Symbolic civil-war events

On the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian revolution (23 October 2006), turmoil, scandal, hooliganism and riot swept through the streets of Budapest. The flaunting of extreme rightist emblems engulfed dignified celebration. The turmoil seemed to do justice to the very image of mob rule that the post-1956 communist regime had tried to spread rather than to the liberating and cathartic experience of the revolution that Albert Camus and Hannah Arendt had regarded as one of the greatest hopes for modern humanity. It was one of the many signs of a divided society, ridden by conflicting, parallel memories, and by challenged patterns of consolidation; indeed, a symbolic civil war has erupted in that country, the changes having been unable to forge a democratic political community.

The Bronze Soldier Statue riots in Tallinn in April 2007 or the more recent turmoil in Athens show that Hungary is by no means the only nation to show the symptoms of such a symbolic civil war. In fact, we find divided symbolic public spaces and antagonistic feasts throughout Europe, with their competing victimologies and parallel collective memories, all of which are rooted in unelaborated personal and collective traumas.

Traumatic Historical Experiences

Divided, sometimes antagonistic, communities in officially unified nations seem to be the rule in Europe. In some cases, they conjure up the most painful memories of actual civil-war events, such as Jedwabne, Naoussa, Londonderry, or Srebrenica, but usually they constitute the common experience of most Europeans, who have lived through different kinds of war (wars of independence, wars for national unification, civil wars, colonial wars, world wars), revolutions, counter-revolutions, coups d’état, dictatorships, totalitarian systems, regime changes, territorial losses, ethnic cleansings, and exchanges of population.

Almost every European nation went through the overwhelming experience of the two World Wars – either as winners or as the defeated, sometimes as perpetrators, and often as victims. Many were defenceless against mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and more lost their homes, surroundings, neighbourhoods, security, and peaceful ways of life. Many of these experiences were archetypical. Some were related to the transition from one or another type of dictatorship to democracy, or vice versa. Others to the twofold process of dissolving empires and creating new nations, medium- or small-sized independent countries, when major portions of populations suddenly found themselves, due to shifting borders, moved from imperial centres to peripheries or from imperial peripheries to national centres. Many experiences had to do with weathering civil war and reconstruction. And we have the universal European experiences of the transformation from traditional to modern society, of the competition and cooperation between nations, and then their ultimate integration into the European Union.

Political Languages and Narratives

The political languages and narratives of these experiences often have their roots in collective transitional tasks, such as establishing democracy, fighting for national liberation, national reconstruction, modernisation, and forging a collective identity out of the ideals of the nation-state, European cooperation and federalism. These discourses have been held together by elite-generated identity models, images of preceding conflict, interpretations of the recent past, the self and the inner alterity, and the blueprints of memory. They have been the building blocks of the patterns of consolidation, the underlying assumptions of turning divided societies and fractured political cultures into a political community. Each one of them has had its share in the ‘European civil wars’.

Over almost all of Europe, the experiences and humiliations of previous generations have remained unspoken and unelaborated at both individual and community levels. Dangerous as they are, such narratives and undigested traumas necessarily require a working out and an overwriting, in a well-advised, learned and thoughtful fashion.

Trauma Management in Social and Political Sciences

In spite of major breakthroughs, especially in Germany and the Franco-German reconciliation, we find all over Europe that the experiences and humiliations of previous generations have remained unspoken and unelaborated at both individual and community levels. However, for all the important contributions that the social and political sciences have already made in the field of trauma management – particularly social anthropology, social psychology, studies in peace and security, past in space, regimes of memory, identity discourses, and nationalism studies – serious historical research has usually tended to focus only on single, or a few cities, regions, states, or countries in given periods. Examples are Pierre Nora's enormous intellectual enterprise, Les Lieux de mémoire (1984),¹ Paul Smith, Kalliopi Koufa and Arnold Suppan's edited work Ethnic Groups in International Relations (1991)² and Mark Mazower's Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430–1950 (2005).³ There are also works with a European scope, such as Mark Mazower's Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (1999)⁴ and Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (2005)⁵ and his Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (2008).⁶

A broadly based, well-founded, historical, multi- and interdisciplinary research project for the comparison of the various modes of trauma management in the different countries and regions of Europe can open up new perspectives and provide essential tools for working out individual and collective traumatic historical experiences. Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning and Recovery (2003),⁷ on the post-Civil War American South, France after the Prussian-French war and post-First World War Germany, is a groundbreaking monograph and much can be learned from it. This project aims to broaden the historical and geographical scope, and widen the methodological analysis of present and historical traumas in Europe.

