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2. Broken European memories and recovered national consciousness
- Author:
- Veronica Mihalache
- Publication Date:
- 01-2020
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Warsaw East European Review (WEER)
- Institution:
- Centre for East European Studies, University of Warsaw
- Abstract:
- This paper brings into discussion a concept that has not yet been distinctively and uniquely defined but which, at the same time, can be considered a classical one, thanks to the establishment of the theoretical basis of the social frameworks of memory in 1925 by the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. Basically, any past memory reaches the fields of human memory causing a process of perpetual transformation. The social frameworks of memory are pieces of collective memory, past memories that are dominant and persistent in time, which offer explicit historical and social coordinates that lead to the interpretation of the past and the orientation of present values. Both public and collective environments offer the individual social and historical coordinates as well as a certain orientation of these values, an implicit ideology, so that the individual is influenced, and in time, even shaped by these coordinates and values that are implicitly transmitted by the social fields of memory.
- Topic:
- Sociology, Memory, Identities, and Values
- Political Geography:
- Europe
3. Et tu, Emmanuel? Or Why the West Rewrites History
- Author:
- D. Demurin
- Publication Date:
- 01-2020
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- International Affairs: A Russian Journal of World Politics, Diplomacy and International Relations
- Institution:
- East View Information Services
- Abstract:
- The Approaching 75th anniversary of the end of World War II gave a new lease of life to the so-called “memory wars.” On September 19, 2019, the European Parliament passed a resolution “On the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe”1 that, among other things, shifted the burden of equal responsibility for World War II onto Germany and the USSR. The same document accuses Moscow of decades of occupation of Eastern Europe which slowed down their socio-economic and democratic development and suggests another Nuremberg tribunal to conduct legal inquiries into the crimes of “Stalinism,” etc. On the whole, this document is the fullest presentation of what the Western political elites think about the Soviet Union and its role in World War II. On December 20, 2019, speaking at an informal summit of the CIS countries, President of Russia Vladimir Putin presented convincing evi- dence of falsification by our Western colleagues of the facts related to the beginning of World War II including documents that unequivocally con- firmed the responsibility of West European countries that had encouraged Hitler to spread his expansion eastward and Poland’s unsavory role in the division of Czechoslovakia. This stirred up an extremely negative response by many European politicians and political scientists who raised their voices against what they called revisionist history. At the same time, it should be said that this resolution did not drop out of the sky – it was a result of many years of efforts of the European establishment to transform the European historical space.
- Topic:
- History, Memory, and World War II
- Political Geography:
- Europe