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MIT Department of Political Science
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Paper Abstracts Panel 1: Francesca Cappelletto "Public memories and personal stories:
Recalling the Nazi-fascist massacres"
"Memory-Making Among Gentry in Poland" The paper is based on the life histories of the Polish gentry in the post-war socialist era collected in a period after the regime fell. It differentiates between life histories and life stories and examines the process by which autobiographical memories are transformed into collective memory. The paper argues that the memory the group constructs is structured by and transferred through a variety of means that range from practices of everyday life, staged rituals, purposeful and unintentional invocations of the past, and collective acts of remembrance performed in private and semi-public spaces. And so collective memory continuously negotiates between available historical records, remembered experience, and current social and political agendas, selectively emphasizing, suppressing, and elaborating different aspects in the process.
Elisabeth Jean Wood "Ethnographic Research in the Shadow of Civil War: Explaining Insurgent Collective Action in El Salvador" In this paper I analyze challenges posed by processes of social memory formation for research on local political processes during civil war. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in five case study areas of rural El Salvador during and just after the civil war, I show how subsequent social processes reshaped memories of war and thus complicate the reconstruction of local histories by social scientists. To nonetheless reconstruct the history of civil war in the case-study areas, I gathered a variety of data. In particular, I asked participants in the insurgency to draw large maps showing property rights and land use patterns before and after the civil war. The maps and other data provide evidence of the emergence of an insurgent political culture, a crucial step in the argument of the book manuscript from which the paper is drawn, in which I analyze why some peasants participated in insurgent collective action despite the extremely high risks of doing so. During the presentation, I will show slides of the maps as well as other data gathered during fieldwork. Roger Petersen "Reconstructing Life from Violent Eras: A Comparison of Émigré and Native Narratives" In fieldwork (conducted in 1990-1992) designed to explain local variation in 1940's anti-Soviet resistance in Lithuania, I interviewed roughly equal sets of Lithuanian émigrés and residents of Lithuania. As in the work of Elisabeth Wood, I asked participants to draw maps of their communities. This paper describes differences in memory between the two sets of interviewees with special attention to the role of emotion and meta-narrative.
James Wertsch "Filling in the Blank Spots in History: The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in Russian Collective Memory" The Soviet Union was notorious for treating many episodes and personalities in its history as "blank spots." These blank spots were understood by Soviet citizens as involving something that could not be mentioned-even when they involved someone who had just been at the center of public discourse the day before. During the last few decades of the Soviet Union's existence, these blank spots increasingly became the object of discussion and protest, at least in private settings. One of the assumptions of such discussion was that if these blank spots could only be publicly acknowledged and filled in with accurate information, then the truth would replace falsehood and omission once and for all. For Soviet citizens in the Baltic region, these ideas applied nowhere more obviously than to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. While enjoined from discussing this matter in public, Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians were insistent, at least in private, that this was an episode of violence whose memory would not be lost and whose true story would eventually come out. In this presentation I examine Russian accounts of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and I argue that in post-Soviet Russia, the transformation in the memory of this pact cannot be understood as a single, definitive event yielding a final, fixed account. Instead, it has involved a process of change that has so far involved two basic steps, and this change has given rise to an account that is clearly not what the people of the Baltics had in mind. The key to understanding the dynamics of this process is to be found in the a "schematic narrative template" that shapes Russian collective memory of the events leading up to World War II as well as many other historical episodes.
"Tracking Your Neighbors' Memory Processes" The presentation will address how the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement and the Soviet occupation and annexation of the Baltic countries are presented in Estonian history textbooks. Memories of these events still play an important role in the actual historical consciousness of the Baltic states, as well as in relations between these states and Russia. It is useful to discuss these issues in a wider international context. Olena Ivanova "To Remember or Not? The Memory of the Holocaust as a Part of the War Memory" In this presentation I outline how one of the blank spots of the World War II, namely the Holocaust, has been filled in using examples from American and Ukrainian textbooks. Several narratives about the Holocaust from Ukrainian textbooks have been analyzed, and it appears that in comparison with Soviet times the account of the Holocaust in official history has changed slightly. There is some information about this event, but when provided at all, this information is very brief and vague. An account for what has emerged and why it has emerged will be proposed. The dynamics of the change in narratives about the Holocaust in American textbooks from various years have also been studied. These changes are viewed as attempts to create narratives about the Holocaust that are suitable for the particular political situation at the time. In addition to analyses of textbooks, the presentation will outline information from written reports such as essays and the comments of museum visitors and the insight they provide into how Ukrainians and Americans remember the Holocaust.
