Silence in the age of transnational memory:Recovering political violence in Romanian contemporary debates

The argument in this manuscript intervenes in the broader debate about the limits, biases and exclusions of the global liberal memory paradigm and the narratives that underpin global liberal democracy. Through a close reading of enduring conservative connotations of being 'liberal' and 'European' in Central and Eastern Europe, and specifically in Romania, the research charts how narratives of political violence have been linked to exclusionary dimensions of liberalism (human rights, neoliberalism) on the one hand, and problematic notions of Europeanism on the other. In particular, I mapped conflicts of memory, debates and contests. The analysis focused in particular on narratives of fragility, vulnerability, victimhood and persecution on the one hand, and of hope and transformation on the other, in order to trace how memory began as a mobilizing force, only to become a deterrent to truly progressive liberal notions, and ultimately to contribute to the demise of its myth. The argument builds on a notion of silence that has emerged in relation to the history of the left and social justice movements, critical narratives of knowledge and geopolitics, the mainstreaming of radical rightist thought, or the exclusionary dimensions of the state and law. In turn, the normative approach to political violence offers insights into a long and complex process of unravelling the idealism of liberalism. The analysis weaves together memory studies, intellectual history and political history to provide a cultural genealogy of the pitfalls of liberal memory

On political heritage: remembering and disavowing 1989

In 2014, the “reception crisis” [Christopoulos, Dimitris. 2017. “Human R⁠ights in a S⁠tate of P⁠erpetual Emergency.” Open Democracy, January 5th, 2017.⁠ Accessed May 7 2018. https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/dimitris-christopoulos/human-rights-in-state-of-perpetual-emergency] of refugees mobilized several memorial narratives which had been the backbone of European memory. Historian Dan Stone has recently made a detailed foray into the locus of the Holocaust as a historical narrative meant to support the ethical argument for solidarity and conclude that remembrance represents just a small fraction of the necessary historicization. The memorial neglect of its history was at the time a recurrent account of the reluctant political attitudes emerging around the frontiers of Europe. This article traces a similar now transnational difficult history inscribed into the European narrative, 1989, and investigated the conditions in which it became a topic of interest in 2014–2015. I locate their invocation in a longer term perspective on the ebbs and flows of the history of 1989 becoming political heritage. This article argues that 1989, as both consensus and competing memory, has been increasingly polarized through these two opposing perspectives more recently. In order to flesh out and interpret these dynamics, I first contextualize how an initially consensus-driven memory narrative around 1989 had by 2014 solidified into two divergent collective memory discourses, suggestive of the populist abatement. It was in the 1990s that the perspective on 1989 generally consolidated the events into a pre-emptive memory, wherein remembrance represented an act of political citizenship supported by a civic narrative of disobedience which would be able to be called on in anticipation of a threat to the new liberal polity. Yet such “negative” political heritage, otherwise a European⁠ transnational memorial perspective, gradually emerged as a prop for identity politics. Here, I focus on the tensions in Romanian and Hungarian memorial debates. Indeed, since roughly 2010, this former pre-emption remembrance is being increasingly integrated into discourses of sovereignty and more recently played into the mobilization of the memory of 1989 as a defensive narrative. I consequently consider its invocation in the recent debate on refugees and a wider spectrum of clashing notions of citizenship, state and the public, all leaning on a narrative of the “authoritarian past. As both sides were (and are) employing an increasingly selective historical imaginary, the competition around the memory of 1989 shows how appropriating a revolutionary heritage is in fact instrumental to authoritarian prone politic

Institution and Inclination in the Post-Socialist Space: Genocide as “Memory Intervention”

This article investigates memory discourses around communism in Ukraine and Romania and the manner in which account­ability for the past has been mobilized to shape authoritative trauma based memorializations, public appropriations, and increasingly standardized manners of indexing the past. In the last decade, both countries have gone through successive attempts — through memory legislation, historical commis­sions and historiography — to include these negative historical narratives into an ideational redress in the postsocialist period. Alongside national connotations, I argue that trauma based political projects around memory have become an important site where the narrative of a “European” state is produced. In both national contexts, representations have appropriated and benefitted from more liberal-cen­ter representations of memory, which now match the pan-European paradigm of “totalitarianism” introduced by the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism passed by European Council. This article focuses however on one of the consequences of this transnational dynamics of for representing a renewed, European political space, namely the usage of and appeal to legal notions of memory, such as “genocide”, in both public discourse and historiography