This book traces the influence of collective memory in international relations (IR). It inquires where a country’s memory first emerges and how it guides states through time in world politics. It locates the origins of national memory in political strategies within the international environment. The study then turns to the domestic landscape, where among a country’s public, it finds memory to be the carrier of national identity over time. From there, however, the analysis reverts to the international sphere: in the medium term, collective memory begins to channel international state behaviour, whereas, in the long run, it circumvents a country’s normative horizons. In this book, collective memory is thus assumed to become manifest in world politics in four varying forms: as a country’s political strategy, as its public identity, as underwriting its international state behaviour, and finally, as a source for its national values. All four theorized manifestations of memory are tested in a comparative study of (West) Germany and Austria and the impact their diverse post-war interpretations of the Nazi legacy had on their international policies over time. With the illustrative help of the empirical cases, the book not only explores whether collective memory has an influence on political outcomes but how and why it matters for IR.

This article suggests that there exists an alternative form of international political behavior between countries who share a common traumatic past: diplomacy with memory. Diplomacy with memory manifests itself as an official, diplomatic team performance that aims at conveying a certain historic image for the purpose of achieving rational aims on the international stage. In a first step, a theoretical and empirical framework is developed that highlights diplomacy with memory as a strategic diplomatic action that does not conform with mainstream IR models of state behavior. In a second step, the new theoretical model is tested on two selected postconflict scenarios: The bilateral negotiations between West Germany and Israel, and between Austria and Israel about eventual reparation payments to the Jewish state in the early 1950s. Extracting the core elements of the diplomacy with memory from these historical examples, this paper suggests amending the toolkit of traditional diplomatic strategies with memory in order to better explain state behavior in other postconflict situations as they emerge.

This article is interested in the formation of war legacies and how they interact with social identities. It suggests a bottom-up approach towards examining the societal processes in which individuals create a legacy of war. It posits that through their narratives of conflict, by remembering what happened to them as a group, they mould the meaning and boundaries of how the group will be membered post-conflict. The validity of the theorised link between war memory and group membership is then tested in the case of Syria. In 200 interviews, Syrians provided their narratives of the conflict and their vision of a future Syrian state and society. The findings show that most respondents’ narratives follow a civic rationale, forming a society around civil rights and political ideas rather than around ethnic/sectarian divides. With this, the article contributes a new route for international relations scholars to understand the formation of war legacies through individuals’ narratives of conflict and explains their effects on ties of group belonging while also offering a glimpse into the Syrian ‘we’ amid the ongoing war in Syria.

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‘Memory—what a strange thing it is!…We can only think of it, in the line of an abstract time that is deprived of all thickness…Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are’, writes the philosopher Gaston Bachelard in ...