Regimes of Memory, Patterns of Consolidation. Comparative Issues

Regimes of Memory, Patterns of Consolidation. Comparative Issues.

From Ireland, Belgium, and the Baltics through Ukraine, Poland, and Hungary to Spain, Italy, and Greece, most European political cultures are dominated by various grievances, fears, and pursuits of amends as consequences of unprocessed historical traumas. Competing regimes of memory are manifested in different interpretations of symbolic dates, places, and traditions. In Hungary, these include the conflicting narratives of the regime change, the varying interpretations of what happened in 1956, the competing memories of 1944 and 1945, the Shoa, the liberation, and the occupation. The varying experiences, fears, and offences of the different experiences of communities of 1989-90, 1956, 1945 and 1944 include the various interpretations of the dissolutions of the Habsburg Monarchy and the historical Hungary connected with the revolutions of 1918-19 and the counter-revolution of 1919. The clashing memories include the differences between the communities’ interpretations of the Ausgleich and 1848–1849 in favour of different traditions. Driven by the incessant compulsion to reinterpret, all these bear the divisive experiences and repetitive compulsions of historical traumas piled upon one another, undigested, suppressed, fossilized, yet as painful as ever and calling for amends. There are two main types of the current Grand Narratives: progress vs. fatherland and the adoption of Europeanness vs. national egoism. Leftists see themselves as modernizers as opposed to reactionaries, their enemies. Consequently, they proclaim to be committed to controlled modernization with their exclusiveness resting on the lack of alternative solutions and see their policy as the only salutary option. Their public discourse applies the language that calls for the adoption of the European model. By contrast, the antithesis of nation vs. traitors sums up the images of the self and the enemy evoked by the political right. Rightist public discourse, the language of national self-centeredness, is based on the decisive role of the will to carry out the „unavoidable” change of unjust relations and claims a nation-based state redistribution, new regime change, and moral revival. Its interpretation of history, traceable to ethnicity-based political language and interpretations, holds that foreign rule (various occupiers) not only shifted the country’s point of gravity abroad but replaced its ruling stratum, intellectual elite, and middle class. This led to an internal counter-selection: to the fetishization of power relations, the practice of waiting out, and self-destruction.

The objectives of the project are to identify, analyze, and contextualize the current regimes of memory in Europe, their competing victimologies, different political languages, ceremonies, rituals, symbolic times and spaces, images of the self and the inner alterity, their audiences, followers, and their different damnosae hereditates, political hysteria, as well as their powder-keg, unprocessed traumatic historical experiences. Putting them in a comparative and interdisciplinary European context can help overwrite and surpass them as far as trauma management, mediation, and building a democratic political community are concerned.

Its interpretative framework and methodology are mainly connected to the politics of identity and the politics of memory. The innovation of the project lies in the concepts of trauma and the regime of memory. Coming from psychology, the concept of trauma has been successfully applied in social psychology and the sociology of law. In historical analysis, therefore, a traumatic event or process engenders a discourse of grievance (transmitted through the media, literature, popular culture, and so on). Representatives of such discourse see themselves as victims. Their discourse permeates organizations, influences political life, and elicits institutional responses. Should a trauma not develop into a full-fledged discourse, it may still enter the realm of collective memory patterns or even the national Grand Narratives, be passed on to future generations, and be opened up to reinterpretation. The conditions under which a past event or process is reinterpreted as a traumatic inheritance can also be studied empirically, as can the social awareness obtained by it. The political languages and narratives of such experiences have been held together by elite-generated identity models as well as by images of preceding conflict, interpretations of the recent past, the self and the inner alterity, and the blueprints of memory. They have been the building blocks for turning divided societies and fractured political cultures into one democratic, pluralist political community. The historical traumas of the communities may lead to a fluid or „vacuum” situation, a non-democratic „consolidation”, a fall back to personal power, or even political hysteria if the assessment of the situation is wrong and bad aims are chosen.

The different interpretations and reinterpretations as well as selections and taboos of historical tradition tend to divide themselves into establishment and alternative types. The ways regimes seek to homogenize the fractured and often contradictory elements of their political cultures draw separate and sometimes opposite blueprints informed by disastrous historical experiences. Their frozen pasts appear embodied in real and symbolic spaces, the very structures and centres of cities, monuments, and sacred places. Alternative pasts end up being rekindled in collective rituals and processions influencing and often poisoning personal consciousness, individual and collective life strategies, and also inter- and cross-generational contacts and transfers. Regimes of memory are institutionalized ways of setting and managing the supply and demand of remembrance in historical contexts. The concept points beyond the more usual „politics of memory” insofar as it implies governance of the issues relating to the past in modern societies; on the one hand, discourse on the past is produced by the state, its institutions, and various other organizations (clubs, associations, and so on), leaders of opposition parties, opinion makers, and other informal networks of communication; on the other hand, memory patterns also produce social identities demanding public recognition. A regime of memory is the way both ends are met, both in the political and cultural sense. A regime of memory usually makes room for different, sometimes incoherent, even contradictory discourses on the past. Policies on their side may oscillate from celebrating traumatic events as victories of one part of the community over the other to sending certain historical processes into oblivion. A regime of memory deals with how the past is managed in the present. Understanding, identifying, contextualizing, and putting them into comparative context is an inevitable precondition for transcending the competing regimes of memory.