On Dec. 4-6 the international conference “Geopolitics, Reconciliation, Memory” will take place at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy. It will be attended by leading scholars of Europe and Ukraine. The Embassy of Poland to Ukraine, France’s Embassy to Ukraine, the Kyiv-based French Cultural Center, the Institute of Political and Social Studies at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (Paris) are the initiators of the conference. Below is the report of Georges Mink, Research Director at the Institute of Political and Social Studies, CNRS, which is to be presented at the conference.
There are times when History reminds me of a theatre storeroom where costumes for very different plays are kept. We tend to bring them out according to the needs of the moment.
The end of communism in Eastern Europe worked to renew debates on history — namely European history — and reactivated social memory issues. The correlation with the European Union integration process had its own galvanising effect. The uses made of Europe went beyond learning the acquis communautaire and interacting with institutional actors. The window of opportunity offered by the pre-enlargement transition period was filled with intense symbolic activity both inside and outside the countries, activity involving several categories of actor. And once the countries had joined the Union, hitherto unknown memory problematics erupted in the enlarged EU space. The new member countries challenge us to take on their heritage of social memory issues: ‘Yes to Europe’, wrote Maria Janion [2000], a historian of Polish Romanticism, ‘but we’re coming in with our dead’.
THE RECURRENCE AND DIVERSITY OF SOCIAL MEMORY PHENOMENA IN EUROPE
The EU space has been enriched with new concerns. It now encompasses memory issues other than those that rotate around the ‘axis’ of Germany, though they are still dominant. Europe has become a theatre of recurring ‘memorial’ movements that are striking out all over, from North to South and East to West, and this development persists despite (or perhaps because of) the EU’s routine policy of encouraging reconciliation acts and arrangements. The Union’s juridical-normative policies undoubtedly act as a safety valve, periodically relieving excessive pressure, but they also offer increased visibility to the actors handling the conflicts and dissent resulting from the reactivation and re-evaluation of historical ‘files’ that seemed definitively closed.
In some states recently, history has begun to be used explicitly as a governing instrument. Here the aim is not to improve bilateral relations and the European Union construction-as was the case of the Mitterrand-Kohl couple’s usage of their countries’ conflictual past [Rosoux 2001] — but rather to mobilise the electorate of a given party or coalition around what may be described as symbolic yet bellicose identity demands, demands made both in the internal political arena and to the world at large. In Poland, for example, the political right has begun to speak of ‘historical policy’ and intends to make such policy-which it claims has been neglected until now by the ‘successors’ of the Old Regime (the insinuation being that those successors are ‘accomplices to the crimes of the past’)-a constituent component of its public policy. Not wishing to be surpassed on this point, the Polish political left opted for a parade that would have approximately the same tone: ‘We must have our own historical policy’, wrote the leader of the Democratic Left Alliance, Wojciech Olejniczak (Gazeta Wyborcza, 7 November 2006). ‘It seems that history in Poland today is the exclusive property of the right. The left must not let itself be paralysed by this ... It must recall all that is worthy and important in its tradition ... In politics in general we speak of the past while thinking of the present and the future.’
Up against the proliferating use of conflictual symbolic pasts, Europe (the EU) offers its model of peaceful coexistence among former enemies. But in seeking to absolutise peace through consensus, well-meaning European politicians have often simply deferred recollection of the conflicts in question by one or two generations. By integrating memory of the historical-political past into the routine canons of democracy, they have indeed limited or neutralised the risk that the violence of those heritages will return. But the problem with reconciliationism — in Europe as elsewhere — is that everything seems to have been arranged to make it possible to get out of conflict impasses and construct democracy but nothing has been put in place to prevent or soothe later competitive struggles between the actors in question.
REDEFINING CONCEPTS OF AND APPROACHES TO SOCIAL MEMORY GAMES
The range of different developments in the area of social memory in Europe shows that at some point in time actors will re-enact historicisation strategies; that is, strategies for historicising conflict-generating heritages.The aim of these strategies may be to produce consensus (pacification of social relations) or, on the contrary, to reopen certain aspects of a repressed history (here the aim is to obtain distinction, symbolic recognition, and integration into national narratives); it may also be to escape responsibility for crimes by ‘erasing the traces of a criminal past’.
The concept of historicisation strategies is crucial to understanding memory issues and the behaviour of the actors involved, together with institutional diversity. This is a variant of symbolic politics; the underlying conviction is that certain representations of historical facts, internalised through socialisation that is either formal (schooling, for example) or informal (within the family), have the collective mobilisation potential required for getting the group using the strategy the political influence it desires.
