Reports

Abstract

Within the EU-Horizon-2020-funded project Unsettling Remembering and Social Cohesion in Transnational Europe (UNREST), 1 one work package (WP4) analyzed the memorial regimes of museums related to the history of World War I and World War II in Europe. An article by Anna Cento Bull and Hans Lauge Hansen (2016) entitled "Agonistic Memory" provided the theoretical framework for the analysis. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe's work (2005, 2013), the authors distinguish three memorial regimes: antagonistic, cosmopolitan, and agonistic. Antagonistic memory landscapes, revolving around adversarial contrapositions of friends/foes, heroes/villains, and good/evil, dominated the scene in Europe before World War II and well into the second half of the twentieth century, at a time when memory politics underpinned nationalist governments. In the 1980s, however, also under the influence of European integration, memory politics started to move toward cosmopolitanism (Levy and Sznaider 2002). Since the 1990s, this approach has been extended to Eastern Europe. A cosmopolitan memory discourse promotes empathy with and compassion for the "other" by focusing on the suffering and plight of the victims. However, the more recent rise of populist right-wing movements has seen a revival of antagonistic memory against which the dominant cosmopolitan memory regimes seem helpless. Hence, Cento Bull and Hansen suggest that agonism in memory politics might better be able to counter the rise of right-wing populist movements in Europe, as it engages with sociopolitical emotions and passions, and since it revisits the historical processes and struggles that led to people becoming perpetrators, victims, and bystanders.WP4's key objectives were to establish the dominant memory regimes in selected war museums in contemporary Europe, and assess the possible inclusion of agonistic representations and practices. Hence, researchers analyzed the representations of war in five war museums and aimed at evaluating the reception of their exhibitions among visitors. In what follows, we present the key results of the research undertaken within WP4. First, we briefly introduce our case studies and discuss the methodology that we employed. We then present some results from our comparative analysis focusing on the key question of which memory regimes are dominant within war museums in contemporary Europe and of how the public interacts with such regimes.

Az emlékezet, a politika, a kritikus

“…A könyvem első felében ehelyett strukturális magyarázatot adok arra az átalakulásra, amely az emlékezetpolitika mai értelemben vett gyakorlataihoz vezetett. Habermas (1988) (Berger et al 2018).…”