Comparative European Research

I am proposing to start up and build a European interdisciplinary research project that will focus on various patterns of consolidation/reconciliation/settlement and their comparison. It will seek to define these patterns in order to establish their possible typologies, determine their similarities and differences and thereby provide insights to the challenges of how modern democratic political communities can be constructed. The timeframe is the 200 years between the Napoleonic wars and the present. Rather than impose a fashionable monocausal, schematic typology, the theory, methodology and the criteria of choosing different contexts and countries outlined in the research proposal are the common bases of a transnational research team for the next five years.

The team will work on the subject, partake in mutual exchange of ideas and texts, and will produce case studies, case-study volumes, comparative studies and a multivolume monograph on the issue. It is intended that the research will transcend national and regional histories, avoid national and regional conceit, but will start out from the specialities of national political culture in order to open up a perspective for a problem-focused European comparison. Insofar as the European Union (its identity, integrative force, legitimacy, and stability) is concerned, the results will be helpful in providing new aspects, insights, and background knowledge for people involved in national, European and international political decision-making.

Unusual Focus: Consolidation

Research has often focused on crises, rarely on consolidation. This project intends to examine the inner consolidation processes and their backgrounds. Consolidation (often called ‘reconciliation’, sometimes ‘reconstruction’, ‘settlement’, or ‘concord’) is usually conceived of in terms of politics, and it is frequently connected to social and economic arrangements. It should not be thought of as a finality resulting from a sequence of past events. It does not even necessarily bear a positive (or negative) meaning. In some cases, as in the aftermath of civil wars in Ireland, Finland, Poland, Greece, Italy, and Spain, consolidation was framed by the victorious party, which secured its ascendancy for many decades. The student is therefore compelled to take a critical stance examining the particulars of every case. The patterns of consolidation of established political regimes are different, yet they are likewise connected to the changes in regimes of memory, including imprints on individual, group, and collective projections. They also have antagonistic political languages and different narratives of the recent past, and previous conflict in particular. Their different interpretations and reinterpretations, selections and taboos, of historical tradition divide into establishment and alternative types. The ways they seek to homogenise the fractured and often contradictory elements of their political cultures draw separate, sometimes opposite blueprints informed by disastrous historical experiences. Their frozen pasts are embodied in real and symbolic spaces, the very structures and centres of cities, monuments, and sacred places. Alternative pasts are rekindled in collective rituals and processions influencing and often poisoning personal consciousness, individual and collective life strategies, and inter- and cross-generational contacts and transfers, as well.

The proposed research project will focus on various patterns of consolidation/reconciliation/settlement and their comparison. It will seek to define them in order to establish their possible typologies, determine their similarities and differences, and thereby provide insights to the challenges of how modern democratic political communities can be constructed. The timeframe is the 200 years between the shift to the modern paradigm of legitimacy, which varies from country to country, but is roughly concurrent with the Atlantic Revolutions/Napoleonic wars and the present. The unprocessed past has an influence on the present – this is one of the hypotheses of the project. One of the purposes of this project is to learn about the way the past has been addressed in modern European political culture in the case countries, and how traumatic past events have influenced the evolution of their political regimes and civil societies in the last two centuries. More particularly, the research project aims at analyzing how civil wars, revolutions, post-war settlements and political transitions have shaped visions of the past in emerging political cultures and how the narratives addressing these processes have influenced consolidation, power struggles, social movements and citizenship values. Social identities clashing within them, such visions have been part and parcel of ‘absolute politics’, and have been forged and transformed together with the emergence and expansion of new social values and collective referents. Such deep identity changes tend to unleash debates on the meaning and understanding of events and processes of the recent past. They should be regarded as a crucial element in the shaping of modern national political cultures.

The research will focus on the relationship between the patterns of consolidations in these countries and the main characteristics of their political culture between the 1820s up till now. Which were their patterns and strategies of consolidations? How did they construct their recent past? How did they interpret the conflicts before the consolidations? Which were the narratives of the establishment interpreting them and which were the alternative narratives? What were and are the canons of making political discourses, defining the public spaces, symbols, and rituals? What kinds of political language did and do they have? What were and are their images of the self and the other – the enemy? How did and do they use public spaces and symbols? How did and do they interpret the different models of modernity? Which kinds of concepts of Europe do they use and create? How do they select, define, interpret, reinterpret and use different traditions? How do they create and invent different models of collective identities? Which kinds of patterns do they use to interpret the development of economic growth and democracy, and especially their link to the growing and overwhelming globalization? How do they connect with and differentiate between the concepts of the people, society, nation, and state from each other? Do they have or create parallel or different collective memories, public spaces, symbols, and rituals?

