Przemysław Łukasik - Different Shades of the Past: History as an Instrument of Contemporary International Conflicts

ISBN 9783111000251

e-ISBN (PDF) 9783111000596

e-ISBN (EPUB) 9783111000671

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The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

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Disputes between states and conflicts regarding the past are among the key sources of serious international rows. Such controversies may be defined as a situation of political and social stress connected with active, serious disparities of judgments referring to the common past of the disputing sides, including such disputes as those regarding borders, past armed conflicts, occupation, annexation, war crimes and crimes against humanity, oppression, discrimination, responsibility for international crises and humanitarian disasters, disputes on cultural legacy and achievements.

On November 2, 2021 the Pedagogical University of Krakow in cooperation with the Research Center Global Dynamics (ReCentGlobe) of the University of Leipzig and the Institute of the European Network of Remembrance and Solidarity in Warsaw organized the second International Scientific Conference: History as an Instrument of Contemporary International Conflicts. The first edition of the conference took place in October 2018, also at the Institute of Political Science, Pedagogical University in Krakow. The event aroused great interest in the academic society. Both conferences were attended by researchers from 16 countries, including Armenia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and the United States.

The results of the conference project will be presented within a multivolume edition including volumes on disputes and conflicts between states and nations regarding history in particular parts of the world, as well as in a volume on the outcomes of the comparative analyses of discussed conflicts including recommendations referring to conflict prevention and conflict solution in the presented context.

The past never dies. In fact, its not even the past, as William Faulkner puts it. The words of the American writer very well reflect the dynamic nature of the process of shaping historical memory and awareness. In order to explain the process of constructing the past as a means of building an intergenerational community bond between its members, Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson It can therefore be said that contemporary generations look at themselves in the past like in a mirror, building their own images.

In his book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century the historian Yuval Noah Harrari wrote that man had the possibility to conquer the world precisely because he could create fictional stories and believe in them. People created more and more complex stories about themselves that served and continue to serve, according to the professor of the University of Jerusalem, building unity, social harmony and gaining power.

Victimisation, or the cult of national victims, is a common phenomenon in modern historical memory. A turning point in European memory and historical debate in this regard was the year 1991. After the end of the Cold War, the consensus regarding the events after 1945 was unfrozen, which allowed those nations and groups that had not yet been heard to speak. As a result, the Dutch could tell about the victims of the hunger winter of 19441945, and the inhabitants of the Baltic states could speak out about the Soviet aggression and the expulsion and deportation after the Second World War (about 10 per cent of the entire adult Baltic population was deported or sent to labor camps). Nowadays, the struggle for national unity with the threatening postmodern relativism, as Dan Stone emphasises, has acquired the character of a war of memory. As the British historian noted, the memory of the twentieth century can be used for the purpose of reconciliation or conflict.

A narrative about past, in which memory fragmentation and victimisation play a large role, may be a temptation to instrumentalise the past. This is especially true in relation to the events of the twentieth century, when a series of bloody war conflicts occurred. As shown in the following post-conference volume, today the wars of the past (World War I and II, Indian-Pakistani war) and current conflicts (Russo-Ukrainian war, war in Sudan or Nagorno-Karabakh) are also a catalyst for the process of instrumentalisation. This process can be analysed both at the level of the evolution of the language of conflict, including the erosion of the values of democratic dialogue, and the use of specific means of commemorating the past (monuments, museums, the Internet).

The conference, the papers of which are presented in the publication, as mentioned earlier, took place in November 2021. The Russian-Ukrainian war broke out three months later, during the editorial work on the post-conference volume. As a result, the papers on Ukraine and Russian-Ukrainian relations do not take into account this important turning point. The texts on Ukraine contained in the manuscript are a clear and impressive indication of the depth of the conflict and the upcoming war, in which the historical and political manipulation of Russias denial of the autonomy of the Ukrainian nation and the state plays an important role.

The conference volume consists of 12 articles and can be divided into two groups. The first group of articles deals with methodology and theory. The authors refer to the formulating and evolution of some theories and historical narratives (conflicts in international relations, the theory of democratic peace), but they also describe selected historical conflicts, by referring to the role of tools of historical narration, such as museums, monuments or new media. The second group of texts concerns cases of instrumentalisation of the past of a more general nature.

The first group of articles includes the text of Dovil Budryt, Georgia Gwinnett College, USA. In the paper Conflicts over Memory and Political Crises: Insights from Lithuania and Ukraine she examines how research into memory politics in Eastern Europe can address more serious problems regarding international relations (IR). Budryte argues that research on historical memory (politics) that is common in area studies could help to rethink the study of crises in IR by demonstrating how crises change discourses and yield opportunities for memories to be challenged and defended not only by the strong, but also by the weak (or peripheral) actors. To illustrate this argument, the paper presents a comparative study of memory politics in Ukraine and Lithuania, tracing major discursive changes, their domestic and international impact and offering a depiction of how hegemonic historical accounts were created before and during the 2013/2014 crisis in Ukraine and how they were contested in the aftermath of the crisis.

Krzysztof Wasilewski from the Koszalin University of Technology, Poland, is the author of the paper Local Memory, International Conflicts. Case Study of the Katy Memorial in Jersey City. This article focuses on presenting the theoretical and empirical aspects of international politics of urban memory and its conflicting nature. The author analyses how local governments make use of international activity to promote their own narration on past events. He also refers to the example of the decision of the Jersey City authorities to relocate the Katy Memorial in 2018, which resulted in a conflict with the Polish state.