What is the point here? History as scholarly facts or remembered ones has always been used to legitimate or de-legitimate. And recently we have been seeing a wave of memory-centred social movements (sometimes qualified as ‘revisionist’ and always involving a ‘revisiting’ of the knowledge that has been acquired by historical science) that call into question the established legitimacy of certain memory representations, namely those pertaining to the Second World War. This is due to a number of factors, including the end of the great ideological interpretation systems, systems which allowed for clear, seemingly immutable identification of victims and persecutors, winners and losers, and the dual temptation to make the victims of both sides equal and develop new historical categories and rankings. The various moves to rewrite history are very closely linked to the arrival on the scene of subsequent generations as well as the ‘archives revolution’: the opening of archives in post-communist Europe (some without official consent or regulation) and more generally, the new availability of archive material as prescribed inaccessibility periods come to an end. All this is being done in a fluid context in which behaviour and values are proliferating that threaten to call into question the dominant understanding that democracy has become definitively universal. In general, that vision is being given a rough time, here by the eruption of unconventional behaviour; there by assaults on the continuity of historical legitimation; elsewhere by the rise of xenophobic discourses and movements. Criticism and heretofore unmentionable subjects of debate — repressed until now, prohibited or censured — are cropping up all over. Those who are speaking out in these instances show a superb indifference to the standard, routine frameworks of representation, negotiation and political legality. An increasing number of firmly rooted national politicians who have acquired legitimacy at the polls in democratic contests are giving in to the temptation to make high-risk anti-democratic speeches and statements. And new categories of actors are alternately playing system and anti-system games, struggling thereby to call into question the historical foundations of political systems by changing people’s representations of those systems. These actors are taking advantage of the many scheduled national elections — and, for broader European issues, of the growth-related and functional difficulties the European Union is having-to make themselves heard.
Historicising strategies, then, play an important role in regulating the behaviour, choices and arrangements developed by institutions. Behind memory games and the development of arrangements for handling post-conflict periods, all of which produce complex actor networks, actors are increasingly likely to use representations of the past, especially if that past is conflictual. We should ask, of course, how profitable such strategic choices are, but profitability is hard to measure given that actors make their choices empirically, as a function of the profit and rewards they think they can expect. Their moves are aimed to procure them a better political position, an election victory; to designate and stigmatize the enemy, strengthen their client relations, consolidate identitary referents, etc. Their choices will necessarily correspond to timely situational contexts that will increase the probability of attaining their goals.
(...)In any case, the space of Europe (the EU and beyond) is run through with a multitude of stagings of conflictual memories, memories around which multiform actors compete.
THE HERITAGE OF THE MEMORY OF COMMUNISM
In the East, the past is being used to re-arm partisan cleavages. The memory situation in post-communist Europe resembles one of free-floating resources. The space of memory has not yet been stabilised, and its fault lines constitute memory veins or seams offering multiple resources. Memory of the pre-communist past is appealed to primarily through opposition to communism (patriotic acts and anti-communist resistance). Since 1989 the general tendency has been 1) to check the pasts of zealous regime agents and remove anyone responsible for state crimes from any kind of power; 2) simultaneously to de-communise institutional structures, and 3) to teach the ill deeds of communism to the new generations. Policy applications, meanwhile, involve several scales of historicising action that use several operation modes and concern a panoply of different memory fields. On the institutional side there are lustration laws for people and de-communisation of structures, as well as public socialisation and information policies and systems such as archives for managing memory resources. On the side of social relations, there are citizen interactions (various victim associations), unregulated actions (organised leaks of lists of persons who collaborated with the political police); lastly, there are specialist communities and their scientific studies, as well as interference in the historical field from journalist, judge, and MP ‘intruders’. In none of the post-communist countries today is there consensus on definitively closing the ‘file’ of the communist past. On the contrary, the impression is that with time, the importance of that past is growing in political life, on the grounds that its moral and socio-political consequences have not really been checked, resolved, or overcome.
