Connected Memories: The International Politics of Partition, from Poland to India

Abstract

This article theorizes connected memory, or in other words how people remember each other's memories, through the connected histories of territorial partition in different contexts. It claims that social memories can travel beyond their original context, pushing beyond efforts to understand supranational “mnemonic communities,” or to understand cosmopolitan memory as a thin memory community encompassing all humanity. It builds on the idea of “connected histories,” arguing that existing approaches to social memory in world politics either neglect connections across national and regional boundaries or scale up the national model to the global level. The article uses the history of territorial partitions as an illustration of three types of connected memory: sympathetic, vicarious, and modular. Partition has often been studied in comparative or aggregative ways, ruling out the possibility that partitions affect each other. But from the partitions of Poland to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, to Ireland, Palestine, and India, partitions have often been events remembered beyond the national context and in the plural. Such memories have, in turn, altered the imaginable possibilities of the future, for example, by providing precedents for or warnings about future partitions.

International memories in global politics: Making the case for or against UN intervention in Libya and Syria

“…Invoking memories in political discourse necessarily implies simplifying complex events into actionable forms. 11 During this process, the lessons derived from the past can change, and the same memory can come to justify opposite policies and courses of action. 12 To illustrate, take the famous example of Germany's Nazi past and its memory of the Holocaust.…”

“…17 It follows that when politicians are guided by or use memories, they use national memories and derive lessons from them that are assumed to resonate with the national community they represent. 18 According to the politics of memory literature, memories actively or passively provoke political action by mobilising a specifically bounded national collective.…”