Beyond Transition?
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BEYOND TRANSITION? MEMORY AND IDENTITY NARRATIVES IN EASTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE EDITED BY: BARBARA TÖRNQUIST-PLEWA, NIKLAS BERNSAND & ELEONORA NARVSELIUS CENTRE FOR EUROPEAN STUDIES AT LUND UNIVERSITY 2015 BEYOND TRANSITION? MEMORY AND IDENTITY NARRATIVES IN EASTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE 1 2 BEYOND TRANSITION? MEMORY AND IDENTITY NARRATIVES IN EASTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE Edited by: Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, Niklas Bernsand & Eleonora Narvselius CFE Conference Papers Series No. 7 Lund 2015 3 The CFE Conference papers series is published by The Centre for European Studies (CFE) at Lund University: Cover photo by Eleonora Narvselius from a market place in Skopje, Macedonia, April 2014 © 2015 The Centre for European Studies at Lund University and the authors Editors: Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, Niklas Bernsand and Eleonora Narvselius Assistant editor: Alexandru Budai ISSN: 1654-2185 The paper is also available in pdf-format at CFE’s website www.cfe.lu.se CENTRE FOR EUROPEAN STUDIES AT LUND UNIVERSITY Box 201 Phone +46 (0)46-222 88 19 SE-221 00 LUND Fax: +46 (0)46-222 32 11 SWEDEN E-mail: [email protected] Printed in Sweden by Media-Tryck, Lund University Lund 2015 A partpart ofof FTIFTI (the(the PackagingPackaging andand NewspaperNewspaper CollectionCollection Service)Service) 4 Table of Content Introduction 7 Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, Niklas Bernsand & Eleonora Narvselius “Transition” in Hindsight: 1990s Transitology as an object of Intellectual History 11 Kristian Petrov Transitional Justice and the Politics of Memory in Europe: An East-West Comparative Exercise 23 Csilla Kiss The Baltic States beyond the Transition: New Approaches to Regional Research 39 Vida Savoniakaitė Postmemory, Post-dependence, Post-trauma: Negotiating Jewish Identity in Post-Communist Poland 55 Aleksandra Szczepan The meanings of Auschwitz in Central Europe before and after 1989 67 Marek Kucia Remeasuring the Distance between Spain and Poland: Similarities and Divergences of Art and Literature Created during Franco’s Regime in Spain and Communism in Poland 87 Matylda Figlerowicz Church and Slaves. Questions on memory about the church controlled forced labour camp in Berlin and its commemoration. A case study. 103 Jarosław Suchoples & Ewa Maria Slaska Official Memory and Legitimization in Kyrgyzstan. The Revolutionary Past in the Public Statements of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev after 2005 131 Nartsiss Shukuralieva Lviv and Chernivtsi – Two Memory Cultures at the Western Ukrainian Borderland 149 Eleonora Narvselius & Niklas Bernsand 5 Identity-building in Post-communist Ukraine: Post-imperial vs Post-colonial Discourses 169 Oleksii Polegkyi Returning to Eurasia from the heart of Europe? Geographical metanarratives in Hungary and beyond 191 Péter Balogh Contributors to the Volume 209 6 Introduction Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, Niklas Bernsand & Eleonora Narvselius This volume collects selected contributions to the international conference Beyond Transition? New Directions in Eastern and Central European Studies, held in Lund on 2-4 October 2013. The conference emerged in cooperation between the Centre for European Studies at Lund University, the Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) at Södertörn University (Stockholm), with generous financial support from the Swedish Society for the Study of Russia, Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The event served as a follow-up conference to the 8th ICCEES World Congress, held in Stockholm in 2010. The conference encouraged participants from various academic fields and with different subregional focuses to go beyond the study of the post-Soviet states and the former socialist countries in Eastern and Central Europe in relation to their trajectory from the old system. It suggested that it might be more rewarding to take into account patterns of convergence and divergence between European countries on both sides of the former Iron Curtain facing the pressures and possibilities of globalisation. Consequently, all the papers in this volume in their own way, more or less explicitly, deal with cases where problems of change and continuity transgress the old East-West border under the impact of larger political, socio- cultural and intellectual trends. Individual contributions The pivotal concept of the conference – transition – is revisited in Kristian Petrov’s contribution. This theoretical essay, “Transition” in Hindsight: 1990s Transitology as an object of Intellectual History, which opens the volume, compares the concept of transition suggested by post-communist transitology with the same term current in Soviet ideology until 