Strategy and Methodology

The strategy of the project is to begin by discovering the places, roles, narratives, and functions of the different pasts in the divided present on a country-by-country, case-by-case basis. Then it will turn to the exposition of the factors and obstacles of making political communities in each of the case countries on the basis of understanding, defining and analysing the patterns of consolidation they underwent. This will go together with an uncovering of the interpretative schemes of creating collective memories, narratives rationalizing recent past and earlier conflict. At the same time, this should lead to a redefining of the significance and functions of traditions. These tasks involve deconstructing, reconstructing, contextualising and mapping historical turning points in their different contexts. Finally as an Aufhebung, the project will seek to return to the diverse pasts of the varied present on a higher level, giving a broad and representative European picture.

The project will analyse the images of revolution, war and transition in narratives of consolidation to test their capacity for enactment, continuity or erosion over time. In order to do so, it will be centred at the intersection of theories of identity as recognition, history of concepts and literary theory, and will draw theoretical tools from different disciplines, including social anthropology and social psychology, mentalité, discourse analysis, and different interpretative methods of intellectual history. This includes the expanding body of publications on political languages by the Cambridge School of John Pocock, Quentin Skinner and their colleagues, the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe of Reinhart Koselleck's circle, studies in political semantics, and the mentalité examinations of the Annales School and its followers from its beginnings to the present (see, among others, Refs 8–33).

The project will seek to make use of the different types of structural political history interpretations, philosophical and literary text analyses, and, of course, their context-based views and techniques. In order to challenge the traditional national historical master narratives that construct the histories of national/political communities (on the bases of seemingly firm if not inevitable historical development), and in order to better understand the different layers of memory work and reflections on the past, the investigation will offer contributors the chance of adopting a counter-chronological approach, but also of avoiding any single-path, single-direction type of attitude. Thus, setting aside the seductive logic of chronological narrative, the project should put into question the major historical narratives and exigent ‘usable pasts’ that work within the various political, social, and cultural environments through analysing and decoding them in a reverse timeframe. One of the theoretical aims of the project is to develop the concept of memory regimes further by elaborating the different patterns of consolidation they foster. The logic of explanation draws on methodological inspirations from various recent schools of intellectual history and history of concepts, where the sociocultural context of the use of concepts, the disputes over definitions and keywords, and, consequently, clashes around interpretations of the most important historical milestones and ‘national traumas’ are considered to be central. Seeking to go beyond both conventional history of ideas and conventional political history, the project will build on contextualist and conceptual history. It will attempt to map the discourses, political languages and their sociocultural settings that predetermine the ways given historical events are perceived, elaborated on and internalised.

Another methodological point concerns the manner in which the intellectual, cultural, and political space of a given country has been historically reconstructed. One of the main interests of the research project is how prevailing versions of understanding in a given community have merged with the political language of the interpretation of modernisation, and how this merger has influenced the discourse about the normative past of the nation. Also, vice versa, how the interpretations and reinterpretations of the national past (and, above all, some of the most important traumatic experiences such as wars, occupations or suppressed revolutions) reconfigured and predetermined the patterns of consolidation/reconstruction in the different time periods – thus interpreting the past in a much broader way than historian-created images can.

Multi- and Interdisciplinarity

The proposed project intends to make a typology of the different pasts in the divergent presents through the characteristics and functions of the various political cultures. There is a great temptation of projecting the present back into the past, which would be very misleading. Do one or more political communities exist in a country? What kinds of relationship can we find between divided communities? Why and in what matter did the communities become divided? Were they and are they different communities based on separate collective traumatic historical experiences? From afar, it is tempting to accept that some political cultures call themselves republican, as they do in France, Ireland and Poland. On a closer look at their histories, we note that it is their differences that have been dominant. The usual schemes of the two Frances, two Germanies, two Italies, two Spains, two Greeces, and so on, are related to nation-building projects and traumatic experiences of civil wars. Again, this means that we have to be very careful in each case and context. Mutual exchange of ideas will enable all the contributors of the research team of the project to share in constructing a collective wisdom. This will be the basis and driving force of the work of comparison. The scope of the research is intentionally broad, and has a multi- and interdisciplinary character. Besides the vast literature on the political and cultural histories of the different countries and regions of Europe, the research will have to deal with the other discussions of political and social sciences. An instrumentalist view presupposes that actors are rational, and only rational, subjects of their actions. The overwhelming majority of the literature on nationalism presents mythical constructions of the processes of forging collective identities, but a reductionist logic is also built in. Neither the instrumentalist, nor the symbolic interpretation is capable of coping with the inherited and unprocessed experiences of people. Likewise, historians of the formation of a national political culture often debate terms that emphasise its specificity and indeed its exclusively ‘national’ origin and ‘nature’. While elements of any national political culture are necessarily ‘peculiar’ to the country/nation in question and its history, we ought to have learned not to confuse the ‘peculiar’ with the ‘exceptional’ (most helpful in this respect will be Refs 34–42).

