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This chapter considers the role of ‘memory politics’ – understood as the combination of official and unofficial attempts to deal with the legacy of past violations – in the struggle for democratization in Central America: official initiatives can include truth commissions, amnesty dispensations, criminal investigations and prosecutions, and a range of institutional reforms aimed at redressing the previous failure of the state to guarantee human rights; unofficial initiatives developed by civil society actors to confront the past can include investigations of violations, legal actions, and different kinds of commemorative acts and exercises in collective memory. Memory politics operates at multiple levels and involves a diversity of agents, including local communities, national and international non-governmental human rights organizations (HROs), governments, the media, and, in the case of Central America, the UN; however, it is suggested here that its long-term effects in any national context depend on the interaction between official and unofficial efforts to address the legacies of the past. The experiences of memory politics analysed in this chapter are those of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the three Central American countries that during the 1990s undertook official processes of investigating past violations of human rights. The precise nature of memory politics and the impact it has had varied considerably in these three countries, and it is suggested that four interrelated factors are central to explaining differences between the respective national experiences: the first is the specific political and social legacies of human rights abuse in each country; the second concerns the circumstances of the transition from war to peace, specifically the prevailing balance of forces and the trade-off between truth and justice that this engendered in each case; the third is the role of local HROs and civil society in general in the politics of memory; and the fourth is the role of international governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in efforts to uncover the truth about the past and to address the consequences of violations. The first three sections of the chapter compare the legacies of human rights abuses, the transitional trade-offs between truth and justice, and the role of civil society organizations and international actors in the memory politics of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala; the final section considers the impact of memory politics on the prospects for democracy in these countries.

The general aim of this book is to shed light on how countries deal with legacies of repression during a transition from authoritarian or totalitarian rule to democratic rule. Two broad kinds of transition are covered: those that occur as a result of the collapse of the old regimes or regime forces, as in Portugal, Argentina, Central and Eastern Europe, Russia and Germany after reunification, where collapse was followed by absorption into another state; and those that are negotiated between an incoming democratic elite and an old regime, as in Spain, the southern cone of Latin America, Central America and South Africa. Because of this range of transitional situations, it is possible to see how varying degrees of political, social and institutional constraints affect the solutions adopted or limit opportunities to deal with the past, and to permit a comparative analysis of the variety of policies adopted, establishing links between one and the other. The book concentrates on the presence (or absence) of three kinds of official or government-sponsored efforts to come to terms with the past: truth commissions, trials and amnesties, and purges; to a lesser extent, it also looks at policies of compensation, restitution or reparation. At the same time, it focuses on unofficial and private initiatives emerging from within society to deal with the past – usually promoted by human rights organizations (HROs), churches, political parties and other civil society organizations; in doing this, the book examines a ‘politics of memory’ whereby societies rework the past in a wider cultural arena, both during the transitions and after official transitional policies have been implemented and even forgotten. The different sections of the Introduction are: Truth and Justice in Periods of Political Change: An Overview; What Can be Done about an Authoritarian Past? Limits and Possibilities of Transition Types and Other Variables; Beyond the Transitional Period: Authoritarian and Long-Term Historical Legacies; Truth, Justice and Democracy; and Memory Making and Democratization.

This chapter examines how Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Chile fared with truth and justice policies after the transition from authoritarian rule, looking at the issue from an institutional and political angle, and at the social politics of memory. Efforts to deal with the past and their significance in the overall politics of transition to democracy are shaped by country-specific historical conditions and developments: the nature and legacies of repression and authoritarian rule; and the nature of the transition process and the various political, institutional and legal factors conditioning the post-transitional period, among which are the nature of repression, the presence and strength of a human rights movement, inherited legal or constitutional limitations, relations between political parties and Human Rights Organizations (HROs), the degree of executive or party commitment to policies of truth and justice, the unity of democratic parties, the ability of the military to mobilise against any policies of accountability as well as their relations with the democratic executive, the attitude of the judiciary to past violations, the presence of a strong legislative right, and the degree to which repression penetrated the social fabric. The way in which the first democratically elected authorities deal with the past, together with the relative strength of the human rights movement in the post-transitional period, sets the agenda for the subsequent evolution of the issue; more specifically, the past remains a source of open conflict if there are loopholes in official policies that preclude full closure or amnesty, and if transnational groups or regional and international human rights bodies challenge national policies favouring impunity. The past also remains a source of conflict if there are strong HROs that continue to contest official decisions on how to deal with the past, and have allies in the formal political arena or the courts. Official policies to deal with the past are not of themselves directly relevant to the process of democratisation, and what is more, during the first transitional period, truth and justice policies are unrelated to (or may even place obstacles in the way of) wider institutional reform; the reverse is also true, but whatever the case, the past becomes part of the dynamic of democratic politics. Indeed, although the continued pursuit of truth and justice and its links to wider reforms may be difficult to establish across the board, the politics of memory more widely conceived are important for a process of democratization in all four countries examined here, as it is about how a society interprets and appropriates its past, in an attempt to mould its future, and as such it is an integral part of any political process, including progress towards deeper democracy.