(...) In Germany the initial law decreed that legal procedures would be null and void after fifteen years of access to the archives, but this time limit has been extended. In some cases-the former GDR, Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic-judiciarisation came early and fast; laws were quickly promulgated and institutional arrangements put in place. Elsewhere, the absolutising of consensus and compromise, the peacemaking mode negotiated at the end of the old regime, has slowed the decision-making process, namely because it has inhibited the development of clearly defined parties. It has been in the interests of political parties (rather than the transitional groups, frontists and unionists of 1989) to get involved in memory games and use historicising strategies to reawaken atrophied cleavages, even if this means intensifying dissent. However, opinions differ on the timing of these moves (too early? too late?) and on the different operation modes used. There seems no end in sight to any of the cases, and this means that the debate on how profitable such strategies are has not reached any clear conclusions. Countries who took measures relatively late-Poles, Bulgarians, Romanians, Slovakians-have each in their own way magnified the German example: to deal with their past of police persecution, the East Germans immediately (1991) passed a law opening the archives for consultation, scheduling that law to go out of effect on 21 December 2006. However, we have seen that during the debate in the Bundestag on whether or not it was necessary to extend the period for five more years (November 2006), neither the seeming perfection of the administrative system for managing the Stasi archives nor the fact that it was put in place early had the expected effects. Consider the following comment, published in the November 26, 2006, issue of the Tageszeitung, expressing surprise at the virulence of the debate: ‘We were further along ten years ago than we are now. At that time everyone agreed that the GDR was a dictatorship with no respect for human dignity .... Today the antitotalitarian consensus has grown porous.’
In fact, the idea that the communist past can be settled and definitively closed in the name of a healthier democracy often involves a kind of normative presupposition. The rhetoric of some of the more zealous actors, those who call for definitively turning the communist page by punishing the perpetrators of communist crimes, actually works to legitimate and promote precisely the opposite aim: keeping the memory vein productive and exploitable as long as possible. Producing dissensus around memory is a means of guaranteeing the speakers a strong position on the partisan scene. Having archives that are not readily accessible actually works to support the deliberately maintained suspicion that those archives contain potentially inexhaustible hidden proof of the continuing existence of the enemy. Leaks — more or less planned — make people believe that reparative justice is being impeded by a network of enemy accomplices. They fuel the feeling that one enemy is hiding another: the hidden enemy — the old regime — must be protecting confidants of its former police.
Institutional memory actors: the Office of Joachim Gauck and the Institutes of Memory.
Post-communist Europe has not chosen to imitate the Truth and Justice or Truth and Reconciliation Commissions set up on several other continents, though from time to time appeals are made to follow those examples. This is because the notion of reconciliation with the communist regime is not of much interest to the new rightist political parties, many of which are rooted in the protest against the ententes and compromises that were part of the negotiated revolutions. The argument often put forward in favour of the more disputatious option of radical lustration was that letting former agents of the regime go unpunished would endanger the newly acquired sovereignty of the country, since those agents might continue to work for a foreign power, in this case Russia. The countries most sensitive to this argument were the Baltic states and Poland. For a decade the model most admired by post-communist countries was the one conceived by the Germans of the former GDR, particularly the former dissidents, who organized street demonstrations and strikes to oppose the proposal by the German Federal Republic representative at the July 1990 reunification negotiations that the archives be destroyed as soon as possible. Since its foundation in 1992, approximately two million German citizens have come to consult their file in the renowned Office run by the former dissident pastor Joachim Gauck and now by Marianne Birthler. The specificity of the Office is that everyone has free access to their Stasi file. Several top-level politicians were unmasked as political police collaborators, though this did not hurt their political careers. But we often forget that the way of treating the East German past is not applicable in other contexts. Gauck never spoke of the biography verification process as one of de-communisation. He repeatedly stressed that SED Communist Party members and functionaries had nothing to fear. Manfred Stolpe, Social Democrat premier of the state of Brandenburg for several years, responded to revelations of his collaboration with the Stasi by saying that the East German past was a period of dishonest little compromises, and that this was a common denominator in the memory of a great number of former East German nationals. He succeeded in eliciting a general reaction of understanding, even sympathy, which then enabled him to win the federal state elections despite his past. Moreover, reunification made possible an exchange of elites: East German functionaries were simply replaced with West Germans rather then being de-communised. Finally, when the secret funding of the West German CDU party was discovered and Chancellor Helmut Kohl refused to give names, the Stasi files could have helped in the investigation, but all German political parties were against this solution, going against Gauck’s own preference. The ghosts of the past can only act if today’s political actors want them to. Would reactivating them be profitable in Germany today? Says Gauck, ‘Only 20% of Germans have put the experience of the communist dictatorship behind them. Most Germans are convinced that we must not forget the abyss of civilization of the Nazi period. But no such consensus exists for the communist dictatorship.’ And though the Bundestag did vote to prolong the period of accessibility to Stasi files by five years, it also annulled the requirement to check the past of every candidate for public office, with the exception of federal government offices and a few specific categories. The official understanding is that the lustration process is fundamentally over. The several tens of thousands of positions covered by the former law have been reduced to a few dozen. Does this mean that the past can no longer serve in Germany to discredit people, and that the only historicising strategies that might be profitable now are those of reconciliation and consensus? Hardly. The law had already been passed when Die Welt published a sensational report claiming that Gauck’s office employed about fifty specialists who were themselves former Stasi agents. Memory trouble flared up in Germany once again.