Countries and Contexts to be Compared

In choosing case countries and contexts for the European project, one of the goals is to avoid the standard regional and historical dichotomies (North vs. South, West vs. East, developed vs. backward, core vs. periphery, etc.). This means finding representative countries and contexts of almost every regional and historical type occurring in the continent. The project will conduct the comparison with an eye to three aspects: unity and diversity, continuity and discontinuity, and patterns of consolidation. In the end, the different contexts will come together as a unified whole, the most important outcome of the project. Among the countries included in this broad and representative European comparative project, France and Spain have had longue durée statehoods. Belgium was established as a state in 1830. It happened to be a brief decade later that Greece declared independence from the Ottoman Empire. Germany and Italy formed unified states in 1870–1871. Ireland, Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary had ceased to be visible as independent medieval kingdoms in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The Rzeczpospolita (Polish Republic) was erased from the map for more than a hundred years. The four joined the community of independent European states again as republics in 1918, exactly when Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Yugoslavia (including Bosnia-Herzegovina) appeared among the European states as independent partners. Poland, Czechoslovakia and its successors, the Czech and the Slovak Republics, Hungary, Estonia, and Latvia became democratic countries in 1989–1991, and then joined the European Union.

Cases and Contexts⁴³

Germany: Reconciliation and National Identity

Today, Germany is a successfully integrated political community with a diverse background of discontinuities and patterns of consolidation. Two centuries earlier, it had been a hyper-aristocratic, fragmented, anachronistic world, defeated by Napoleon; in 1848–49 again, it did not have the force to unify the different petty German states, and was quasi-united by Bismarck, who maintained the Kleinstaaterei. Its political culture was definitely not based on any democratic model until the post-Nazi period, with the exception of the Weimar period. In its growth-phase, it had been influenced by the successful French example, an antithesis of what was thought to be the German model. So a field of tension between the French and the German poles emerged in the first decades of the nineteenth century that was to have a deep impact on European history and be one of the major causes of the two World Wars. Franco–German reconciliation was therefore a prerequisite not only for European political stability and rapprochement, but also for the reconciliation of the Germans with their own nationality – a bond that had been severely damaged under Nazi rule and the Shoah.

The mid-nineteenth-century debate over the raison d’être of German collective identity that gave rise to the concept that Germans were something unique, different within Europe, had a profound cultural stance that distinguished them from the rest of Western European civilisation. And so was the dichotomy between German ‘Kultur’ and French (and British) ‘civilisation’ born. This Sonderweg-type of thinking would last until 1945, having determined both German self-perception and the foreign political strategy before, during and after the Great War. From here it was only a short distance to the National Socialist quest for ‘Lebensraum’ in the East and for a new, National Socialist order for Europe. The collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945, the awareness of the evident crimes of the Nazi regime, the perception of being, as Germans, responsible for the Shoah, and the partition of Germany after 1949 obviously bore upon Germans’ attitude to their identity. For many West Germans, European integration seemed to be an adequate substitute for German collective identity, while for some in the East, the idea of still belonging to the one German nation seemed, at least for a while, to help bear the factual division of the country and communist rule. The fall of the Berlin Wall thus happened when German collective identity seemed to break up into two different nationalisms. Reunification in 1990 obviously put an end to this process.

Italy: Behind the North–South Divide

Starting out from current debates in Italy on present and past unities and disunities, continuities and discontinuities, and patterns of consolidation, the project intends to probe the years of Risorgimento, the Liberal state, Fascism, post-Fascist political consolidation, and its break down. This encompasses the achievement of political unity and (a less certain) national independence, but also a sequence of violent episodes that left deep but frequently contradictory imprints on historical memories. In terms of establishment historiography and memory, Italy's modern political culture is founded on the principles of unity and independence, the two great achievements of nineteenth-century Risorgimento. But their myths could never obliterate the other truths of Italy's struggles for independence – the frequently violent rural insurrections that occurred with predictable frequency at every moment of political crisis from the Jacobin Republics of 1799 to the revolutions of 1848–49. These events had to be retrospectively marginalised as reactionary and self-interested protests that threatened the achievement of ‘national’ goals. Similarly, great explosions of peasant protest in the southern provinces after unification (1860–64), which resulted in greater loss of life (amongst the peasants) than in all the wars of independence put together, was deliberately portrayed as mere ‘brigandage’.

This is one of the many strategies adopted to disguise internal conflicts, and one that would be redeployed on many later occasions as well. But once unification had been achieved, the principal cultural instrument for dealing with its enemies was to confine them to oblivion – they were the losers. These events had to be retrospectively marginalised as reactionary and self-interested protests that threatened the achievement of ‘national’ goals. This is one of the many strategies adopted to disguise internal conflicts – one that would be redeployed on many later occasions as well.