This chapter explores Russia’s attempts to come to terms with its Stalinist past in an endeavour to build a civil society based on the rule of law. It begins by examining the nature of Stalinist repression and the legacy of Soviet terror. It goes on to focus on halted official efforts at truth telling, and persistent unofficial efforts, led by the organization Memorial, at remembering and commemorating; this provides insight into the issues that daunted the quest for moral recovery. The chapter then looks at post-Soviet efforts to come to terms with the Stalinist past, and finally it assesses the impact of the discussion of past injustices, or the politics of memory, on Russia’s subsequent process of democratization. The information presented and the conclusions drawn are necessarily based on a number of scattered sources, including memoirs, interviews and official archives; Russia’s experience is unique, and difficult to compare with other post-authoritarian political systems, especially as democracy has not taken substantial hold, and, since the transition is so new, questions of accountability are only beginning to be addressed.

Romania has been hard pressed to confront the communist past and its human rights infringements. Among religious denominations, the most tainted by collaboration with the repressive regime was the Orthodox Church. Four related themes illustrate how transitional justice affected the Orthodox Church: Patriarch Teoctist's undignified resignation in 1990 and his controversial return to the helm of his church; allegations that Orthodox priests broke the secret of the confessional by reporting information to the communist secret political police, the Securitate; reevaluation of the pros and cons of the church's collaboration with the communist regime; and the church's insistence that the names of political police agents and informers drawn from among the Orthodox clergy continue to be kept secret.

This chapter focuses on aspects of Young Turk and Kemalist memory politics. It discusses how their memory politics intervened in existing patterns of social memory in the eastern provinces and examines how the mass violence of the past Ottoman decades was remembered by the population and the government. The construction of a hegemonic canon of knowledge and an information dam around the country is surveyed by inspecting the official histories that the regime ordered to be written. The chapter will also discuss how contemporary denial of the Armenian genocide is rooted in those Young Turk official histories.

This introductory chapter outlines the thrust of the book and provides the reader with a theoretical background. The author surveys the historiography of Hindenburg's career and his role in German politics. The most important scholarly texts on the politics of memory and commemoration and the history of political myths and hero worship are discussed. Turning to Weber's concept of charismatic authority, the author contends that its application to Hindenburg's case is limited because projection is defined as key. Hindenburg's followers could not simply mould him into the mythical figure they desired, but constantly had to incorporate the tumultuous events and his conflicting actions into the mythical narrative, making it an enduring, but ever-evolving phenomenon. Furthermore, it is argued that Hindenburg's adulation was no stride on a ‘special German path’, but had parallels elsewhere. However, the Hindenburg myth had grave consequences: it was inextricably linked to the rise of National Socialism.

This chapter, which discusses the “memory wars” that continue to be fought over the political meanings associated with the evacuation of refugee children from their homes to Eastern Europe during the Greek Civil War, considers the “politics of memory” by analyzing four ethnographic examples. The first two involve political communities of memory: the Association of Refugee Children from Aegean Macedonia; and the Pan-Macedonian Association USA, Inc. The third focuses on Nicholas Gage and his book Eleni, and the fourth explores the transformation of the village of Lia, the Gage’s birthplace.

The chapter proposes a novel conceptualization of the politics of memory and commemoration and a theoretical framework designed to explain the emergence of different types of memory regimes. The chapter argues that the interaction of mnemonic actors determines the nature of the resulting memory regime. Four ideal-types of such actors are identified: mnemonic warriors, pluralists, abnegators, and prospectives. A fractured regime emerges when at least one actor is a warrior, a pillarized regime when all actors are abnegators. The different memory regime outcomes around the twentieth anniversary of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe are explained as product of several configurations of factors. These include a range of structural and cultural constraints that actors face, as well as the cultural choices they make.

This chapter examines memory understood as a public discourse that helps to build group identity; memory that is entangled in a relationship of mutual dependence with other identity-building processes. Here, memory cannot be interpreted as a fixed, unchangeable entity. Rather, it is a representation of past reality, constantly revised according to the different demands of present-day identity. The latter is not a fixed entity either: it also changes, in part because of what is remembered by a given group at a given time. The discussion here focuses on Auschwitz. The fact that Auschwitz is such an important site of ‘memory work’, in which different ‘politics of memory’ seek to master the ‘unmasterable past’, can actually be taken for granted. To elucidate the essential nature of memory work or the politics of memory, however, the chapter asks why Auschwitz is such a ‘convenient’ location for displaying collective memories and identities.

