My name is Maria Mälksoo and I am Senior Lecturer in International
Security at the Brussels School of International Studies, University of Kent.
at Brussels. Today I would like to invite you to think along with me on Memory
Wars and Memory Laws. I have spent the better part of my scholarly life
studying the periodically re-intensifying conflict over the meaning
and legacy of the Second World War and the Soviet communism in Eastern Europe.
This contestation involves debates over the origins of World War II, the contents
of history books and legitimate ways of remembering the conduct and consequences
of both World War II and the overall legacy and meaning of the Soviet
communism as such in Eastern Europe. It also entails the diverging assessments
of the universal applicability of the law formulated in 1945 for the Nuremberg
International Military Tribunal as demonstrated by various rulings of the
European Court of Human Rights in the recent decade. But what does it really mean to
talk about memory wars? Think of the famous Prussian strategic thinker and
equally famous strategic practitioner Carl von Clausewitz,
who maintained that war is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse
with a mixture of other means. Now referring to political contestations over
historical remembrance as memory wars further blurs the line, and an
already thin line at that, between politics and war - possibly even to the
point of risking thus to devalue the concept of war. But then again if we do accept
this Clausewitz that war is a chameleon, that it constantly changes its forms as
well as appearances, what kind of war is a war over historical memory. Memory war
is certainly a captivating metaphor yet it is not an innocent one.
The logic of war calls for the destruction, rather than understanding, of
one's opponent. The lax use of military metaphors also conditions and
legitimates the rhetoric and means of security for handling contested memories,
thus also enhancing the potential for militarising the state's historical self-
understanding, its self-vision and possibly its culture as a whole.
Consider the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. We have witnessed a powerful emergence
of the so-called historical memory front, next to physical and online spaces of
confrontation between Ukraine and Russia. With the reinvigoration of rich brew of
the Second World War era political rhetoric, Russian media has
systematically demonised and denigrated pro-democratic forces in
Ukraine as Nazis, as fascists as Banderites. It has insinuated their
intention to erase the historical memory of the Soviet victory in the war over
Nazism and against Nazism and willingness to perpetrate genocide
against Russian and Jewish minorities in the contemporary era. Ukrainian counter
rhetoric towards the mosque voice or mass Kiley has been at times
competitively derogatory and colourful. So what we see here is essentially the old
struggle of defining who we are by juxtaposing us to who and what we are not.
Historical memory provides a backbone to the stories that nations and
states tell of themselves. The problem of international relations and the problem
of survival in international relations is accordingly not just about the
survival of the body of the state or its territorial intactness, the inviolability
of its borders along with the security of its people and the sovereignty of
state institutions. It is also, and importantly, about
surviving as a certain kind of a state, as a certain kind of vector and hence
defending and safeguarding of one's memory and identity as a state of a
particular sort. So states seek to secure their understandings of themselves which
might well provide the key to our understanding as scholars and analysts
of international politics, why they would approach their own past wrongdoings and
the other's past wrongdoings in a particular way and how they would
consequently act on the international stage. But now the question emerges:
should a political community's understanding or remembrance of certain
historical events be protected by means of law,
if so deemed necessary by its governing elites, in case this very remembrance is
perceived to be challenged or even openly attacked by some other
community or a state and thus potentially undermined in this struggle
between contesting historical remembrances. And this is indeed a very
topical question, not just in the context of handling the question of Holocaust
denial, but equally so in an era saturated by bus routes such as
nonlinear warfare propaganda and information offenses. psychological
defense and strategic communication. Hybrid war and hybrid warfare is indeed
something that has come to frame the contemporary international security
debate, security commentariat, ever since Russia's swift annexation of Crimea in
2014 with the help of the “little polite green men” and Russia's involvement in
the protracted conflicts in eastern Ukraine. The European Union has
consequently adopted a joint framework to counter hybrid threats and foster the
resilience of the Union, giving prominent crowns to the problematic also in its
new global strategy on foreign and security policy of 2016. And NATO in its
turn has also agreed on a strategy on its role in countering hybrid warfare to
be implemented in coordination with the European Union. Now zooming back into
Eastern Europe. Russian penal code, for example, has a new provision since 2014.
Namely article 354, point one on the rehabilitation of Nazism which
criminalises among other things the public dissemination of knowingly false
information about the activities of the USSR during the Second World War.
Meanwhile, Ukraine adopted a set of so-called decommunisation laws
shortly after the Maidan revolution in the spring of 2015. This package of four
laws which was heralded by the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory,
this package contains legislation criminalising both Nazi and communist
totalitarian regimes, prohibiting their symbols and propaganda and two further
laws commemorating Ukraine's fighters for twentieth-century independence
movements and the victory over Nazism during the Second World War, and the law
guaranteeing access to archives of repressive Soviet-era origins respectively.
