The Ubiquitous Presence of the Past? Collective Memory and International History

Finney, Patrick

doi:10.1080/07075332.2013.828646

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 79 publications

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“…Starting in the mid-twentieth century, the craft of history is particularly entangled with the contemporary "memory boom" or "memory turn" that weighs heavily on the growing interest in cultural and memory studies (Winter, 2006;Finney, 2014). With the Great War and the Second World War, the cult of memory spreads widely as a global phenomenon, but the recent decades have further accelerated this trend.…”

Section: Military History and "Memory Turn"mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With the Great War and the Second World War, the cult of memory spreads widely as a global phenomenon, but the recent decades have further accelerated this trend. The Centennial of the Great War and various anniversary events dedicated to the Second World War further fueled the "memory boom" phenomenon that owes much to the constant and growing public interest in the accumulated trauma and catastrophic experiences of war (Finney, 2014). Building on the new scholarly investigations, the connection between war, memory, and identity was increasingly being researched systematically, adding new dimensions to the military history study.…”

Section: Military History and "Memory Turn"mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Military History and Collective Identity

Rijnoveanu

2023

Handbook of Military Sciences

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Each country has a national story that forges a sense of identity and – as Patrick Finney put it – while language, religion, culture, and traditions are key elements, war has traditionally been at the core of identity construction, shaping the collective national sentiment and the sense of Self (Finney, Remembering the Road to World War Two: International history, national identity, collective memory. Routledge, 2011).Recently, scholars have increasingly become interested in the way in which war and war experiences frame collective identities. From this perspective war and identity are closely intertwined, and this interactive process can explain not only how identities are created but how they may produce various typologies of warfare practices and states’ conduct. Such a conceptual paradigm provides new windows to a study of past wars but also prepares the ground for a better understating of current or future conflicts.Which role does military history play in the collective identity of nations and other collectives, how does war memory shape the architecture of identity construction, and how does identity-memory dynamics frame states’ strategic thinking? These are the central questions of this text. While the possible answers to such questions depend on multiple variables, there is a broad scholarly consensus that this is an area of research that needs to be further explored, especially in the light of new advancements in the field of cultural and social studies. Wars are fought on two main fronts: on the battlefield and in people’s minds where it maintains an enduring influence that is preserved over generations. The way people remember and memorialize the experiences of war allows us to gain a more comprehensive view on the set of practices, norms, values, and emotions that shape collective identities and determine typologies of state behavior in military and security affairs.

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Section: Military History and "Memory Turn"mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Military History and "Memory Turn"mentioning

confidence: 99%

Military History and Collective Identity

Rijnoveanu

2023

Handbook of Military Sciences

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“…21 The scholarly consensus is that "there is copious contemporary and historical evidence that collective memories can impact upon the course of international relations. " 22 Yet as Patrick Finney has argued, scholars of international history need to take memory more seriously than they so far have. 23 Among others, Finney ' s research agenda prescribes a renewed focus on the role of collective memory in international decision making 24 -which this paper will discuss in the context of late Cold War US foreign policy training.…”

Section: The Role Of Memory In Transatlantic Relationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a Study of Memory in US Transatlantic Relations: The Late Cold War

Tóth

2016

Auc Studia Territorialia

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Probing the intersection of Memory Studies and International Relations, this article traces the uses of collective memory in late Cold War US Transatlantic relations. First it surveys the existing scholarly literature on the topic and critiques some selected methodological models. Next it discusses the politics of cultural memory in the United States itself. In its main body, the study focuses on the core of the use of memory in US Transatlantic relations: historical reasoning in the fields of 1) foreign policy decision-making, and 2) public or cultural diplomacy. The author argues that while the US government may not have had a centrally articulated and overarching policy for the use of collective memory in US diplomacy, such a policy can nevertheless be assembled out of its foreign policy training and the cultural diplomacy practices of the United States Information Agency, both of which continued throughout the 1990s, the first period of the post-Cold War era.

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The unbearable lightness of luck: Three sources of overconfidence in the manageability of nuclear crises

Pélopidas

2017

Eur j.of int. secur.

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Overconfidence in the controllability of nuclear weapons creates danger. The passing of the last elite witness of the most dangerous nuclear crisis, that is, the ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’, and the current Trump administration only make this more salient. In this context, this article reviews the scholarly literature about the limits of predictability and controllability of nuclear crises and investigates three failures of learning from them. Given that France displays in particularly acute form some of the sources of overconfidence in the controllability of nuclear crises that can been found in other nuclear armed states, this article offers the first study of the French experience and evolving interpretation of the Cuban missile crisis in comparative perspective, based on untapped primary material. In security studies, this article makes three contributions. First, the publication and interpretation of primary sources is a contribution in itself given the frequent misconceptions about nuclear dynamics due to theory-driven extrapolations. Second, it challenges a widespread assumption of automaticity linking a fear-induced deterrent effect and the presence of nuclear weapons. Third, empirically, this article studies part of a regime of valuation of nuclear weapons. It finally outlines a research agenda to take luck seriously in security studies.

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The Ubiquitous Presence of the Past? Collective Memory and International History

Cited by 7 publications

References 79 publications

Military History and Collective Identity

Military History and Collective Identity

Towards a Study of Memory in US Transatlantic Relations: The Late Cold War

The unbearable lightness of luck: Three sources of overconfidence in the manageability of nuclear crises

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