Memory Laws and Nation-Building: Responses to a Post-National Europe

• In Event: Historical Memory, Identity Construction, and Populism in Europe

Abstract

The political and legal dimensions of how one can publicly speak about historical events has been largely shunned by social scientists. This is surprising, given that laws determining what can be said in public about a country’s history have become a key tool for nation-building across many countries. With increasing political controversy focusing on post-national understandings of identity and supranational institutions like the EU (as witnessed by the rise of populist and anti-immigrant movements within even the West’s oldest and most stable democracies), countries across Europe, and particularly in East-Central Europe, have increasingly relied on memory laws for the purpose of nation-building. In a context of heightened economic uncertainty and international pressure, sanitized and nationalized perspectives on the past are more and more being relied on to project these countries into the future. In January 2018, for instance, the Polish parliament approved a controversial bill that continues a long-standing governmental policy of interfering with the work of historians by essentially prescribing that the role of Poles during World War II may only be depicted in a positive light. There are many more such examples of laws that attempt to engage in nation-building via state-crafted historical narratives, most of them promulgated by right-wing parties intent on solidifying essentialized and unproblematic national identities.

This paper makes use of a unique and comprehensive database of memory laws and the context of their adoption constructed by the authors in the period 2015-2018. In it, we derive and test a typology of the ways in which legislation on memory affects the public sphere and the kinds of norms that are included therein. Our analysis comprises an assessment of the shifts in the political processes surrounding the issuance and implementation of mnemonic legislation over time and space. This is an important step beyond investigations of memory laws undertaken by legal scholars, which largely neglect the underlying political dynamics. While we focus on the large patterns emerging from the database, we combine this with an in-depth analysis of the critical cases of Russia and France and the memory laws that have been adopted in those countries.

Authors

• George Soroka, Harvard University

• Félix Krawatzek, University of Oxford