European Memory and Conflicting Visions of the Past

Toth, Mano

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-79843-7

Cited by 2 publications

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“…The monumental role of Holocaust remembrance at various levels of politics (Levy and Sznaider 2006;Rothberg 2009;Subotić 2019;Radonić 2021;Moses 2021) and the specific regional memory-political dynamics in different parts of Europe (Müller 2002;Lebow et al 2006;Blacker et al 2013;Nicolaïdis and Sèbe 2014;Pakier and Wawrzyniak 2016;Törnquist-Plewa 2016;Dureinović 2019;Bachleitner 2021), Russia (Etkind 2013), East Asia (Kim 2015;Saito 2017;Shin and Sneider 2016;Wang 2012), the Americas (Landsberg 2004;Maurantonio 2019;Tavares Furtado 2022) and Africa (Mark-Thisen et al 2022) have been tackled alongside the general compendiums of the state of the art in the study of collective memory (e.g., Erll and Nünning 2010;Radstone and Schwarz 2010;Olick et al 2011;Tota and Hagen 2016;Kattago 2016;Budryte 2020;Klymenko 2022). The memory politics in the transnational European space (Sierp 2014;Neumayer 2019;Verovšek 2020;Milosević and Trošt 2020;Toth 2021) is a vibrant research field, with the transnational research ethos increasingly pushed to other regions across the world (Lewis et al 2022).…”

Section: When Memory Meets Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Politics of memory: a conceptual introduction

Mälksoo¹

2023

Handbook on the Politics of Memory

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Memory matters, for people and polities alike. Long considered a "soft" subject in the study of international relations, memory appears increasingly consequential in contemporary world politics. Vladimir Putin's rationale for Russia's full-on invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 drew on a rich brew of twisted "lessons of history", denying Ukraine's tradition of statehood, and calling for its "denazification" and "decommunization" in the same breath (Putin 2022b, 2022a). Russia's kinetic war against Ukraine was preceded by, and has run in parallel to, an intense "memory war", probing Ukraine's political subjectivity and sovereignty at various critical juncture points in the twentieth-century past (Fedor et al. 2017). In the meantime, statues and plaques commemorating historical figures complicit in colonialism and racism are being torn down in the former Western colonial metropoles, together with contesting the rose-tinted stories of empires that are sought to be decolonized along with their symbolic and material representations in the contemporary world. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has raged through the world during the period this book has been in preparation, has created its own politically charged practices of commemoration, (mis)recognition and veneration. These range from the ritual applauding of the medics at pre-agreed evening hours across Europe in the spring of 2020 to the use of the Star of David in the anti-vaxxer demonstrations as the pandemic evolved, attempting to draw parallels between the alleged contemporary and historical state violence towards the people.What does "memory" do, who "does" memory -and what is being done by politically utilizing memory -are the central concerns for the study of memory politics. This handbook tackles the multifaceted and polyphonic politics of memory head-on. It proceeds from the basic observation that collective memory -that is, the active remembering together as a political collective, as well as a reference to a set of collective representations and interpretations of the past -is a deeply political phenomenon. Collective or social memory is politically embedded, reflecting political visions, and enacting social and political worlds. Collective memory is constructed and constructive: it is socially shaped and politically productive. Dynamic and plural by nature, social memory is standardly subject to contestation, and thus prone to instrumentalization, institutionalization, securitization and, at times, outright weaponization by the state or particular groups of interest therein. Memory is an important political resource for its emotive power to mobilize due to its pertaining to the part of the past kept alive (Subotić and Steele 2020).

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