Memories of 1989 in Europe between Hope, Dismay, and Neglect

Laczó, Ferenc; Wawrzyniak, Joanna

doi:10.1177/0888325417698741

Cited by 17 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Indeed, it is an adage to say that the 1989 events, as a point of rupture and change worldwide have been contested ever since in eastern Europe because of its uncertain aftermath (Mark 2010;Pop Eleches 2014;Petrescu and Petrescu 2014;Breuer and Delius 2017;Laczó and Wawrzyniak 2017). In what were largely national debates, the remembrance of the mass civil protests was filtered by accusations of an unsubstantial political change.…”

Section: Challenging the Reconciliatory Pastmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This was made more apparent by a growing "totalitarian" dimension of memory politics (Bauerkämper 2012) would lead to this point. Its central perspective framed by the parallel between National Socialism and Communism as the negative of the contemporary political configuration) supports the "de-coupling of a European collective identity from the collective identities bound to the nation state" (Lagrou 1999;Delanty 2005;Laczó and Wawrzyniak 2017). In this sense, 1989 comes as a constitutional moment of political genealogy (Soysal 2010).…”

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confidence: 98%

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On political heritage: remembering and disavowing 1989

Dolghin

2018

Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research

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www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/dimitris-christopoulos/humanrights-in-state-of-perpetual-emergency] of refugees mobilized several memorial narratives which had been the backbone of European memory. Historian Dan Stone has recently made a detailed foray into the locus of the Holocaust as a historical narrative meant to support the ethical argument for solidarity and conclude that remembrance represents just a small fraction of the necessary historicization. The memorial neglect of its history was at the time a recurrent account of the reluctant political attitudes emerging around the frontiers of Europe. This article traces a similar now transnational difficult history inscribed into the European narrative, 1989, and investigated the conditions in which it became a topic of interest in 2014-2015. I locate their invocation in a longer term perspective on the ebbs and flows of the history of 1989 becoming political heritage. This article argues that 1989, as both consensus and competing memory, has been increasingly polarized through these two opposing perspectives more recently. In order to flesh out and interpret these dynamics, I first contextualize how an initially consensus-driven memory narrative around 1989 had by 2014 solidified into two divergent collective memory discourses, suggestive of the populist abatement. It was in the 1990s that the perspective on 1989 generally consolidated the events into a pre-emptive memory, wherein remembrance represented an act of political citizenship supported by a civic narrative of disobedience which would be able to be called on in anticipation of a threat to the new liberal polity. Yet such "negative" political heritage, otherwise a European transnational memorial perspective, gradually emerged as a prop for identity politics. Here, I focus on the tensions in Romanian and Hungarian memorial debates. Indeed, since roughly 2010, this former pre-emption remembrance is being increasingly integrated into discourses of sovereignty and more recently played into the mobilization of the memory of 1989 as a defensive narrative. I consequently consider its invocation in the recent debate on refugees and a wider spectrum of clashing notions of citizenship, state and the public, all leaning on a narrative of the "authoritarian past. As both sides were (and are) employing an increasingly selective historical imaginary, the competition around the memory of 1989 shows how appropriating a revolutionary heritage is in fact instrumental to authoritarian prone politics .

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Section: Challenging the Reconciliatory Pastmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 98%

On political heritage: remembering and disavowing 1989

Dolghin

2018

Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research

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“…Spillman 1997 ;Wertsch 2002 ;Kattago 2016 ) and questions of justice and reconciliation (e.g. Teitel 2000 ;Elster 2004 ;Lawther, Moffet, and Jacobs 2017 ), which in turn are sometimes explored together with regard to Eastern Europe ( Mälksoo 2009 ;Blacker and Etkind 2013 ;Laczó and Wawrzyniak 2017 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

European Memory in Populism

2019

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European Memory in Populism explores the links between memory and populism in contemporary Europe. Focusing on circulating ideas of memory, especially European memory, in contemporary populist discourses, the book also analyzes populist ideas in sites and practices of remembrance that usually tend to go unnoticed. More broadly, the theoretical heart of the book reflects upon the similarities, differences, and slippages between memory, populism, nationalism, and cultural racism and the ways in which social memory contributes to give substance to various ideas of what constitutes the 'people' in populist discourse and beyond.Bringing together a group of political scientists, anthropologists, and cultural and memory studies scholars, the book illuminates the relationship between memory and populism from different angles and in different contexts. The contributors to the volume discuss dominant notions of European heritage that circulate in the public sphere and in political discourse, and consider how the politics of fear relates to such notions of European heritage and identity across and beyond Europe and the European Union. Ultimately, this volume will shed light on how notions of a shared European heritage and memory can be used not only to include and connect Europeans, but also to exclude some of them.Investigating the ways in which nationalist populist forces mobilize the idea of a shared, homogeneous European civilization, European Memory in Populism will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of European studies, heritage and memory studies, migration studies, anthropology, political science, and sociology.Chapters 1, 4, 6, and 10 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No-Derivatives 4.0 license.

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1989

James

Iacob

Rupprecht

et al. 2019

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Memories of 1989 in Europe between Hope, Dismay, and Neglect

Cited by 17 publications

References 1 publication

On political heritage: remembering and disavowing 1989

On political heritage: remembering and disavowing 1989

European Memory in Populism

1989

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