The Fascist period points to the present, since the post-Fascist political consensus of the First Republic (1946–92) was based on the broad Resistance alliance, the rejection of Fascism. That consolidation was also founded on the exclusion of political forces complicated all the issues of national interest and national identities. These exclusions contributed to the severity of the political crisis in Italy that followed the end of the Cold War. Italy's past and present national identity, its political and national cohesion, has become the subject of often fierce political debate. Separatism has gained ground since the 1990s, and internal tensions pose important questions about the future integrity of the Italian nation/state. What does the Italian past tell us about the capacities for containing and resolving internal conflicts, how have these evolved, and how can their effectiveness be measured or assessed? What policy proposals can such a study help identify or formulate?

Belgium: The European Battlefield

This broad European comparative project has a particular resonance for the Belgian case. Conflict and trauma are part and parcel of the Belgian experience; indeed, the country has been imagined as the battlefield of Europe. The twentieth century and its two world wars hardened this battlefield rhetoric. Conflict and trauma may have been overarching themes, but they were never simple unifying forces. Since the national elections of 2007, Belgium has witnessed an acute and drawn-out identity crisis. The tensions between Flemings and Francophones seem to have brought the country to the brink of dissolution. Is the end of Belgium imminent?

The Great War, the ‘rape of Belgium’, had at once a catalysing and a decatalysing impact on Belgian nationhood. To Flemish nationalists the war proved the moral bankruptcy of Belgium, a state that had purportedly driven thousands of Flemings to their deaths in a language that they did not understand, and that had not honoured their suffering and sacrifice. The Great War became the symbolic cradle of Flemish nationalism. Belgium, which in the ‘European battlefield’ discourse had always been cast as a victim of foreign oppression, became the perpetrator in Flemish nationalist history. It was presented as the last one in a long line of foreign despotic powers oppressing Flanders. The painful memory of the war lingered on in the issue of ‘amnesty’ for those who had been sentenced for collaboration. Merely a quarter century after the First World War, Belgium was again overrun by German armies. The Second World War came to replace the First as the central traumatic event in the national imagination.

At the moment, the linguistic divide is the most potent fault line in Belgian society, with Flanders, Brussels and Wallonia as main protagonists. Flemish society is supposedly based on ethnocultural principles such as descent and has consequently given birth to an extremist, xenophobic nationalism. In contrast, the Francophone Belgian and Walloon societies are supposedly open to all people and value citizenship (citoyenneté) above all. They are civic-voluntaristic: anyone can become a citoyen by choice. This division infuses their views of the past and the way they interpret the trauma of the First World War. As it is, the Second World War is a highly disputed lieux de mémoire.

Bohemia/Czechoslovakia/Czech and Slovak Republics: Usable Pasts

How did the reconstruction of collective identities and the contest for the ‘right’ of authentic representation of the national experience in the past precondition and shape the development of political cultures, languages and ideologies in modern Bohemia in the Habsburg Monarchy between 1848 and 1918? What were the main patterns of the consolidation/reconstruction of the political communities in this region in the periods of 1918–39, 1945–48, 1948–68, 1968, 1969–89, and beyond? The project will take a ‘Bohemian’ position; that is, it will not focus on one particular national or ethnic tradition (Czech, Slovak, German, Jewish), but rather try to analyse the making of various ‘memory regimes’ and political languages in the context of mutual negotiation and the contest of diverse national, political, and cultural movements. Its main focus will nevertheless be on the relationship of the major national cultures in modern history in Bohemia (Czech–German) and Czechoslovakia (Czech–German–Slovak).

The political development and contests for legitimacy in the 1990s have left their marks on political and social practices in the Czech and Slovak Republics. Post-socialist political differentiation has been driven by the same image of the future. What differed were the diverging and often incompatible images and interpretations of the past, above all of the communist period and its historical incorporation or, on the contrary, its exclusion from the broader national historical master narrative. Hence, the central idea is how the past was experienced, how its (re)interpretations have shaped and preconditioned present expectations and future visions, and how the appropriation of certain ‘usable’ pasts have determined the development of political, social, and cultural identities in the democratizing societies after the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia.

Ireland: The Inner Alterity

A study of the relationship between unity and disunity, continuity and discontinuity in Ireland will offer general conclusions inasmuch as its patterns of consolidation do so. Ireland was subjugated by England gradually, particularly in the wars of the seventeenth century and under Cromwell's Commonwealth, and was colonised by Protestant British settlers mainly in Ulster. As a consequence of the underdevelopment of the greater part of Ireland, many Irish immigrated to America and Britain to find a better living. The dilemma is well known from Poland to Greece: If national character is to be altered to allow us to enter their world of progress and modernity, we will become indistinguishable from them. Rooted in indigenous traditions and language, this nation-building project vindicated the distancing of Ireland from the surrounding developed world. At the same time, it claimed to speak in the name of the whole nation. From Wolfe Tone to Éamon de Valera, from Daniel O'Connell to Charles Stuart Parnell, Irish republicanism manifests extraordinary diversity both in ideology and programme.

