position of (historical, theoretical, critical...) knowledge, they position themselves to appear as if they would hold absolute truths on Bosnian society and its history. Their main strategy comprises of the levelling of all ideological positions (as "the barbarism of our Left and Right", to quote one of them), which boils down to an equation whereby Yugoslav socialism equals post-Yugoslav nationalism or, in an even starker intepretation, the former is perceived as the essential cause of the latter. One of the effects of this strategy is the erasing of the political and the fetishizing of culture, resulting in a type of social amnesia. This replaces historical perspectives of the leftist tradition of the international solidarity and antifascist struggle with a myriad of isolated imaginaries belonging to different and incommensurable cultural (i.e. ethnic and religious) groups. In this paper, I will offer an analysis of several examples of this strategy carried out by the Bosnian (self-proclaimed) "intellectual elite", which points to the node of the prohibition of leftist politics, antifascist revisionism and civic-liberal conformism.

On author

Rastko Močnik: Slovene Historians on the Destruction of Yugoslav Federation

The contribution will analyse how three prominent Slovene historians present the destruction of Yugoslav federation. Two models appear: 1. secular genesis of the Balkan nations; 2. sequence of political arrangements, each justified on its own terms. The two models can roughly be assimilated to Foucault's distinction between the (pre-modern) "Roman" (2) and the (early modern) "biblical" (1) type of historiography. The combination of both models offers a strong instrument to construct a teleological montage apologetic of the present relations of domination. – In the second part, I will argue that ideological foundations supporting the horizon of the official historiography in Slovenia have already been challenged and analysed by works accomplished outside the local historiographic establishment. Should we conclude that the institutionalised science reproduces epistemic obstacles and transforms them into ideological "pillars of the nation"?

On author

Andrej Kurillo

Postgraduate student at University of Ljubljana. A historian, erudite and gentleman. Engaged in explorations of the history of nationalism, political history of Slovenia and Yugoslavia in 19th and 20th century, political history of militant Catholicism and Protestantism and history of international workers' movement.

Abstract

Geoffroy Pascal Geraud

Postgraduate student at Dauphine University, Paris. A theoretician and syndicalist militant. He currently lives in Ljubljana and studies economic history of Yugoslavia. His main research interests are critique of political economy and history of communist politics and economy, as well as contemporary anti-capitalist politics and workers' struggles.

Abstract

József Böröcz

Professor at Rutgers University, New Jersey, member of scholarly board at Institute for Political Sciences at Hungarian Academy of Science, Budapest and faculty affiliate at Center for Migration and Development at Princeton University, New Jersey. His work includes critical analysis of contemporary EU politics (from migrations to institutional racism), cultural history of the Eastern bloc and political economy of economic globalization (from the perspective of world system theory).

Lecture abstract

Abstract