Controversies over historical interpretation have become a key focus of contemporary politics. Recently, these issues have taken on particular prominence in Europe, where a burgeoning array of “memory laws” has sparked heated debates. While laws prohibiting Holocaust denial are their progenitors, most of the newer laws are intended to shape, rather than simply to reflect, social norms about how the past should be understood and discussed. They also reflect concerns about maintaining national unity and cultural coherence in the face of European integration. As such, these laws constitute both a response to the postnational order and a threat to liberalism.
About the Authors
George Soroka
George Soroka is lecturer on government and assistant director of undergraduate studies at Harvard University. He is coeditor of Ukraine After Maidan: Revisiting Domestic and Regional Security (2018).
Félix Krawatzek is senior researcher at the Centre for East European and International Studies in Berlin and an associate member of Nuffield College, Oxford. He is author ofYouth in Regime Crisis: Comparative Perspectives from Russia to Weimar Germany (2018).
Some liberals attribute the origins of our polarized political era to “identity politics.” But multiculturalism need not provoke majoritarian anxieties — not if national identities can open ways for all…
The fall of the Berlin Wall gave East Europeans a euphoric sense that they were about to give European democacy a new direction. But as many of their countries prepare…
