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Long Live Yugoslavia! War, Memory Activism, and the Heritage of Yugoslavia in Slovenia and in the Italo-Slovene Borderland

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Transforming Heritage in the Former Yugoslavia

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict ((PSCHC))

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Abstract

Second World War monuments continue to evoke the Yugoslav past in the contemporary landscape, although controversies have been raised in public debates. This chapter analzses changes in Slovenia’s cultural landscape from the 1990s onwards, in order to show different attitudes towards the Yugoslav heritage, and argue that the redefinition of collective identities and the reinterpretation of history are not solely a post-Yugoslav or Eastern European peculiarity but rather a European phenomenon. Similar processes of reinterpreting the past are no less frequent elsewhere, especially in the neighbouring regions that formed a kind of ‘military frontier’ for the West during the Cold War. Therefore, special emphasis is dedicated to historical revisionism in the Italo-Slovene borderland, in which the politics of history are particularly evident. Moreover, this chapter argues that the attitude towards the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) in this transnational region should be viewed as a continuity of narratives from the Cold War, rather than resulting from a Yugonostalgia.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Science and Research Centre, Institute for Historical Studies, Koper, Slovenia

    Borut Klabjan

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  1. Borut Klabjan
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Correspondence to Borut Klabjan .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany

    Gruia Bădescu

  2. Wits City Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Braamfontein, South Africa

    Britt Baillie

  3. Department of Philosophy and Communication Studies, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Francesco Mazzucchelli

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Klabjan, B. (2021). Long Live Yugoslavia! War, Memory Activism, and the Heritage of Yugoslavia in Slovenia and in the Italo-Slovene Borderland. In: Bădescu, G., Baillie, B., Mazzucchelli, F. (eds) Transforming Heritage in the Former Yugoslavia. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76401-2_8

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