Memory Wars in the East European Frontier: In Search of Research Methodology

Within the framework of this article, the theoretical and methodological framework of the philosophical interpretation of the concept “memory wars” was analyzed. In the context of criticism of allochronism and the project of the politics of time by B. Bevernage, as well as the concept of the frontier by F. Turner, the space-time aspects of the content of memory wars were comprehended. The use of Bevernage's ideas made it possible to explain the nature of modern memory wars in Europe. The origins of these wars are associated with an attempt to transfer the Western European project of “cosmopolitan” memory, in which Western Europe turns out to be a kind of a “referential” framework of historical modernity, to the countries of Eastern Europe after 1989. The uncritical use of Western European historical experience as a “reference” leads to a superficial copying of the politics of memory, which runs counter to the politics of the time in Eastern Europe. In Eastern Europe, the idea of two totalitarianisms is presented as a single and internally indistinguishable era, and the politics of modern post-socialist states are based on the idea of a radical spatio-temporal distancing from their recent past. The article analyzes the issue of the specifics of the Eastern European frontier, the conditions for its emergence and the impact on modern forms of implementation of the politics of memory. The frontier arises as a result of the collapse of the colonial empires and becomes a space of symbolic struggle, first between the USSR and Germany, and then between the socialist and capitalist blocs. The crisis of the globalist project of the politics of memory and the transfer of the German model of victimization to the territory of the Eastern European frontier leads to the competition of sacrificial narratives and the escalation of memorial conflicts, turning into full-fledged memory wars. The hybrid nature of the antagonistic politics of memory in the conditions of the frontier leads to the fact that not only the socialist past, but also the national trauma of individual states becomes the subject of memory wars. The increasing complexity of the mnemonic structure of the frontier is associated with the emergence of a number of unrecognized states, whose memory politics, in contrast to the national discourses of Eastern European states, is based on a synthesis of the Soviet legacy and individual elements of the imperial past.

Keywords

Authors

References