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The Hugo Valentin Centre The Hugo Valentin Centre Master Thesis From the Destruction of Memory to the Destruction of People Social Movements and their Impact on Memory, Legitimacy and Mass Violence: A Comparative Study of the West German Student Movement and the Serbian "Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution." Carl Franks Year: 2017 Points: 45 ECTS Supervisor: Dr Roland Kostić Acknowledgements Dr Roland Kostić at the Hugo Valentin Centre, Uppsala University, for his confidence in my abilities, for pointing me in the right direction and for providing such intelligent supervision. Professors Michael Bernhard, University of Florida, and Jan Kubik, University College London, who masterminded a theoretical model which proved tremendously powerful in this paper. And my wife, especially my wife. Carl Franks Uppsala, May 2017 2 Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................................................. 4 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................................... 5 Research Problem and Hypothesis ................................................................................................................ 5 Disposition .................................................................................................................................................... 6 Theory and Method ........................................................................................................................................... 7 Theoretical Overview .................................................................................................................................... 7 Ethics and the Advocates and Detractors of Collective Memory ................................................................. 7 When Memory Turns into a Mess ............................................................................................................ 9 First Ethical Argument: Remembrance as Moral Obligation ................................................................. 11 Second Ethical Argument: In Praise of Forgetting ................................................................................. 13 Third Ethical Argument: Collective Memory as Malleable Resource .................................................... 16 Moving from Ethics to Politics ................................................................................................................... 20 Identifying the Nexus between Memory and Power ............................................................................... 20 The State-Civil Society Dichotomy ........................................................................................................ 22 The Bernhard-Kubik Model ........................................................................................................................ 24 Mnemonic Actors ................................................................................................................................... 25 Memory Regimes .................................................................................................................................... 26 Constraints and Choices Faced by Mnemonic Actors ............................................................................ 28 Theoretical Counterarguments .................................................................................................................... 32 Methodology ............................................................................................................................................... 33 Independent and Dependent Variables ................................................................................................... 34 West Germany ................................................................................................................................................. 37 The Interregnum, 1945-1949 .................................................................................................................. 37 Adenauer and Beyond, 1949-1968 ......................................................................................................... 38 Emergence of the Student Movement, 1968 ........................................................................................... 40 Serbia ............................................................................................................................................................... 45 Tito’s Yugoslavia, 1945-1980 ................................................................................................................ 45 Serbia in the Early Yugoslav Crisis, 1980-86 ......................................................................................... 47 Emergence of the Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution, 1986-1989 ................................................................ 49 Analysis ........................................................................................................................................................... 54 Case Analysis Using the Bernhard-Kubik Model ................................................................................... 54 The Boundary Between State and Civil Society ..................................................................................... 56 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................................... 58 Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................... 60 3 Abstract Challenges to the legitimacy of established collective memory can prove so inflammatory that mass violence, ethnic cleansing and even genocide have followed in their wake. However, if few doubt that the ethno-nationalist memory wars during the 1980s collapse of Yugoslavia contributed to the real wars and ethnic cleansing witnessed in the 1990s, no previous research has been able to explain why this is so. This paper pinpoints the determinant variable and causal link between attacks on memory and subsequent mass violence (or a lack thereof). It uses a theoretical model that ties together memory, legitimacy and power to compare the cases of West Germany’s 1968 student movement and Serbia’s 1986-1989 anti-bureaucratic revolution before establishing that the level of prior state repression is one factor that determines whether memory challenges will turn violent. The paper recommends further theory building over the permeable boundary that separates state and civil society, particularly in terms of how accessible state functions are to those social movements that seek to challenge and delegitimise memory. 4 Introduction While very few would doubt that memory mattered and exercised power in the Yugoslav wars, even fewer would be able to explain precisely how it mattered. ——Jan-Werner Müller, Memory and Power in Post-War Europe Mnemonic contests that feature attempts to not so much rewrite as overwrite history can be viewed as challenges to the legitimacy of a dominant memory regime. Such tactics were effectively implemented both consciously and inadvertently through the radical anti-authoritarianism of the West German student movement synonymous with 1968, and the similarly radical combined socialism and Serbian nationalism embodied by the anti-bureaucratic movement of the late 1980s. These as well as other cases were to have a profound impact on the future direction of collective memory in their respective countries and previous research has pointed towards a process that links such memory wars with real wars. But even if actors’ motives and perceptions may have stemmed from a rejection of accepted memory, it is unclear whether their intentions correlate with the outcomes in their respective contexts (Bude 1995, 290). Above all, little has so far been offered to explain why, in some cases, challenges to memory have descended into mass violence—tantamount at times to genocide—whereas, in other cases, similar challenges have instead provoked a relatively peaceful reassessment and adjustment of collective memory. Unlike the impact and legacy of the divisive and radicalised Serbian nationalism that escalated during the 1980s and beyond, there was no massive violence in the wake of what, beyond differences in ideological bent, were remarkably similar uprisings and challenges to legitimacy little over a decade earlier in West Germany. But, as demonstrated by these two similar cases with vastly divergent outcomes, what is it that explains why some memory challenges result in mass violence but others don’t? Research Problem and Hypothesis Although this paper takes up two empirical cases, the theory, line of reasoning as well as findings contained within it are likely to be applicable elsewhere. By moving beyond the assumption that there is a causal relationship between legitimacy challenges involving collective memory and subsequent mass violence, this paper seeks to answer why this is so in some cases, and not so in others. Essentially, what is it that determines whether challenges to the legitimacy of established memory—be these in the form of national, ethnic, class or other narratives—catalyse mass violence or instead remain relatively peaceful in nature? 5 The hypothesis at the heart of this paper suggests that legitimacy contests
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