IISES International Academic Conference, Istanbul

CONTINUOUS MODERNITY IN EAST CENTRAL EUROPE AFTER COMMUNISM

SOKOL LLESHI

Abstract:

The fall of the communist regimes in the East Central Europe, and the end of the Cold War can be seen as a momentous historical juncture for reclaiming the 'repressed' memories' during the past regime. Henceforth, the revolutionary changes of 1989 include a different representation of the past. Long after regime change, the emergence of Institutes of Memory in most of the countries of East Central Europe, constitutes a new empirical reality, which continues to be addressed in the social science literature within the framework of politics of memory. On the other hand, there is a concern in the memory studies in particular, but also on a broader societal level of experiences of the past, that the post-communist Eastern Europe does not share the same memory as that of the Western Europe. This paper addresses this distinction between the memory practices of East Central Europe since the establishment of the Institutes of Memory with the memory practices observed for quite some time in Western Europe. I would like to note that the distinction East and West of Europe is not a claim of essentialist different identities as it is more a use of these categories as terms to denote particular and peculiar historical junctions and conditions that differentiate between what Pierre Nora would call the process of decoupling of state-nation-memory towards the decentralization, fragmentation and democratization of memory, and a process of the coupling of the state/memory as a homogenizing memory of the past. The way representations of the past are mediated recently in the post-communist Eastern Europe questions the post-modern condition of fragmented and plural memories in the public sphere, generally shared within the literature.

Keywords: mediated memory; representation fallacy; institutional sites; public sphere; memory field

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