The other post-communist European countries were forced to turn to less ambitious solutions than an equivalent of the Gauck Office, with its annual budget of € 100 million and its 2200 employees in charge of 160 kilometres of files. Some of these countries-Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Romania and at least in principle Bulgaria — have authorised entirely free access to the archives; others limited access to victims of the regime, researchers, journalists and magistrates. Almost all the countries, with the exception of the Czech Republic, founded specific institutions-institutes-for managing memory; the archives are located in these institutes. Some have archives that date from before the Second World War to 1990; they handle both totalitarianisms. In certain countries the lists of police collaborators (contested in some cases) may be consulted online (for Slovakia, on the site of the Nation’s Memory Institute; for the Czech Republic, on the site of the archives of the Ministry of the Interior). Lists also circulate without institutional approval, for example, in the Czech Republic, where their purpose is to contest and supplement the official list, and in Poland, where twice now, in 1992 and 2005, they were used to pressure institutional actors and accelerate procedures for unmasking regime agents. The same is true for Hungary. In this ferment of initiatives, some countered by the powers that be, others generated by citizen movements or revelations made by victims, also by historians without regard for the presumption of innocence or journalists eager for a scoop, the actors often mistake their targets. Several persons unjustly accused of being political police collaborators have filed complaints with the European Human Rights Court in Strasbourg and some have won. In 2004, for example, the Lithuanian authorities had to pay heavy damages to two citizens whom they had removed from their jobs after accusations of collaboration. Rumours about files being used by former agents to blackmail their former victims increase the feeling of insecurity, particularly when the rumour is confirmed, as was the case in 2002 in Estonia when a Russian citizen sold the Estonian embassy in Moscow the files on four hundred previously unknown KGB agents. The principle for recruiting historians and archivists applied in the Polish and Slovakian Institutes is interesting: according to their directors, young historians were preferred over older ones who had lived under the communist regime because the young were assumed to be without emotional prejudices. The results are hardly convincing given the confusion around the aims of these institutes and how they are regulated. A number of young researchers have assumed the role of prosecuting attorney and descended into the partisan arena. They are insensitive to the complexity of the files. In Poland some are actually suspected of playing the game of the political parties they are close to; that is, facilitating the lustration of political enemies and keeping suspicions alive so as to compromise irreproachable political personalities who have chosen a political option different from theirs. It has been suggested, for example, that because the hero of the Polish political opposition Jacek Kuron interviewed state agent informers, as shown in their notes, he was in the process of reaching an understanding with the communist regime. (...) What is to be feared is that through the game of partisan appointments, these institutes will become little more than instruments in less than honest hands for use in political contests. This is especially likely given that Institute employees perform several functions: classification, prosecution, and evaluating individual applicants to certain administrative positions. This offers a field of action for the many francs tireurs of partisan historicisation out to impinge on individual destinies. History as a science is thus in danger of being reduced to the role of assistant prosecuting attorney. The media are pleased to see historians taking up this role: they like having historian-judges pulling out files and making accusations in front of their cameras instead of expounding on the context and complexity of the past. And they are particularly pleased with those who echo their own questions-Who gave the order? Who ratified it? Why haven’t the criminals been punished? — while neglecting the usual precautions.
Until it is understood in Europe that the East’s memory games have specific content linked to the past of the Second World War and Sovietisation, there can be no successful ‘Europeanisation’ of the histories of Europeans.
Georges Mink is Senior researcher in ISP - French National Center For Scientific Research(CNRS). He is currently teaching in Institute of Political Sciences of Paris (Sciences Po) and in College of Europe (Natolin). He is author or co-editor of several books, among them “La Force ou la Raison, Histoire sociale et politique de la Pologne, 1980-1989”,1989, “Cet etrange postcommunisme” (co-dir.), 1992, “1989. Une revolution? ” (co-dir.), 1994, “ Vie et mort du bloc sovietique”, 1997, “La Grande Conversion ” (co-author with Jean Charles Szurek), 1999, “Post-communisme : les sciences sociales a l’epreuve”, 2003, “Europe et ses passes douloureux” (co-dir), 2007. He is a former Director of French Center for Research in Social Sciences in Prague (2001-2003).