The Spanish political period that spanned from the death of dictator Francisco Franco in November 1975 to the victory of the Socialist Party (PSOE) in the election of 1982 has been held up by many as a model of successful political transformation from an authoritarian regime to a democratic government. Yet criticisms of this period abound, and discussions of the means and ends of this political and cultural transformation continue. This chapter discusses why it is important to look into the visual and literary texts about the Transición as a renewed attention that shares an important generational imprint. It identifies a generational cohort and their complicated relationship with the memory of the Spanish Civil War, the dictatorship, and the transition.

This chapter explores how movies function as “memory-making films” and the way an individual film is transposed into cultural memory. Offering a reading of Flags of Our Fathers (2006), it considers the impact of Clint Eastwood’s film on historical discourse. It argues that Flags of Our Fathers shows a process of translation and negotiation where the remediation of the battle of Iwo Jima turns truth into myth and raises the question of whether it is possible to represent the past as it was. It also considers the role played by historical truth when eruptive and erratic traumatic memories meet memory politics. The chapter suggests that a polyphonous and multi-vocal fiction film may be the closest thing we find to something that can provoke the public into thinking critically about the past.

In the mid-1980s, oppositional social movements arose in the Baltic republics to challenge the Soviet order. Baltic pursuit of national independence was steeped in the politics of memory, and conflicting historical accounts of the World War II period featured prominently in both regime and opposition discourse and actions. In the post-communist period, oppositional social movement activities and goals of the 1986–1991 period have been subject to the complex politics of memory, creating fractured memory regimes in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. This chapter highlights public remembrances of the Baltic Way of 1989, the Latvian and Lithuanian barricades of January 1991, and the final de facto re-establishment of independence in the late summer of 1991, showing that different post-communist era commemorations have produced different articulations of and contests about the meaning of the past.

This chapter explores the idea of “liberation from grievous history” and examines its wider political and ethical implications. The key aspect of contemporary Vietnamese memory politics is the fact that the emerging local social forms have redefined the bond between past and present generations, thereby challenging the authority of the state hierarchy. Therefore, changes in the social life of the dead mirror changes in the political life of the living. Concerning the three classes of the dead (heroes, ancestors, and ghosts) in Vietnamese social reality, the ritual ties with ghosts best illustrate the magical unity between the local and the cosmopolitan. Liberation from grievance, for the victims of mass death in the Monkey Year, is a way of transcending the recovery of the unity of humankind denied in the former and a universal norm concealed in the symbolic forms of communal unity.

This chapter sets the book’s main issues by defining key concepts including nostalgia, memory, identity, nationalism, Ottomanism, variants of the Ottoman term, neo-Ottomanism, and nationalism versus patriotism. It identifies the most critical factors in the struggle to resurrect the Ottoman ideal and explains the importance of studying the rise of nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire, especially in Turkey’s political environment desiring to restore the country’s greatness as a geopolitical power. The second part examines the connection between nostalgia and contemporary Ottomanism in Turkey. After identifying diverse modes of nostalgia, the chapter focuses on the politics of identity, explaining the set of structural conditions that facilitated the reconstruction of the Ottoman memory.

The Introduction outlines the book's contents. It starts by stating that an important part of the foundation of new political regimes, identities, and principles of political legitimacy comes from looking back to the past. This book is concerned with the explosion of the politics of memory triggered by the fall of state socialism in Eastern Europe (1989/1991). It especially looks at the politics of its commemoration twenty years later. It offers seventeen case studies, a new theoretical framework, and a comparative analysis of memory regime types and their origins. The book identifies four different kinds of mnemonic actors and considers that their interaction renders three different types of memory regimes: fractured, pillarized, and unified. This is followed by a comparative analysis of the cases that looks at how several different configurations of factors affect the emergence of mnemonic actors and different varieties of memory regimes. Three groups of causal influences show the political form of the memory regime: structural constraints, cultural constraints, and the cultural and strategic choices that actors make.

This chapter analyzes the polarized memory politics in post-Soviet Ukraine and how the divide manifested itself during the commemorations of the twentieth anniversary of independence in 1991. The author argues that while political elites in Ukraine continue to engage in memory wars and unsuccessfully seek to impose their versions of history on society, the possibility for mnemonic pluralism exists. It is rooted in ambivalent attitudes to divisive historical events held by many in Ukrainian society, notably in the geographic center of the country, and in a general willingness to tolerate diverse views of the past as long as they are not imposed on society. The view that Ukrainians are deeply divided into two camps is too simplistic. Regional divisions are not the main obstacle to the creation of pluralistic memory regimes. Instead, responsibility lies with competing political elites who instrumentalize and purposefully aggravate “memory wars” in their pursuit of power.