For the Catholic majority, Protestantism and Britishness become the image of them, while Irish working-class Catholics constituted the inner alterity for the British. The North–South opposition obviously meant more than the question of the Protestant/Catholic majority. Perhaps it became a barrier between the British and the Irish nation-building projects. Negotiations, signs of conquering the symbolic space and time, uprisings, civil wars, extremism, and terrorism have been connected with the Irish and Northern Irish politics. Discovering the specificities and contexts of the various Irish political cultures, different narratives, blueprints, codes, and canons, and placing them in a European comparative perspective will offer chances of understanding and transcending petrified dichotomies.

‘Poland yes, but what sort of Poland?’

In spite of cherishing the memory of an idealised Rzeczpospolita, Poles regularly faced the painful dilemma of fighting or not fighting; and were thus divided into ‘insurrectionists’, ‘conciliators’ and ‘loyalists’ during the Napoleonic wars, in 1831, 1846, and 1863. Although the Romantic and universalistic messianism of Mickiewicz dominated much of the nineteenth century, the second half of the century saw the ascendancy of two schools of political realism – the liberal Warsaw and the conservative Kraków schools. Both advocated a strategy of accommodation and compromise with the partitioning powers with a focus on fostering material and cultural modernisation. The conflict and competition between the two nationalist and independentist camps and their leaders, Roman Dmowski and Józef Piłsudski, were manifestations of a much-divided political culture, which would overshadow the political life of the interwar years, and influence even current political culture: ‘Poland is ruled by two coffins’. Both camps had been politically divided not only with respect to past animosities, but also to the vision of the independent state and especially the former Eastern territories: while Piłsudski's vision was resolutely federalist and civic, Dmowski represented a centralist, assimilationist and corporatist ‘national egoism’. Both movements were characterised by a sort of authoritarian political socialisation, with a high level of internal discipline and a considerable cult of the leader. The outcome was a semi-authoritarian hybrid.

After the invasion of Poland from both east and west, its rapid defeat and the exile of the government, the structures of the underground state were established and political life continued clandestinely. After the defeat of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising by the Germans and the disarray of the structures of the underground state, units of the Home Army and Far-Right partisans resisted the Soviets. Under increasing Soviet terror, seeing the Yalta agreements and the disastrous state of civil war, the legitimate Polish government and various political forces decided to end military resistance, but still hoped to have a say in post-war political settlement. Under the later communist rule and in the midst of civil wars, crises, student and worker unrest, terror, and martial law in the period of Solidarność, round table talks and referenda, the Polska Ludowa has had to repeatedly face the heritage of its earlier political culture, Slowacki's question: ‘Poland yes, but what sort of Poland?’

Hungary: Unelaborated Pasts, Divided Communities

Hungary had been a large medieval multiethnic kingdom, which was later occupied by the Ottomans, then liberated and conquered by the Habsburgs. It had a tradition of noble political pluralism, and its political elite acted more successfully than their Polish counterparts. Serfs were liberated, political privileges were cast off, the foundations of democratic representation laid, the economy and society reformed and modernised, and a government responsible to parliament was set up in 1848. However, Hungarians had to defend their country and achievements against the Austrian army and the non-Magyar ethnic revolts, but finally surrendered to the Russian forces. After a period of absolute reign, Hungary managed to strike a deal with the Habsburgs, establishing the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. In the interwar period it had an independent, semi-authoritarian state, became almost ethnically homogeneous, but only after losing two-thirds of its earlier territories and around three-quarters of its former population, including a third of ethnically Magyar people. To regain those territories, it joined the Axis powers, was involved in the Second World War, became occupied by Germany, and participated in the Shoah. Liberated and conquered by the USSR, Hungary was terrorised and Sovietised. Hungarians revolted in 1956, and the country finally became independent in 1989.

Hungarians have suffered traumatic experiences, and the majority were not able to process them. The patterns of consolidation of the 1957–89 period are as unprocessed as the assumptions and rules of regime change in the different, deeply divided communities of the country. The idea of ‘a thousand years of fighting for Europe’, the small-nation inferiority complex, the hero–victim narrative, and the political language of national self-centredness/national egoism have all returned with disenchantment towards the political language of ‘adaptation of the European model’. The symptoms of symbolic civil war have appeared in a country where divided communities have fragmented images of the pasts and antagonistic interpretations of the different traditions. Hungarians have successfully adopted a liberal democratic political system, but they have not created a democratic political community. There is no integrative political culture, frustration and consumerism dominate in a country where more than 1/20th of the population is Roma. The proposed project will start with the different interpretations of 1989, including the different narratives of 1956, 1944–45, 1920, 1918–19, 1914–18, 1867–1914, and 1848–49. It will attempt to work out different experiences and traumas in different contexts.

