Reflexive particularism and cosmopolitanization: the reconfiguration of the national (original) (raw)
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The past as history: national identity and historical consciousness in modern Europe
Choice Reviews Online
In 2003, a research program entitled Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in 19 th and 20 th Century was launched by the European Science Foundation. The scholars in the program sought to explore the intellectual and cultural contexts in which national historical narratives emerged and the extent to which these narratives proved durable as cultural phenomena. Stefan Berger launched the project, and he had the support of Christoph Conrad and Guy P. Marchal in the international research that was done up until 2008. The goal of the program was the publication of a series of eight volumes, and these volumes were indeed published between 2008 and 2015. The book under review is the concluding volume of the series. The books, which altogether come to some 3,700 pages, contain the writings of almost 150 authors from more than 20 countries. Time and space do not allow me to present the results of the Representations of the Past project in its entirety. Berger and Conrad have written a work that provides a synthesis of the entire initiative and thus offers a glimpse into the project as a whole. The book is divided into seven chapters offering a chronological presentation of the entire history of national historical narratives in Europe. In the introduction, the authors examine the concept of the historical construct of nation, touching on the roles that national histories have played in European Modernity. They do not, however, deal with theories of nationalism. In and of itself, this is not a problem, but it does contribute ultimately to the failure to clarify the precise meaning(s) of the term "national history," which plays a key role in the train of thought of the entire book. A choice between the constructivist or the ethnosymbolic theories on nation and nationalism and the analytical perspective this would have given would have offered some compensation for this shortcoming. However, with regards to the concept of national history, we are informed only that its function was the creation and maintenance of the nation: "National history has [thus] been one of the main instruments with which to construct collective national identity. […] It is important in our discussions of collective national identity to remain aware of the political functionalisation of this idea
Postnational Relations to the Past: A " European Ethics of Memory "
International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 2013
In nation-building processes, the construction of a common past and references to a shared founding moment have played a well-documented role in fostering notions of a collective political actor. While notions of unreflective national collective memories no longer hold in an age of a postheroic " politics of regret " , the preferred subject of collective memories nevertheless often remains the nation, both in academic literature and in public debates. In this paper, my aim is to establish the role of collective memory in self-proclaimed " postnational " approaches—specifically in the context of European integration—and to assess in how far these approaches can claim to go beyond notions of memory handed down to us from earlier accounts of nation-building processes. I start by laying out two different approaches to a postnational collective memory as they emerge from the literature. The first approach aims at overcoming national subjectivities by focusing on a specific content: a shared, albeit negative, legacy for all Europeans. The Holocaust plays a particularly prominent role in this discourse. The second approach sees and seeks commonalities not so much on the level of memory content but rather on the level of specific memory practices (a " European ethics of memory "). While it is not aimed at dismantling the nation as a political subject per se, it also creates a European self-understanding that makes the symbolic borders of Europe look more porous: potentially everyone can employ these memory practices. However, as I will show, this approach knows its own attempts to define a postnational " essence " , most notably by tying the ethics of memory to a specifically European cultural repertoire.
Political Studies Forum, 2024
At the end of the Cold War, the geopolitical struggle for the shaping of reunified Europe, the rise of populism, and the reemergence of neo-nationalism on both sides of the old Iron Curtain created the premises for a competition between the new master narratives associated to the two dominant paradigms of the politics of the past: the cosmopolitan / transnational and the antagonistic / national(istic) one. Against the background of the persistent crises following the transition processes in Eastern Europe, the Great Recession, the new geopolitical challenges, and the subsequent waves of neo-nationalism, the “memory games” intensified on both national and European institutional arenas. These games had a significant impact, detectable especially at the level of the institutionalized memory formats (the political and the cultural memory focused on the “founding traumas”, including the revisionist national historical politics), which encompassed the deepening of the ideological, political, and cultural cleavages within and beyond the nation states. In the same time, the mnemonic and cultural struggles over the conflicting “painful pasts” allowed the preservation of the old fault line which has divided “Europe’s Europes” during the Cold War. Against this mnemonic background, the new paradigm of the “agonistic memory” seems to offer a “decent” and “realistic” third way for dealing with the contested pasts, by means of a multiperspectivist approach which also allows the overcoming of the impasses revealed by the two other competitive memory models.
Cosmopolitan Memory and National Memory Conflicts: On the Dynamics of their Interaction
Journal of Sociology (2014), 50:4, 501-514, 2014
Levy and Sznaider's positing of a global cosmopolitan memory has negated the reductionism inherent in classifying national memory cultures as homogeneous, globalized phenomena by redefining the interaction between the two as a coalescence of the two elements rather than a superimposition of the global on the national with the attendant eradication of the latter. A survey of countries that have adopted the edicts of cosmopolitan memory, however, indicates that this coalescence can take the form of either a strained dialectic or a relatively easy symbiosis. By examining primarily the interaction between cosmopolitan memory and national memory conflicts in Ireland and Austria, this article aims to ascertain the constituent elements of the national memory conflict which serve to increase or diminish the strength of the influence of global cosmopolitan memory.
