Social change in Croatia during the 1990s proceeded under exceptionally complex historical circumstances in which the impact of the recent past was particularly significant. The process of overcoming the communist legacy was intertwined with national emancipation, the establishment of an independent state and international recognition, ethnic conflict in Croatia and the neighbor-ing region with international involvement, war and the struggle for territorial integrity, as well as the problems associated with the creation of civil society. The most im-portant positions in the new political elite were assumed by former communists and political dissidents backed by political émigrés. Historian Franjo Tuđman, the head of the victorious political party, the Croatian Democratic Union, and the first president of independent Croatia, became the central personality of Croatian politics. Al-though he was a former communist and one of Tito’s generals, he later became a political dissident. Tuđman’s political activities were conditioned by his unambiguous historicism, above all pertaining to matters of interethnic relations and the Croatian state-building tradition, and by the constraints of dogmatic communist orthodoxy. His
style of rule and overall political demeanor were greatly drawn from the political heritage of Josip Broz Tito. In-dividual aspects of the complex and, in many ways, con-troversial relationship between Tuđman and Tito, which were reflected in the contemporary attitude toward the recent past, are covered in this work.
Key words: Croatian contemporary history, Franjo Tuđman, Josip Broz Tito, Croatia, Yugoslavia, post-com-munism, Croatian Homeland War, transition, Croatian political elite, reconciliation, war crimes
1. The communist heritage and dealing with the past:
“Even after Tito, Tito”
In concluding his criticism of the “incursion of nationalism into the Communist Party of Croatia (KPH) and the Alliance of Commu-nists of Croatia (SKH)” in 1978, one of the most influential politi-cians of the last two decades of socialism in Croatia and Yugoslavia, Stipe Šuvar, emphasized the following: “The new society, accord-ing to Marx, is long borne by the youth of the old, and the inertia of old forms of awareness, the power of old ideas, is still immense”
(Šuvar, 1978: 9). The problem of the past’s influence (“old ideas”) on the present of which Marx spoke is one of the most complex issues of history.54 Which ideas are “old” and which are “new,” which are
“progressive” and which are “retrograde,” which survive the “test” of history and which vanish from the theater of history are just some of the questions which may be posed in this context. The recent history of Croatia, the period covering the past two decades, disproved Šuvar and his conviction on the untouchability and resistance of the political concept of “the revolutionary struggle to vanquish the old class-based
54 To be sure, the opposite is also true, so that the influence of the present on the past (historical reconstruction) and the interaction of both viewpoints must also be examined.
society and to construct a new society grounded in classless social re-lations” (Šuvar, 1978: 3). The road to a classless society, a consensual economy and worker self-management, Yugoslavism, and fraternity and unity became “historical relics,” while democratization, national emancipation, nation-building, and a liberation war came to the fore-front of political interest and became the new historical realities of Croatia. However, historical change did not quite disprove Marx’s idea on the “power of old ideas” and their reflection in the present (which Šuvar also cited).
After the introduction of political pluralism and the defeat of com-munism in free elections in Croatia in 1990, the new political elite proclaimed the victory of democracy and the struggle for a new sys-tem of values. Stipe Šuvar and the “Marxist view of the world” were relegated to the margins of the political scene, and their place was as-sumed by former communist dissidents and members of the so-called Croatian Diaspora, in which the most important role was played by individuals who declared themselves political émigrés. In this histori-cal context, the complex matter of the impact of the past on the present emerged as one of the problematic transition aspects of overcoming the past. The most outstanding factor of a fifty-year historical legacy (a human lifetime) which marked the recent history of Croatia and Yu-goslavia to the greatest degree was the “life and times” of Josip Broz Tito. As a wartime victor, the central figure of Yugoslav communism, and the lifetime president of Yugoslavia, Tito reigned for 35 years, employing his personal charisma and iron hand, directly overseeing the most important levers of authority. Tito’s departure from the his-torical stage in 1980 signified the simultaneous disappearance of the most vital integrative factor holding together multiethnic Yugoslavia and its peculiar road to communism. The attitude toward his legacy and heritage is therefore one of the central issues in how Croatia and the other former Yugoslav states deal with the past. To be sure, this is an exceptionally complex and, in some ways, controversial political and social heritage. This paper is a contribution to breaking down and, within this context, a modest illustration of this complex phenomenon.