Bosnia-Herzegovina: Statelessness and Homogenisation

Bosnia-Herzegovina is defined by the lack of statehood and nationhood due to the legacies of the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the first and second Yugoslav republics, the civil war dissolving the second Yugoslavia, and the temptations of the project to create homogeneous Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian nation-states. The memories of the Second World War and the wars in the 1990s are interconnected, though structured differently. After the victory of the anti-fascist coalition in 1945, the victor wrote history. Thus, the members of all other military groups – Serbian, Croatian, and Muslim (Bosniaks) – were branded as quislings and excluded from all new societal and political formations. Under party terror, political differences were resolved according to the model of victor and vanquished. This model for memory was a cornerstone of the political order of the second Yugoslavia. The 1992–95 war between the Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks left behind a different type of memory. This armed conflict was fuelled by other premises, the varying views of the political elite concerning the political makeup of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a state. These different concepts, still present in the political life of the country, have resulted in Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian memories that are mutually exclusive, and obliterate each other. In theory, Bosnia-Herzegovina is a decentralised regionalised state in accordance with historical and geographical requirements, and has three levels of government (central, regional and local) to protect collective and individual rights. In practice, however, the consolidation and reconciliation patterns of this religiously and ethnically variegated society, which were formed within different political frames during the period of ‘statelessness’, have proved to be mere rejections of the previous ones. The alternative narratives of the enemies of the recent past exist to engender ethnonationalism, to establish a public system of hatred.

Greece: The Wars are Over

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Greek experience of consolidation took as a guideline the long and painful process of legitimisation of the democratic political system in the eyes of the social corps. In this case, the milestones are the liberation war against the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s; the War in Asia Minor in the 1920s and the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923; the civil war of 1946–1949, and the transition from junta to democracy. The main points to study are the similar and different characteristics of the patterns of consolidation, the politics of the elite, and the handling of the memory of the conflicts as part of national memory. As far as types of interpretation are concerned, there have always been two or more Greeces. In its peak period (1916–36), division was a rather violent phenomenon with all its political, social, psychological, religious, rhetoric and interpretative ramifications.

The Civil War that broke out in the wake of the Second World War, although equally violent and dividing, did not follow the old split. Although it did have its antecedent cracks, the new division was between the communist left and almost all others (thrusting some centre-left socialists and any other hesitating or unwarlike groups or persons into very perilous situations). For three years, the destructive forces of both sides ravaged the Greek countryside, almost completing its ruin begun by previous Axis occupation.

An immediate parallel side effect was the forced (de jure or de facto) exodus of large numbers of the rural population to the urban centres (with all the social, cultural, and economic outcomes attendant). On a more political level, one of the immediate consequences of the Civil War was the ‘cachectic democracy’ of the 1950s and 1960s and the upgraded role of the Officers’ Corps, winner of the day and saver of the social regime, which, with almost mathematical inevitability, led to military dictatorship (1967–74). The crisis of the junta united almost all sides of the political spectrum against it, opening the way to end civil-war divisions. The first steps were taken during Karamanlis’ premiership (1974–80), but it was Andreas Papandreou who, by a series of political measures in the 1980s, definitely reintegrated the marginalised ‘half’ of Greek society (the losers of the Civil War). The symbolic gesture that finally settled the matter was the coalition government of the right-wing ‘New Democracy’ and the communist-led ‘Left League’ that was installed before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Estonia and Latvia: Trauma and Ethnic Division

Today Estonia and Latvia are ethnically divided, their greatest numbers of minorities being Russians. These nations had been relatively homogeneous during the interwar, independent republic era, and had no Russian population prior to their Sovietisation. However, their ethnic composition was profoundly changed during and after the Second World War. In their official discourses, the governments are inclined to stress the legal continuity between the present and the pre-Second World War republics. As a consequence, the period of Soviet rule in Estonia and Latvia is referred to as a historical injustice that needs to be acknowledged by the Russian Federation, the legal successor of the Soviet Union. Historical injustice, animosities between neighbouring states and the relations between present-day Estonians and Latvians of different ethnicity have unhappily concurred. When discussing their countries’ ethnic diversities, Estonian and Latvian elites have come to deploy the paradigm of national security. At the same time, there is a fair amount of pragmatism in how these societies and their administrations function in practice.

