Nation and Memory in Eastern Europe

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Nation and Memory in Eastern Europe
Lecture 2 Nation and Memory Week 2
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Outline 1. Types of Nation
Building 2. Memory and Nation 3. Collective
Memory National Memory 4. Conclusion
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Irredentism irredentist (from Italian irredenta
unredeemed) advocating annexation of territory
of one state by another state based on common
ethnicity or historical 'rights'
Separatism separatist advocating autonomy or
an own state/governmen for part of the territory
of an existing state
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Types of Nationalism (Michael Hechter)

• State-building nationalism England, France
• Peripheral nationalism Quebec, Scotland,
  Catalonia
• Irredentist nationalism Sudeten Germans,
  Hungarians in Romania
• Unification nationalism Germany, Italy
• Michael Hechter, Containing Nationalism (Oxford,
  New York, 2000), pp. 15-17

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• Lateral Ethnies
• Aristocratic type of ethnie
• Incorporation of different demotic vertical
  communities
• Bureaucratic incorporation incorporation of
  other strata of the population
• Accommodation between the upper-class culture and
  the culture of lower strata and peripheral
  regions
• The state unified, standardized and culturally
  homogenized
• Importance of royal administration, taxation,
  mobilization sense of corporate loyalty and
  identity
• Examples England, France, Spain

• Vertical Ethnies
• Demotic ( of the people, folkish, popular)
  ethnies - bases for nations
• Common myths, symbols
• Religious traditions can be crucial
• Key role of intellectuals in the 19th and 20th
  centuries
• 'Discovery' and realization of the community
• Politicization of the community
• Movement towards a 'homeland'
• Economic unification
• Transformation of ethnic members into legal
  citizens
• Placing the people at the centre of moral and
  political concerns
• Examples Ukraine, Czechia, Latvia, Slovakia,
  Estonia

Anthony D. Smith The Origins of Nations, pp.
109-123
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• Pattern of a successful national movement from
  below (M. Hroch)
• A crisis of legitimacy
• A certain amount of vertical social mobility
  (educated people from the non-dominant group)
• High level of social communication (literacy,
  schooling, market relations)
• Nationally relevant conflicts of interest

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Nation building in non-dominant ethnies (Phase
A) Groups in the ethnic community start to
discuss their own ethnicity and conceive of it as
a nation-to-be scholarly enquiry into and
dissemination of an awareness of the linguistic,
cultural, social and historical attributes of the
nation-to-be (Phase B) A new range of activists
try to awaken national consciousness and to
persuade as many members as possible of the
ethnic group the potential compatriots that
it is important to gain all the attributes of a
fully-fledged nation (1) development of a
national culture based on the local language and
its use in education, administration and economy,
(2) civil rights and self-administration, (3)
creation of a complete social structure
beginning of a national movement (Phase C) A mass
movement is formed which pursues these aims a
fully-fledged social structure of the would-be
nation comes into being Miroslav Hroch, From
National Movement to the Fully-Fledged Nation,
pp. 61-62
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Outline 1. Types of Nation
Building 2. Memory and Nation 3. Collective
Memory National Memory 4. Conclusion
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A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two
things, which in truth are but one, constitute
this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the
past, one in the present. One is the possession
in common of a rich legacy of memories the other
is present-day consent, the desire to live
together, the will to perpetuate the value of the
heritage that one has received in an undivided
form Ernest Renan
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• ethnies are constituted, not by lines of
  physical descent, but by the sense of continuity,
  shared memory and collective destiny, i.e. by
  lines of cultural affinity embodied in myths,
  memories, symbols and values retained by a given
  cultural unit of population.
• A.D. Smith, National Identity, p. 29

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Ethno-Symbolism

• Modern nations and pre-modern ethnies are linked
• Ethnies are crucial for the formation of nations
• Myths, symbols, folk tales, histories, memories,
  cultural traditions play important roles in
  transforming ethnies in nations
• They are the basis for social cohesion

