The Spectre of Communism Is Haunting Croatia. The Croatian Right's Image of the Enemy

Abstract

This article analyzes the image of the enemy firmly held by the Croatian Right and the consequences of this image for democratic political institutions in Croatia. The first part of the text reconstructs a) the public discourse of the former HDZ leader, Tomislav Karamarko, as well as b) the public discourse of the Catholic Church. With the help of theories of cultural trauma, as well as discourse analysis, the second part of the article demonstrates how the Croatian Right in fact interprets any kind of liberal attitude as a specific communist one. In that sense the proposed thesis is that in its campaign against imaginary communists the Croatian Right actually tries to oppose liberalism itself. In other words, this paper tries to answer the question, why the Croatian Right does not name its real enemy – liberalism, instead of repeating the buzzwords about the spectres of communism? The third part of the article analyses Chantal Mouffe's theory of agonistic democracy, arguing its limits in the context of post-communist states. This paper shows that in deeply divided societies like Croatia the reduction of politics on the friend-enemy relation endangers the main liberal values of democracy.