Estonia's and Latvia's grand historical narratives contain numerous internal contradictions that provide ample room for contemporary political manipulation and reinterpretation to suit the needs of identity politics. The most overarching grand narratives are of heroism and suffering of Estonia and Estonians, Latvia and Latvians, the hero-victims of 700 years of slavery and the continuous fight for freedom. Both countries’ grand narratives, particularly regarding the Second World War, often come into conflict with the West European narrative, in which the Soviet Union was an ally and anyone who fought on the Nazi side was an evil collaborator. West European politicians, historians and publicists demanded of Estonia and Latvia an adjustment of their own self-perception as victims and a recognition of the unique tragedy of the Holocaust and the collaboration of their countrymen with the Nazis. In response, they have started to use the terms ‘Estonian Holocaust’ and ‘Latvian Holocaust’.

Finland: History as a Means of Reconciliation

Finnish political culture is especially relevant in a comparative project. Talking about patterns of consolidation after or even before the cataclysms of the twentieth century, one is faced with a sequence of unification attempts and sharpening conflicts. What seems symptomatic in this story is the continuity throughout the history of modern Finland, even in the midst of sharp conflicts. If there are patterns of consolidation, they are connected to future-oriented thinking, and a focus on cooperation. At the intersection of three different historical paths (in terms of religion, sociocultural structure or even language families), Finnish political culture has merged influences coming from quite different, Scandinavian and genuinely Eastern-European directions, together with those typical of the ‘small nations’ of Europe. Finns have shared the fate of many Eastern-European nations, which had to develop a high culture in their vernacular to keep up with nineteenth-century western nationalism, and which established their own states in the aftermath of the collapse of the two multiethnic empires at the end of the First World War. At the same time, it seems that Finland gave different answers to similar questions than did its Eastern-European counterparts.

Seen from the present, Finland is a success story. Consensus is the word that has been used for describing Finnish political culture of the post-war era, but some reservations must be made here. A semi-presidential system together with the influence of an external power dampened political conflicts normal to regular parliamentary democracies. Second, self-censorship obviously prevented certain conflicts from fully unfolding. In the Finnish case, historical research is the most important way of capturing evaluations and re-evaluations of the past that justify the standpoints of conflicting groups on the one hand, and reflect the changes of political culture on the other. How was the ‘narrative of the independent state’ developed (Finland's position inside the empire, the relations to Russia, the Civil War, and the myth of unity in the Winter War)? And how were those elements altered from the 1960s onward, the justification of Finland's position after the Second World War (e.g. establishing a Finnish Sonderweg)?

Common Basis

Rather than impose a fashionable monocausal, schematic typology, the theory, methodology and the criteria of choosing different contexts and countries outlined above are the common basis of the research team. The team will work on the subject, partake in mutual exchange of ideas and texts, and will produce case studies, case-study volumes, comparative studies, monographs, and a multivolume monograph on the issue. The research will transcend national and regional histories, avoid national and regional conceit, but will start out from the specialities of national political cultures in order to open up a perspective for a problem-focused European comparison.

Timetable and Outcomes

I built up a research team of 15 members, including myself, between October 2009 and April 2010, who accept the goal of participating in this European intellectual enterprise. Each member shares the enterprise's underlying assumptions, theoretical views and tasks. The project is neither a research network, nor a consortium of individual researchers working on their own particular subject. Every member will contribute his/her own, yet team-defined research to the common project. The framework of the project will be based on mutual exchange of ideas through workshops and conferences and will be regularly assessed by a board. Results will begin with case studies (Year 1), followed by case-study volumes (Years 2, 3), developing into comparative studies (Year 4) and individual monographs (Year 4), and, as a collective outcome, bringing out a multivolume monograph (Year 5). The board will assess the case studies, comparisons, and monographs at each workshop and conference. Under the aegis of Academia Europaea and with the support of the Leverhulme Trust, the workshop that led to the production of the articles included in the present European Review Focus was the first of a series of such workshops on the subject. The next step in the process, the second workshop, will take place at the end of 2012. Insofar as the European Union – its identity, integrative force, legitimacy, and stability – is concerned, the results will be helpful in providing new aspects, insights, and background knowledge for people involved in national, European and international political decision-making. Some of the supporters of the European Union are tempted to consider the Union as a new empire, a new master, a father figure looking after his children, who are to imitate him. And this reinforces the revolt and reaction against it surfacing in different Sonderweg myths among others. Both attitudes are rooted in unprocessed historical experiences, some of which have destabilised countries. The project will offer fundamental background knowledge about Europe, and will delineate its different contexts. It will draw up new starting points and bases for as many people as possible, among others, scholars of historical, political, and social sciences, international law, literature, nationalism studies, the past in space, social anthropology, psychology, strategic studies, and cultural transfer. It will also provide important insights and materials for the curricula of universities and secondary schools. As an open project, historians from other European or non-European, EU or non-EU countries may join the project, and continue it even further, as interest in the conclusions of the project broadens.