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Outline 1. Types of Nation
Building 2. Memory and Nation 3. Collective
Memory National Memory 4. Conclusion
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It is in society that people normally acquire
their memories. It is also in society that they
recall, recognize, and localize their memories
(Halbwachs, 1925, 1992, p. 38).
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Collective Memory
Concept introduced by the French sociologist
Maurice Halbwachs in 1925, based on ideas of
Emile Durkheim
Individual Memory Collective Memory
Personal, autobiographic Social, historical
Memory of things I have experienced myself, where I have been present Incorporates information about the world beyond my experience, before I was born or where I have not been present
Social framework of remembering Constitutes a kind of social framework
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Maurice Halbwachs 1877-1945
Emile Durkheim, 1858-1917
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Multiplicity of Memory
We can understand each memory as it occurs in
individual thought only if we locate each within
the thought of the corresponding group. We cannot
properly understand their relative strength and
the ways in which they combine within individual
thought unless we connect the individual to the
various groups of which he is simultaneously a
member.
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago,
1992), p.53
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Collective Memory

• Individual remains the real holder of memory
• Memory changes over time
• The collective (family, class, religious
  community, nation) decides what is valuable to
  remember
• Cultural memory is based on socially organised
  mnemonics, institutions, and media
• Memory is a social product - Individual memory
  is dependent on society

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For this purpose we should conceptualize
collective memory as the result of the
interaction among three types of historical
factors the intellectual and cultural traditions
that frame all our representations of the past,
the memory makers who selectively adopt and
manipulate these traditions, and the memory
consumers who use, ignore or transform such
artefacts according to their own
interests. Wulf Kansteiner, Finding Meaning in
memory A Methodological Critique of Collective
Memory Studies, History and Theory 41 (May
2002), pp. 197-197
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Collective Memory and Commemoration
Publicly shared memories are shaped by
ceremonies, cemeteries, museums, symbols, public
holidays, monuments Construction and identity
of groups
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Les lieux de mémoire sites of memory (Pierre
Nora)

• Sites of Memory can be
• places such as archives, museums, cathedrals,
  palaces, cemeteries, and memorials
• concepts and practices such as commemorations,
  generations, mottos, and all rituals
• objects such as inherited property, commemorative
  monuments, manuals, emblems, basic texts, and
  symbols.

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Les lieux de mémoire sites of memory (Pierre
Nora) History and Memory
Memory installs remembrance within the sacred
history, always prosaic, releases it again.
Memory is blind to all but the group it binds At
the heart of history is a critical discourse that
is antithetical to spontaneous memory, History is
perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true
mission is to suppress and destroy it.
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Collective Memory vs. History

• Identity project (usually a picture of heroism,
  victimhood, etc.)
• Impatient with ambiguity
• Ignores counterevidence in order to preserve
  established narrative

• Aspires to arrive at objective truth, regardless
  of consequences
• Recognizes complexity and ambiguity
• May revise existing narrative in light of new
  evidence (archives, etc.)

But is this dichotomy true? What are the
functions of history and historical research in
nation building?
From Voices of Collective Remembering,
Universitetet i Oslo, May 2004, by James V.
Wertsch, Washington University in St. Louis
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Memory and Power
The past is constructed not as fact but as myth
to serve the interest of a particular community.
National memory ... is constituted by different,
often opposing, memories that, in spite of their
rivalries, construct common denominators that
overcome on the symbolic level real social and
political differences to create an imagined
community Alon Confino, Collective Memory and
Cultural History, p.1400
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No sharp dichotomy between official
(manipulative) and vernacular (authentic)
memory How did people internalize the nation
and make it in remarkably short time an everyday
mental property a memory as intimate and
authentic as the local, ethnic, and family
past? Alon Confino, Collective Memory and
Cultural History, p. 1402
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Outline 1. Types of Nation
Building 2. Memory and Nation 3. Collective
Memory National Memory 4. Conclusion
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Nation and Memory

• Individual remains the real holder of memory
• The collective (family, class, religious
  community, nation) decides what is valuable to
  remember
• Memory is a social product - Individual memory
  is dependent on society
• Common memories and traditions ('invented' and
  'real) play a key role in nation building