This paper aims to analyze the articles relating to the World War II (WWII) published in the weekly Croatian newspaper Danas (Today), a prominent print medium for mass circulation that did not agree with the Croatian Democratic Union’s (HDZ) and the League of Communists of Croatia’s (SKH) understanding of the WWII.

Debates about the WWII became heated in former Yugoslavia from the late 1980s, especially in Serbia and Croatia. As discourses regarding the past serve to legitimize the politics of the present, there exists abundant literature focusing on the media coverage, the politics of memory, and the discourse regarding the WWII in the Yugoslav media. However, there is insufficient research investigating the opposition in Croatia that did not share the HDZ’s and the SKH’s interpretations of the WWII. Attending to such opinions expressed on the eve of the fragmentation of Yugoslavia will help the study of the alternative plan of state-building mooted during Croatia’s transitional period.

Franjo Tuđman, the HDZ president who also became the president of the Republic of Croatia in 1990, criticized the official history of Yugoslavia promoted by the communists and instead offered a nationalistic interpretation of the WWII, attempting to rehabilitate the wartime regime led by the pro-Nazi Ustasha. Tuđman called for a “national reconciliation” that aimed to accomplish reconciliation between Partisans and Ustasha by claiming that both sections strived to achieve the independence of the Croatian state. Conversely, the articles in Danas criticized both, the official history of the communists and the new nationalistic narrative offered by the HDZ. Nonetheless, Danas partly followed communists’ official version of history, although it also focused on the mass killings committed by the Yugoslav Partisans and denounced the lack of research on Yugoslav historiography. The politics of memory in Croatia, such as a commemoration event in Bleiburg, was also a matter of dispute in articles published in Danas, which criticized the politics of the HDZ as using the past for political purposes just like the communists.

This paper demonstrates that the articles published in Danas in 1990 called for reconciliation between the Serbs and Croats instead of a nationalist settlement among the Croats because it was considered to be an unavoidable task when Croatia aimed at the accomplishment of integration into Europe. Danas and the liberal oppositions placed significance on the political and cultural pluralism of Europe, while the HDZ focused on state-building that was based on the notion of a Croatian nation. However, the idea that both the Serbs and Croats should come to terms with the crimes committed during the WWII was unacceptable to the Serbs in Croatia, who eagerly tried to use their past as the basis of the legitimation of their political goals. Eventually, the opposition could not bring about a settlement between the Croats and Serbs in Croatia. Further research is required to ascertain the reason why the claims of the Croatian opposition failed to attain wider support.