This is of course a story, which relies upon and invokes the devices of narrative to organize complex events. There are other stories – counter-narratives of loss or regret – but for much of the former Communist world, the contours of that debate share many features describing a collective moral transit. In the case of Yugoslavia, however, that transit was complicated by the wars interposed between Communist past and European future. A different interpretation is required.
That interpretation has been supplied, in significant part, through international criminal law. Influenced by the logic of human rights, modern international criminal law aims not only to deter or punish violence, but to reconcile communities. International criminal law as a discipline that has constructed itself on claims about individual victimization and responsibility precisely in order to combat alternative narratives of collective responsibility.
This implies a particular orientation towards history – one that cannot uncomplicatedly dismiss the Communist past but rather must assign much of ‘the good’ to it, in order properly to condemn the violence that accompanied its destruction.
This essay describes the broad outlines of the transformational narrative logic of the ICTY: a curious digression in a European teleology.