Now it's not particularly surprising that Russia's reactions to
Ukraine's memory laws were indeed rather predictably pained but there has also
been a wide scholarly and media criticism that has been aired towards
these laws in the West, expressing concern about their violation of the
right to freedom of speech and thus their general incompatibility
with Ukraine's alleged road to democratisation and Europeanisation. And
indeed attempts at fixating on certain understandings of the past by
juridifying the frames of legitimate social remembrance raise a host of thorny
questions about the attempted delimitation, or even a closure, of
a political discussion on various violent and controversial historical events
Based on my previous and ongoing research on conflicts over remembering
World War II and the Soviet legacy in Europe, I would
argue that the attempts to make our memory secure by means of law actually
tend to amplify the existing security dilemmas, and also what is worse, lead to
new ones. Trying to defend our memory by law often leads to a lesser sense of
security among the competitors over issues of public remembrance in
international relations. If law is reached for in an attempt to thus
defend our narrative of the past from the allegedly vicious
misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the others, their vision of the past
is accordingly rendered to be existentially endangering for our being
as 'us'. So instead of alleviating mutual insecurities, memory laws tend to
reproduce and reinstate historical animosities between the carriers and
agents of competing memories. Hence, legislation of memory on the assumption
that the security of identity, the security of our self-vision can be
cemented by law. In fact, has a deep politicising effect. Setting legal frames
on how our story can be remembered also enables to solidify the power of the
ruling regime, encouraging state bounds remembrance practices and thus
constituting the political community in a particular way.
Seeking to outlaw struggles over possible narrations thus rejects the
fundamentally political nature of state identity. It also potentially curbs
certain political and societal activity defined as undermining and endangering
for this very identity. So we could say that
ordering historical remembrance by means of law in fact constitutes a legal way
of closing off a particular notion of identity. So we see how making social
historical memory, collective historical memory, an issue of security politics is
actually problematic both morally and politically. So the upshot of all this is
that we should always ask whose history, whose memory, whose identity and security
we are really talking about in each particular case. We should always
distinguish between the modalities of public, social and political remembrance
for there is always this tendency of states to homogenise their national
identity at the expense of certain strangers, certain others. The successful
endorsement of a state's story of origin hardly merges without the exercise of
power over what to remember and how to remember. So I suggest that public
historical remembrance of the past naturally needs to be politically
discussed and preferably not purified by laws that prescribe or proscribe the
ways of relating to the past, if we borrowed the definition of memory laws
by the Dutch historian Antoon De Baets who also happens to be the founder for
the network for concerned historians. Memory laws as a rule tend to
depoliticise. They tend to shift public remembrance
out of the realm of an open and non repressive political debate between
various state and non-state access. And more generally it is probably reasonable
to let go of the pipe dream of being able to fully secure one's self, collective
and individual alike. Moving beyond the politics which is seeking to defend
our memory, to make our memory secure, would entail the ability of political
actors to also learn to tell new stories about themselves, to break away from the
old and possibly harmful routines for both themselves and their others. So in a
nutshell, this would entail their ability to also renew and not just to survive as
a certain sort of being. And of course the problem here is that questioning
oneself, being very reflective, is often viewed as a signal of weakness
especially in certain cultures by both internal critics and external
adversaries and opponents - which is also perhaps the reason why self
interrelation tends to be suspended more often than not in the memory political
practices of states. But if we do assume, if we do subscribe to the view that
certainly differences and the contestability of social remembrance remain
irreducible, then the public relationship towards the past also has to remain in
the realm of speakable, in the realm of debatable, in the realm of discussable.
That is, in Hannah Arendt's words, it should be allowed to live in the sphere of the
political or in the realm of speech. I would subsequently call for more
politics of memory instead of the widespread attempts to fix the public
relationship to the past by juridified rules as a tactic of thus buttressing
competitive selves. In the Laurentian spirit we should recognise the
importance of a genuine debate between plural equals along with the right for
an open struggle of a memory instead of indeed vain attempts to secure one's own
national memory at the expense of others. And indeed if the other in the debates
over collective remembrance becomes conceptualised as someone whose vision
of the past we might not agree with, but whose right to defend that very vision
we do not put into question. As such, I believe in more benevolent space for
settling these debates of an historical memory is actually created. And on this
call for an opening rather than a closure I will stop and thank you very
much for listening.