2. The relationship with the past in the wake of political changes in Croatia at the beginning of the 1990s
The relationship to the past and the problem of confronting the transition to democratization and the development of civil society in Croatia was intimately linked to the escalation of national tensions in Yugoslavia and to the profile of the new political elites. All of the weak-nesses of Tito’s regime became apparent immediately after his death.
With the disappearance of a central authority, all of the institutional shortcomings of Yugoslavia’s social organization came to the fore. So-cial, in particular, national tensions escalated, even as pro-democratic political currents burgeoned at the same time. In the course of these processes, the pretenders to Tito’s heritage simultaneously swore al-legiance to Titoism even as they attempted to reformulate and adapt it to suit their specific political interests. Gradually a critical detach-ment from Tito’s heritage emerged, in which, at the end of the 1980s, the national-communist populism of Slobodan Milošević imposed it-self as the principal driver of Yugoslav nationalisms and the “trigger”
for Yugoslavia’s collapse. In the spring of 1990, the first democratic elections since the Second World War were held in Croatia. The pro-motion of political pluralism resulted in the removal of the previous communist authorities and opened the way for radical social change and the creation of a new political elite. The electoral victor, a party called the Croatian Democratic Union (better known the HDZ), and its leader, Franjo Tuđman—a former general in Tito’s army, a historian, communist dissident, and future president of the independent Croatian state—constituted the basic (operative) factors in the creation of the new political elite which would greatly influence the development of Croatian society to this day.
At the transition from the 1980s into the 1990s, Tuđman’s personal worldviews played a major role in his political activities; these world-views were characterized by exceptional historicism (in the Popperian sense) in which the central role was played by the Croatian nation and its national emancipation. According to Dušan Bilandžić, who
was well-versed in the activities of the first Croatian president and his associates at the beginning of the 1990s, Tuđman was “burdened by nationalism and historicism, and practically without any insight into contemporary social processes in the West”; as such he was “destined to do everything based on inspirations derived from the past. Due to this intellectual and moral atmosphere, Tuđman could not build a mod-ern society. To be sure, the war did not allow this either” (Bilandžić, 2007: 58-59).55
As political analyst V.P. Gagnon noted, the structure of the HDZ showed from the very beginning that it was more “a political move-ment than a political party, or in the words of Franjo Tuđman, a group-ing of ‘all legitimate Croat political forces’”; at the time of the 1990 election, the HDZ covered “a wide spectrum, ranging from moderate reformists who had been purged from the SKH in 1972 for national-ism but were staunch advocates of democracy and economic reforms;
to technocrats and managers of socially owned firms who were inter-ested in maintaining their autonomy and control of their firms, and whose priority was an efficient economy; to ideological hard-liners and nationalist fundamentalists who were very authoritarian and es-poused the most ethnically chauvinistic and xenophobic views, and who would come to have enormous influence in HDZ-controlled me-dia and newspapers; to those with links to the Ustasha emigration, many of whom were from western Herzegovina and who sought to consolidate the HDZ’s control over structures of power, who advo-cated authoritarianism, and who ended up having enormous influence
55 Branko Tuđen, one of Tuđman’s “trusted” journalists, also testified to Tuđman’s historicism and the results of such reasoning: “Tuđman was an old-style person, burdened by histori-cism. He thought that if he was on the victor’s side, and at Dayton the Americans convinced him of this, trials for war crimes would only be organized for the defeated (the Serbs).” (…)
“Tuđman also mistakenly assessed his own participation in the antifascist struggle. The 1990s were no longer the post-Second World War period. He did not count on the fact that the US and the European Union, regardless of the fact that he did their dirty work for them (as claimed in Holbrooke’s book), would equally punish all sides in a war which the West did not want. It was my impression that he thought there was no one who would correctly explain his intentions to the world. He once told me, ‘Unfortunately, I don’t have my own Dedijer.’ Wrong. The time of Dedijer, who would present an embellished portrait of an au-thoritarian ruler, had long since passed.” (Tuđen, 2007: 58-59).
in Croatian policies, despite their small numbers and the lack of popu-lar support for them in their policies. In addition, just before and after the elections a number of conservative SKH officials, especially at the low levels of the party, joined the HDZ as a way to stay within the local structure of power; so they too were committed to resisting fun-damental political and economic reforms” (Gagnon, 2004: 140-141).
