How has memory-collective and individual-influenced European politics after the Second World War and after 1989 in particular? How has the past been used in domestic struggles for power, and how has the past been used in domestic struggles for power, and how have 'historical lessons' been applied in foreign policy? While there is now a burgeoning field of social and cultural memory studiesd, mostly focused on commemorations and monuments, this volume is the first to examine the connection between memory and politics directly. It investigatesd how memory is officially recast, personally reworked and often violently re-instilled after wars, and, above all, the ways memory shapes present power constellations.
The chapters combine theoretical innovation in their approach to the study of me mory with deeply historical, empirically based case studies of major European countries. The point of stressing memory is not ot deny that interests shape polichy, but, with Max Weber, to analyse the historically and ideologically conditioned formation and legitimation of these interests. The volume concludes with reflections on the ethics of memory, and the politics of truth, justice and forgetting after 1945 and 1980.
This ground - breaking book should be of interest to historians of contemporary Europ, political scientists, sociologists and anyone interested in how the political uses of the past have shaped-and continue to shape- the Europe we live in now.
Part 1 Myth, memory and analogy in foreign policy
1 Memory of sovereignty and sovereignty over memory:
Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine, 1939-1999
2 Myth, memory and policy in France since 1945
3 The power of memory and memories of power: the cultural
parameters of German foreign policy-making since 1945
4 The past in the present: British imperial memories and the
European question
5 Europe's post-Cold War remembrance of Russia: cui bono
6 Memory, the media and NATO: information intervention in
Bosnia-Hercegovina
Part 2 Memory and power in domestic affairs
7 The past is another country: myth and memory in post-war
Europe
8 The emergence and legacies of divided memory: Germany
and the Holocaust after 1945
9 Unimagined communities: the power of memory and the
conflict in the former Yugoslavia
10 Translating memories of war and co-belligerency into politics:
the Italian post-war experience
11 Institutionalising the past: shifting memories of nationhood
in German education and immigration legislation
12 Trials, purges and history lessons: treating a difficult past in post-communist Europe