Yinan He "National Mythmaking and the Problems of History in Sino-Japanese Relations" Both China and Japan emerged from their war of 1937-1945 tragically traumatized, but the historical interpretation of the war did not become a political issue between Japan and the communist China until the eruption of a textbook controversy in the summer of 1982. The emergence of the history problem as a prominent source of bilateral tension since the 1980s defies two notions of conventional wisdom--that time can heal wounds and that past grievances should be diluted by present interactions and communications between the relevant parties. This paper attempts to address the puzzle using the historical mythmaking theory. It mainly argues that divergence of national memories caused by elite historical mythmaking mainly accounts for the existence of the history problem in Sino-Japanese relations. Before the 1980s mainstream historical narratives of the two countries were less conflictual with one another and the problems of history were subdued because the Cold War structural pressure was so pressing that governments were willing to put aside emotional issues to concentrate on attaining immediate geostrategic interests. When domestic political considerations came to the forefront since the 1980s, flagrantly nationalistic historical myths flourished and bilateral disagreement on past conflict exacerbated, causing serious political disputes over the history issue. Therefore, it is suggested that the future hope of resolving the problems of history in the Sino-Japanese relations is to a large extent hinged on the bilateral efforts to honest, shared memory that would effectively de-mythify national history. Jennifer M. Lind "Apologies and Threat Reduction in Postwar Europe" Diplomats, scholars, and journalists have argued that Germany is less feared by its neighbors because of its efforts to remember and atone for its aggression and atrocities in World War II. People argue that Japan is more feared because it has failed to apologize. But do apologies and other acts of contrition decrease perception of threat between states? Although analysts often make this assertion, the effects of apologies have never been systematically tested. This paper outlines an apology theory and tests it empirically in the case of France and Germany since World War II. In doing so the paper contributes to theoretical debates about the importance of intentions in threat perception, and supports the policy prescription that apologies and other policies of remembrance are useful confidence-building measures between former adversaries. Stephen Van Evera "Memory and the Israel-Palestinian Conflict: Time for New Narrative" Israelis and Palestinians have clung to false historical narratives in an effort to bolster support for their struggle in their own community and abroad. Both narratives blame the other side for the conflict while claiming innocence for their own side. The party most guilty for the Arab-Israel tragedy--the Christian west -receives far less blame than it deserves in both narratives, largely for tactical political reasons. These mythical narratives are well-designed for waging combat but are major impediments to peacemaking. While they persist peace may be impossible. To make peace the two communities should now embrace an honest narrative that puts blame where it belongs: on the Christian west and the vast cruelties it inflicted on the Jewish diaspora over the past millennium. Panel 5: Melissa Nobles ""To Apologize or Not to Apologize?": Historical Facts and Political Claims in Australia and the United States" This paper analyzes the interactive effects between historical narratives and political claims in the cases of Australia and the United States. It examines both the conventional and revisionist views of history, identifying the actors and political claims that these views support and undermine. The paper also questions the common assumption (and expectation) that revised, more truthful, histories will lead to a shared, nearly indisputable, understanding of appropriate responses. Indeed, the demands for apologies and reparations in both Australia and the United States are partly based on this assumption. Yet, the "new histories" themselves require both interpretations: what do they mean? and consideration of whether and how they do and/or should bear on the perceptions and direction of national political life. Indeed, apologies are desired and resisted, in part, because they endorse a particular interpretation of history and understanding of what history now requires and because they imply a particular course of political action. David Mendeloff "Is Truth-Telling Necessary for Post-Conflict Peacebuilding? An Assessment of the Literature" Over the past decade a consensus has emerged among scholars and practitioners on the need for states and societies to address past crimes and misdeeds in the aftermath of war and violent conflict. Some form of truth-telling or "transitional justice," it is argued, is needed to help individuals heal from the trauma of war and ultimately to help former adversaries achieve reconciliation – processes believed essential for successful peacebuilding. However, despite a decade of scholarship and activity by NGOs, national governments and international institutions, a basic assessment of the scholarly and popular literature has yet to be carried out. This paper will assess how much we actually know about the role of truth-telling in the peacebuilding process by critically evaluating the core arguments, evidence, and factual and theoretical assumptions in the literature. It will assess how the literature answers several fundamental questions: How and why are criminal tribunals or truth commissions necessary or sufficient for successful peacebuilding? Does one approach work better than others, and if so why? How does truth-telling help deter violent conflict? How does truth-telling encourage reconciliation? Indeed, is reconciliation an independent cause of peace, or is it more a consequence of peaceful conditions? A preliminary survey reveals less than satisfying answers to these key questions – a finding that itself raises important questions about the process of the accumulation of knowledge in this area and its use by policy practioners. Jon Elster "Memory and Transitional Justice" The paper addresses the impact of memory of wrongdoings on processes
of transitional justice, with emotion as a main intermediate variable.
Three problems are discussed. (i) The impact of the time interval between
the time of wrongdoing and the transition. (ii) The impact of the time
interval between the transition and the legal proceedings. (iii) The
impact of the memory of previous processes of transitional justice. Panel 6: Thomas Berger and David Art, commentators
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