Despite the exceptional diversity of political options gathered un-der the “umbrella” of the HDZ, the party’s most important structural feature was the controversial alliance between former communists and political émigrés, mainly the descendents of the defeated nationalist formations of the Second World War. The U.S. diplomatic brochures entitled “Wire Service Stories” in 1997 characterized the Croatian Democratic Union as a party in which the “reins were held by for-mer communists on the one hand, and ‘diehard nationalists’ on the other” (Nedjeljna Dalmacija, 14 February 1997). Besides the strong influence on Croatian politics in the 1990s by the historian-politician Tuđman, who personally advocated a concept of national reconcili-ation between the “left” and “right” (known in Croatia as pomirba), such a constellation of political relations resulted in the paradoxical imposement of unresolved issues from the past as ever present con-troversies of contemporary Croatian political discourse. It was in this context that an ambivalent attitude toward Tito and his heritage ap-peared.
3. “Franjo” & “Josip”
Contemporary Croatian political culture has largely been shaped by the populist models and convictions of politicians such as Ante Starčević, Stjepan Radić, Ante Pavelić, and Josip Broz Tito, who dom-inated Croatian politics in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
With the exception of the fascist Pavelić, Franjo Tuđman explicitly referred to each of these politicians, stressing that his political doctrine rests on a synthesis of their teaching and works (Danas [Zagreb], 26
February 1993). Nonetheless, based on numerous indicators, it would seem that the most obvious influence on his personal political culture was Josip Broz Tito, of whom sociologist Bogdan Denić said that “he was really the last Habsburg, ruling a doomed multinational state” and that he went “into history as a perverse coda on the dead Habsburg era” (Denitch, 1994: 58). To be sure, Tuđman changed, or rather ad-justed, his attitude toward Tito. During his long-term political “fer-mentation,” Tuđman underwent a metamorphosis from Tito’s loyal follower and zealous party apparatchik during the Second World War to an unwavering fighter for the national emancipation of the Croats, which brought into question some of the postulates of Titoism. Indi-vidual documents testify to Tuđman’s activities as a political commis-sar attached to the headquarters of the Committee of the 32nd Division during the Second World War. Thus, at the beginning of 1944, Tuđman complained of insufficient party work: “the political commissars are (…) inadequate, and they have not absorbed the party line …”; how-ever, in the report on “political work, conditions and the political con-sciousness and education of the soldiers…” which was compiled by the secretary of the Divisional Committee (Tuđman’s superior), the observation is made of the “excessive rigidity and inaccessibility (…) of the political commissar, Comrade Tuđman” whose strict approach
“has already led to resentment in brigade headquarters” (Bulat, 1985:
318, 331).56
The influence of the ideological discourse of his youth followed Tuđman throughout his life, manifesting itself as a tendency to adapt reality to his own ideas. In contrast to many leftist intellectuals who radicalized the drift from communist dogma in the 1970s and, espe-cially, in the 1980s, during his dissident phase, Tuđman, despite his declarative advocacy of democratic freedoms, remained essentially faithful to the hard-core communist legacy in which he was formed.
Tuđman’s fundamental political ideas of the 1990s bore the recog-nizable features of unbending ideological constructions inspired by
56 About this, see documents IHRP, Zagreb, KP-56/86 and IHRP Zagreb, KP – 56/105. Based on Bulat, 1985: 318, 331.
historicist tenets, in which it was not difficult to discern the dogmatic methodology characteristic of communist orthodoxy (the unity be-tween the sovereign, his party – as the “political vanguard” – and the people, the contrived concept of reconciliation, Bosnia-Herzegovina as a contrived artifice, the societal stratification of social classes/“castes”, and so forth).
At the symbolic level, and to a great degree on matters of practi-cal policy, Tuđman, despite his dissident status, remained under the permanent influence of Tito, like many other members of the higher communist class. In Tuđman’s earlier historiographic works, Tito is certainly the central figure of Croatian and Yugoslav history, whose appearance affirmed the awareness of “the necessity of fusing the class and national struggle in a consolidated revolutionary-democratic process”: “…the arrival of Tito at the head of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1937 (…) marked the beginning, not only in theory but also in reality, of the manifestation of the correct national policy of the KPJ [Communist Party of Yugoslavia].” (“The communist revo-lutionary-democratic movement unified the most progressive political forces of all nations – the Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Macedonian and Montenegrin – in the struggle for the proper solution to the na-tional question.”) (Tuđman, 1969: 173). Even though much later, as the president of the Republic of Croatia, he would write about the
“deficiencies and subjectiveness of Tito’s policies,” the “limitations of one-party totalitarianism,” and Tito himself as the “absolute chief of the Alliance of Communists and the State,” Tuđman did not forget his “reputation and authority at home and abroad” who “became a first-class factor in domestic and international events” (Tuđman, 1996:
152).
