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 have 'historical lessons' been applied in foreign policy? While there is now a burgeoning field of social and cultural memory studies, mostly focused on commemorations and monuments, this volume is the first to examine the connection between memory and politics directly. It investigates 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 memory with deeply historical, empirically based case studies of major European countries. The volume concludes with reflections on the ethics of memory, and the politics of truth, justice and forgetting after 1945 and 1989.
Introduction: The power of memory, the memory of power and the power over memory Jan-Werner Müller; Part I. Myth, Memory and Analogy in Foreign Policy: 1. Memory of sovereignty and sovereignty over memory; Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine since 1939 Tim Snyder; 2. Myth, memory and policy in France since 1945 Robert Gildea; 3. The power of memory and memories of power: the cultural parameters of German foreign policy making since 1945 Thomas U. Berger; 4. The past in the present: British Imperial memories and the European Question Anne Deighton; 5. Memory, the media and NATO: information intervention in Bosnia-Hercegovina Monroe E. Price; 6. Europe's post-Cold War memory of Russia Iver B. Neumann; Part II. Memory, Power and Justice in Domestic Affairs: 7. The past is another country: myth and memory in postwar Europe Tony Judt; 8. The emergence and legacies of divided memory: Germany and the Holocaust after 1945 Jeffrey Herf; 9. Unimagined communities: the power of memory and the conflict in the former Yugoslavia Ilana R. Bet-El; 10. Translating memories of war and co-belligerency into Cold War politics: the Italian case Ilaria Poggiolini; 11. Institutionalizing the past: shifting memories of nationhood in German education and immigration policies Daniel Levy and Julian Dierkes; 12. Trials, purges or history lessons: treating a difficult past in post-communist Europe Timothy Garton Ash.
