The Czech Republicans 1990-8: A populist outsider in a consolidating democracy

The chapter examines the Czech Repulicans (the SPR-RSČ) , a radical right-wing party represented in the Czech parliament between 1992 and 1998, as a case study of party-based oppositional outsider populism in a consolidating democracy. It traces the origins and development of the party, then examines the populist nature of the party's radical right appeals in the 1990s and the implicit understanding of democracy these contained. It concludes by evaluating the Republicans’ impact on the development of Czech democracy and assessing the extent to which it has left a legacy in contemporary Czech politics

Solitary Amnesia as National Memory: From Habermas to Luhmann

The repressive mechanisms of collective memory have been the subject of a fierce debate in the human sciences - especially, but not exclusively, in the study of nationalism. This paper re-investigates the nature of national memory in the context of European nationalisms by drawing on contemporary national cases of remembering and forgetting. The explored instances are mobilized in the study of remembering/forgetting on a factual, rather than ideal level. Theoretically, it is argued that the Habermassian call for fostering ‘anamnestic solidarity’ with the past often fails in practice because of its normative undertones that disagree with Realpolitic demands. This is so because nationalist discourse, which serves to preserve the political interests of the national community, has to present itself to political forces that reside outside the community as a closed, autopoetic system akin to that theorized by Niklas Luhmann. Although the Luhmannian thesis (which would gesture towards the autonomisation of national memory) also fails to explain the nature of nationalist remembering/forgetting tout court, it allows more space for an exploration of nationalist self-presentation than Habermas’ normative stance. The argument in this study, which combines an appreciation of hermeneutics and autopoeia, is that the practice of (re)producing the ‘nation’s’ solitary amnesia enables nationalist discourse to respond to external political pressures. This presents the latter as a dialogical/hermeneutic project despite its solipsistic ‘façade’

A Three-Dimensional Model of Enlarging the Mnemonic Conflict: The Case of Poland Under Second Law and Justice Government

The second Law and Justice (PiS) government, in power in Poland since 2015, reintroduced memory politics atop the policymaking agenda. However, within its strategy, mnemonic policymaking has reached beyond historical policies and commemorative initiatives. PiS represents a new, previously unseen, radical type of mnemonic actor - a memory excluder. It has used politics of the past not instead of politics of the present, but as its integral part - thus past, present, and future blur into one. Most of all, it has consciously enlarged the scope of collective memory dispute in Polish society, incorporating chronologically more distant events, policymaking dimensions previously never examined from the angle of memory, and more local and personalised instances of collective memory narratives. This paper aims to explain the mnemonic tactics of the second PiS government, proposing two novel concepts for the field. First, it defines the memory excluder as a new type of mnemonic actor, and later it explains its demeanours through a complex, three-dimensional model of enlarging the mnemonic conflict. This will be done using available evidence, examples, and ethnographic research on memory politics implemented in Poland in the years 2015-2017

'Against a Wall': Albania’s Women Political Prisoners’ Struggle to be Heard

Between 1944 and 1985, Enver Hoxha ruled socialist Albania as an isolated and paranoid Stalinist state. The regime held power through total party control and continual purges at all levels of society, persecuting approximately twenty per cent of the population (which stood at 3.4 million in 1990) as ‘enemies of the people’. Women and men were punished with internal exile, forced labour or prison, yet even now, twenty years after the communist rulers instituted neoliberal reforms as re-branded ‘democrats’ (in 1990), the victims of communist persecution are socially and structurally marginalised. Through the testimony and experiences of one anonymous woman who survived the communist prison system, this article examines the political, social and psychological factors that silence the voices of Albanian women who were politically persecuted