Tito’s many years of rule and his cult of personality, which was thoroughly implanted in all pores of Yugoslav society as the living symbol of the unique Yugoslav identity, generally exerted a great in-fluence on the wartime (and postwar) revolutionary generation, which, besides Tuđman, encompassed some of the more important members of the new political elite, such as Josip Manolić, Stjepan Mesić, Josip
Boljkovac, Slavko Degoricija, and others. Although largely political dissidents with an exceptionally pro-Croatian bent, these politicians never renounced Tito nor, particularly, the achievements of the anti-fascist struggle which were ultimately underscored as one of the foun-dations for the creation of the independent Croatian state and incor-porated into the modern Croatian constitution. After coming to power, Tuđman – “who always spoke of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia negatively” (“the dungeon of the Croatian people”) – kept a bust of Tito in the Presidential Palace, and “when it suited him he stressed Tito’s role in the Second World War,” as well as emphasized Tito’s Croatian roots (Nemet, 2006: 13).
When, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Serbs began to berate Josip Broz Tito for the anti-Serb “confederal” features of the Yugoslav Constitution of 1974, Tuđman accorded himself the role of guardian of Tito’s heritage (Stojanović, 1988: 213; Ramet, 1992: 22). As the newly-elected president of the Socialist Republic of Croatia, in June 1990 Tuđman responded to a question posed by a reporter from the Hamburg weekly Der Spiegel on what policies he intended to em-ploy to oppose the centralist concept coming from Belgrade by saying:
“Tito established Yugoslavia on the principle of self-determination of all peoples. Even today this is accorded first place in our federal Constitution. And this right is granted not to the federation but to the nations. (...) There is a fundamental contradiction between the opin-ion of Serbia and the understanding of the majority in the remaining republics. Because of this, today Serbia sees nothing good in Tito, so that the deceased Tito has once more been posthumously slain by Ser-bian fanatics, precisely because he set forth the self-determination of peoples” (Der Spiegel, 18 June 1991).57 This argument was certainly not without importance to the popular image of Tito among the inter-national public; as observed by the author of one of the popularly writ-ten biographies of Tito, Neil Barnett, during the establishment of the foundations of postwar Yugoslavia in Jajce in 1943 (at the Anti-fascist Council of the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia), thanks to Tito “the
57 Cited in: Kronologija rata Hrvatska & Bosna i Hercegovina 1989. – 1998., 1998.
people of Yugoslavia would have the right to self-determination and ultimately secession from the federal state” which “laid the founda-tions for the 1946 constitufounda-tions” (and all others which followed – au-thor’s note) (Barnett, 2006: 69).
Besides his break with the Soviet bloc, one of the major motifs in the popular presentation of Tito in the West was his history as a gue-rilla. Even though Tito was sometimes characterized as a “communist dictator” in some foreign media after the outbreak of the Yugoslav crisis, (The Age, 29 April 1991) a positive perception of his historical role nonetheless prevailed. As emphasized by a respected American journalist, Anthony Lewis (The New York Times), the historical contri-bution of the Yugoslav sovereign was reflected, above all, by the fact that “Tito and his Partisans fought courageously against the occupy-ing Nazi armies” (“while Croatian Fascists set up a pro-Nazi puppet
Besides his break with the Soviet bloc, one of the major motifs in the popular presentation of Tito in the West was his history as a gue-rilla. Even though Tito was sometimes characterized as a “communist dictator” in some foreign media after the outbreak of the Yugoslav crisis, (The Age, 29 April 1991) a positive perception of his historical role nonetheless prevailed. As emphasized by a respected American journalist, Anthony Lewis (The New York Times), the historical contri-bution of the Yugoslav sovereign was reflected, above all, by the fact that “Tito and his Partisans fought courageously against the occupy-ing Nazi armies” (“while Croatian Fascists set up a pro-Nazi puppet