2018/05/22 Tóth Manó
Tóth Manó: Challenging the Notion of the ‘East-West Memory Divide’
Hozzászóló: Lakatos Zoltán
Recent scholarly works on memory practices in Europe often appeal to the notion of the ‘East-West memory divide’ or, more dramatically, to the ‘European memory wars’ which have been allegedly raging at least since the Eastern enlargement of 2004. These terms are supposed to stand for the heated debate between the ‘East’ and the ‘West’, between the countries on the opposing sides of the former Iron Curtain, about what the appropriate memory for Europe should be. In this article, I challenge this simplistic division and I argue that this mental frame relies on an outdated, totalising conception of collective memory that completely disregards the role of agency in social processes. In contrast, I conduct an agent-centred empirical analysis and show that the social actors involved in the debate are far more diverse, the fault lines are far less clear and the ‘sides’ of the debate are far more heterogeneous than the carelessly used notion of the ‘East-West memory divide’ would have us believe.