1991. The author warns of the perils of the teleological strand of transitology that gained popularity after 1991. This views the starting point (totalitarian communism) and the end point (perfect democracy or market economy) of the post-communist transitions as an 7 abstraction emptied of ontological content. Hence, the value of transition as a practical tool for analysis of really existing conditions becomes questionable and, besides, it runs the risk of reproducing the bias which was typical of communist ideology. In the article Transitional Justice and the Politics of Memory in Europe: An East-West Comparative Exercise, Csilla Kiss opposes the remaining tendency in Western practical politics and academic approaches to treat East European countries as very different from the rest of Europe despite the long time that has passed since they ceased to be part of the Communist Bloc. In her article, Kiss argues that there are many issues along which East European countries can be compared to their Western counterparts. Choosing the issue of transitional justice in general and the politics of memory in particular, and drawing on the examples of postwar and post-communist transitional justice procedures in Europe, she points out the similarities of various transitional justice procedures between cases in Western and Eastern Europe, with an emphasis on the use of transitional justice in shaping the politics of memory of the countries in question. She argues for the possibilities and uses of an East-West comparison across regions, as well as over time, and thus surpasses the old East-West division for future research. A more specific example of post-Soviet transformations is offered by Vida Savoniakaitė in her outline of the changes and continuities in the study of regions in Lithuanian ethnology and anthropology. Savonakaitė traces both how economic and socio-cultural transformations provide new contexts for research on the countryside, and the contradictions in the research discourse itself caught between old and new paradigms and approaches. Critical perspectives on well-established concepts used in studies of post- 1989 East Central Europe are a hallmark of several contributions to the volume. Among them is Aleksandra Szczepan’s paper Post-memory, Post-dependence, Post-trauma: Negotiating Identity in Post-Communist Poland. The argument runs that these three “post” concepts have been transferred from the Western memory, trauma and Holocaust studies and adapted to Polish realities without much reflection or sensitivity to the local realities. The author suggests that examination of the literary accounts created by the post-war generation of Polish Jews might allow peculiar qualities of memory work to be distinguished in the post- communist cultural spaces. Marek Kucia’s article The Meanings of Auschwitz in Central Europe before and after 1989 accounts for what Auschwitz meant in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe before 1989 and what it came to mean in that country and three other Central European countries – the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia – after the demise of communism and beyond. The article outlines the main historical facts about Auschwitz the camp revealed in Poland in 1990, which prompted major changes in the meanings of Auschwitz the symbol there and elsewhere in the former Soviet bloc. It presents the received view of the meanings 8 of Auschwitz in Poland wherein four major meanings – Polish, international, universal, and Jewish – are distinguished in reference to variously defined groups of victims. It also proposes a new perspective that distinguishes three forms of the symbolic meaning of Auschwitz – universal, international, and national – and analyses the changes of their contents, identifying the principal agents of change. Matylda Figlerowicz’s contribution is a comparative study of the artistic works produced under two different political regimes which, arguably, have much in common when it comes to both official representations of the past and counter- memory. The main focus of the essay is the concepts of abject and the fragmentary. These two aspects define the character of the analysed pieces of art created in Francoist Spain and communist Poland. The author argues that, in spite of the different ideologies, the experience of oppressive political systems created similar artistic responses. Among them are similar expressions of counter-memory that elevate, on the one hand, fragmentation of reality and, on the other hand, abjection as something deeply abhorred and repulsive, but domesticated as a part of daily life. Examination of these conceptual pivots of the art created under oppressive political regimes may help to reveal silences, exclusions and omission and, consequently, to promote more open and plural post-totalitarian narratives. Jarosław Suchoples’ and Ewa Maria Slaska’s contribution to the volume