Memory and Power in Post-War Europe
Memory and Power in Post-War Europe
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.
- Deals with themes (nationalism, war, culture) of interest and importance to a broad cross-section of subjects - history, politics, sociology
- Case studies of major countries e.g.. Germany and the Holocaust, the collapse of Yugoslavia, the British Empire, Russia after the Cold War
Reviews & endorsements
'What makes the book attractive is breadth and depth of empirical study. Miller's volume is a rich collection of studies in the political uses of the past in postwar Europe.' International Affairs
'This is a timely intervention in the burgeoning fields of investigations that engage with the failures and horrors of the past century and the resuscitation of myths and growing important of memories that come along with them in the present … its innovative approach lies in the informed use of theoretical conceptions for the historical and empirical analysis of concrete political phenomena and processes of legitimation in Western, Central and Eastern Europe … the book very carefully avoid the methodological shortcomings and over-psychologising that is prevalent in much of so-called 'memory studies'. It provides a well-researched, empirically rich account of the political importance of memory and its consequences for current policy-making.' Political Studies Review
Product details
August 2002Hardback
9780521806107
302 pages
229 × 152 × 21 mm
0.59kg
Available
Table of Contents
- 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.