Memory, Identity, and Nationalism in European Regions
Reference book
Memory studies is a well-established academic discipline, but the revised issue of ethnicity poses a new set of research questions, particularly in relation to the problem of the operational character of memory and ethnicity in the context of traumatized identity. Contemporary political processes in Europe, populism and nationalism lift in addition to ethnic challenges in the form of demographic shifts have created a situation, in which new national identities have been developed simultaneously with emerging new competitive historical memories. The interaction between politics and managed historical memory is of scholarly and practicality interest. This book is to shed light on the evolution in the politics of memory in European regions and beyond, as well as the tools and techniques of their empowerment. The topic of the book is a subject of public debates since it introduces new theoretical frameworks for collective memory, and European nationalism and regionalism analysis. All questions being discussed accentuate the urgency of memory and forms of nationalism during periods of crisis and/or austerity measures in contemporary Europe. As a comprehensive collection of cases, the publication represents the efforts of experts in the European and Eurasian regional development. The volume combines theory and empirical study; each chapter is based on a particular case, offering a coherent and pragmatic picture. Although different methodologies are used, cases address the key theoretical concepts of memory, identity, nationalism, and security as discursive practices and introduce public policies in contemporary European regions and those stated on the European track of values. By this approach, the volume provides a new lens to formulate a concept of Europe as multifaceted identity and diverse practices.
Bulletin of Historical Research National Taiwan Normal University, 2019
The relationship between Germany and Poland in the first half of the 20th century had been mostly one of aggressive territorial competition and resettlement of people. After the collapse of the communist regimes in Poland and East Germany, followed by German reunification, the history of this relationship has been reconceptualised within the framework of European integration. Despite overall progress, there are still numerous obstacles that need to be overcome. Thus, seen from the perspective of cultures of remembrance, it becomes obvious how fragile the re-established neighbourly relationship and both countries’ quest for internal and bilateral normalization still are. Ever since 1945, there has been an “on-going saga of competitive victimhood” between people in both countries, where the wrongs one has done to the other have to be minimized or delegitimized in order to build a national identity on a sense of being deeply wronged. Reconciliation efforts quickly reached a short-lived peak in 1994/5 but this rapid rapprochement was derailed around the millennium when both sides realized that there were still a number of unresolved issues concerning the recent past. These incidents signalled a return to more re-nationalized approaches to historical memories. Another ten years later, both sides became more and more aware that a more pragmatic approach to the opposite side was needed in order to further develop the bilateral relationship despite remaining differences concerning the views of the past. Thus, we can see over the past three decades a succession of different emphases in German and Polish approaches to the memory of central aspects of their entangled 20th century history, which were alternately based on trends towards Europeanization, contested cosmopolitanisation or reflexive particularism.
Special Issue: Transnational Memory Politics in Europe
Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 2015
In this introductory article to the special issue on 'Transnational Memory Politics in Europe,' we argue for closer scrutiny of the dynamics between the local and the transnational realms of memory. We contend that thus far, scholarship has neglected empirical analysis of transnational mnemonic practices in Europe. We seek to provide a theoretical framework bringing together remembrance with research on globalization, governance, and transnationalism as a way of overcoming the often nation-centric nature of memory studies. The central puzzle for us is how memories are (trans)formed, displayed, shared, and negotiated through transnational channels, while maintaining their local rootedness. In particular, we focus on the construction of narratives that have the power to transcend national boundaries, as well as the role of individual and institutional actors in driving those narratives to (un)successful representation.
Europe’s Europes: Mapping the Conflicts of European Memory
Journal of Political Ideologies, 2020
Debates about ‘European memory’ are frequent in public and political discourse. With the fundamental challenges the European project now faces, such debates exemplify changes in what Europe means and implies politically. Drawing on a large corpus of press articles from six EU member states (France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom) and employing qualitative and quantitative methods of discourse analysis, the article questions the fields and logics of conflict about the meaning of Europe between 2004 and 2016. Intimately linked to national and post-national senses of identity, these conflicts about ‘European memory’ take four different forms and appear across different national public spheres: (1) perspectives from which ‘European memory’ underpins seemingly consensual conceptions of Europe; (2) conflictive conceptions of Europe along an East-West divide that present different attempts of setting rules; (3) memory conflicts establishing peripheries and boundaries of Europe; (4) a global framing of ‘Europe’ that understands Europe as a space of competition that mobilizes triadic patterns of conflict. The fits and misfits, and the degrees of entanglement on conflicts about ‘European memory’ help to understand the persistent and continuous struggles over the mental maps of Europe beyond the simplistic opposition of particularism and cosmopolitanism.