The Dissolution of Yugoslavia and the Emergence of the ‘Nationalist’ Croatian Democratic Union: A Discourse Analytic Reading

The thesis addresses the question of how the essentialist and exclusivist representation of the Croatian nation that underlies the post-socialist democratic order came into being. It does so by examining the emergence of the Croatian Democratic Union’s nationalist discourse in the context of Yugoslavia's dissolution, revealing its historical specificity. The analysis covers the form of social division instituted by the Yugoslavian regime, the politicizations of the Croatian nation during the Croatian Spring movement (1968-1971), the identitary logics that underpinned Yugoslavia's constitutional order, their contestations and the emergence of the League of Communist of Serbia’s transformist project in the 1980s, the disarticulation of the form of social division instituted by the Yugoslavian regime, and the contending democratic discourses that emerged in the Socialist Republic Croatia during the first democratic elections (1990). Drawing on a combination of Poststructuralist Discourse Theory and James Tully’s work on constitutional development, the analysis develops a critical account of the `nationalist' CDU's emergence without reproducing the party’s own representations of its origins, social unity, division and Croatian nationhood. Central to this analysis is the broader movement from the Yugoslavian imaginary horizon to the `new’ myths that emerged in the process of its dissolution and the discursive constructions of the nation in this process. The thesis seeks to expose the limitations of CDU’s nationalist discourse and the complex process of political identity formation and dissolution that made the party’s emergence possible and that continues to shape Croatian politics today.