The limits of memory

Benjamin Nienass and Ross Poole Memory and its critics

better theoretical credentials than the notion of collective memory. Even more fundamentally, there It is a commonplace that there is a boom in are those such as Tzvetan Todorov (2000) and memory studies. A term that had been at most Duncan Bell (2008) who argue that the only cohermarginal in social, cultural, and political studies, ent conception of memory understands it as a property of the individual mind, has over the past twenty or so and talk of forms of memory years become central and Benjamin Nienass is a PhD candidate in the other than that of the indiinescapable. There are good Department of Politics at the New School vidual is little more than a reasons to welcome this. Phifor Social Research in New York City. He is misleading and unhelpful losophers and psychologists currently nishing his dissertation on conmetaphor. have long recognised the ceptions of postnational memory in the European context. In the second section we importance of memory in Email: nienb118@newschool.edu attempt to answer these critiindividual human existence; cisms. But our project is not what has occurred in recent Ross Poole is the author of Morality and merely defensive. We will not years has been the extension modernity (1991), Nation and identity (1999), and numerous articles and book offer a blanket defence of the of that recognition to the chapters. He teaches in the Departments of ways in which the concept of equally important role of Philosophy and Politics at the New School memory has been deployed memory in social and politifor Social Research in New York City and is over the past twenty or so cal life. However, there are currently working on a monograph entitled years. Indeed, our project is to also reasons to be wary. Past justice. Email: pooler@newschool.edu encourage more precision in Alongside the memory the use of this concept. We enthusiasts, there have been will argue that if we are to critics and sceptics. Some, for example Kerwin Lee Klein (2000) and Benjamin understand why memory plays such a signicant Robinson (2006), have argued that the proliferation role in the lives of individuals and societies it is of memory talk provides little more than a senti- necessary to recognise its limits. There are two key mentalised (Klein says squishy), moralised, and aspects to our understanding of memory. First, ultimately religious substitute for the rigors of memory is not merely a medium for the transmishistory. Others, for example Noa Gedi and Yigal sion of information from the past to the present; it is Elam (1996) and Duncan Bell (2008), have argued also normative. That is to say, its role is to remind us that where cultural theorists now talk of collective either individually or collectively of those epimemory (for reasons that will become apparent sodes in the past that we ought to take account of in later, we generally prefer collective to social or the present. Second, memory has force; that is, it cultural), a previous generation of theorists moves us to act. If we are to understand the force of would have spoken of myths. This term has a memory, we must focus on its specicity, and not respectable place in anthropology and, its propo- use the term to collect together too heterogeneous nents would argue, it is both less confusing and has and diffuse a range of phenomena.

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Memory studies has largely taken for granted what Jeffrey Olick (2003, p.2) called a peculiar synergy between memory and the nation. Sometimes it has seemed as if national memories were the only memories worth studying (though family memories would occasionally crop up to provide a sanitised model for national memories; see, e.g. Booth 2006). And yet coinciding with the boom in memory studies has been another boom, that in globalisation studies, in which sociologists, cultural theorists, and economists have competed with each other to explain and sometimes celebrate the post-national era. What then is the role of memory in this context? In the third and fourth sections we engage with two recent accounts of the role of memory in the contemporary world. In the third section we consider the claim which we will call the universalisation thesis that amidst the mlange of representations competing for cultural space in the contemporary world, it is possible to discern elements that have a universal resonance. Amongst these elements, the Holocaust has pride of place, and has become a universally recognisable symbol of moral evil. The universalisation thesis is conceptually innovative, and if correct, has important political implications. We argue, however, that it pushes the concept of memory beyond its workable limits, and because of this, it drains it of much of its political force. In the fourth section, we consider a second account of post-national memory that is conceptually less ambitious but more engaged politically. It takes as its starting point the project of creating a political identity based on the European Union. Here the ambition is to construct a common memory for all Europeans, a memory of a past through which they can project a common future. But this memory should not be a national memory writ large. It must nd elements and stories that are appropriate to the democratic, inclusive, and tolerant ways of life envisaged for the future Europe. Once again the Holocaust is selected to play a key role in this project, to provide what is sometimes called a negative founding moment, a crime that Europe must remember and overcome. This conception of post-national memory is an attractive one, especially as it does not have the conceptual problems of the universalisation thesis. However, there are reasons to be sceptical whether any one event, even one of such enormous signicance as the Holocaust, can play this role, without drawing attention away from

other features of European history that are politically relevant to the future of Europe.

The force of memory

Let us begin with the most fundamental criticism of the memory industry (Klein 2000). Memory is undeniably an attribute of individual human beings. Although much remains mysterious, enormous strides have been made over the past hundred years or so by neuroscientists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and even philosophers in understanding how individual memory works. By what right do we extend the notion of memory into the social sphere? Of course people may choose to use terms as they wish, and if one wants to insist that memory is, as a matter of denition, conned to individuals, then we can only point out that this does not preclude others making different choices. A more substantial question concerns the usefulness of the extended concept of memory, that is, whether it enables us to identify and understand aspects of human affairs in ways that would not otherwise be possible. Ultimately, the justication of the socialised concept of memory must lie in whether it generates an enriched understanding of social and political life. For the time being, however, we will take on a less ambitious project. We will show that there are sufcient parallels between individual memory and its social counterpart to justify, if not to mandate, their being subsumed under the same concept, i.e. treated as different forms of memory. Psychologists distinguish two forms of memory. The rst semantic memory is the recollection of information that we have acquired in the past; for example, we remember that Socrates was condemned to death. There is no implication that we were present at the scene, nor even that we remember the occasion when we acquired this knowledge. Semantic memory is pervasive; indeed, on some accounts, it comprises almost all our knowledge (for the empiricist remembering that is almost equivalent to knowing that). But our major concern here will be with the second form of memory, episodic memory. This is the memory that we have of specic events in our lives, as we might remember, for example, the rudeness of the customs ofcer on our rst arrival in the United States. This kind of memory begins with an experience: we witness

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something, or perhaps we do something. At a later point we recall the experience. Since Martin and Deutschers (1966) classic article, it is now accepted that this form of memory involves a causal connection between the remembered experience and the act of remembering. As they present it, the causal sequence involves the formation and retention of an internal trace, both a causal residue and a structural analogue of the original experience, and it is this trace that enables the later experience of recall. Martin and Deutschers project was to analyse our ordinary understanding of memory and they make no attempt to specify the precise nature of the underlying causal relations. However, the enormous progress made in the years since they wrote in specifying the neural processes involved is very much in the spirit of their analysis. Let us compare this understanding of individual memory with its collective counterpart. A specic event in the history of a group, say the battle of Gettysburg in American history, will be experienced and remembered by those involved. But if the memory is to be transmitted to future generations, it must nd other means of storage. No doubt the memories of participants are passed on to their children and others, from one mind to another as it were, in much the same way in which memories were transmitted in pre-literate societies. But this is not the most important mechanism at work in collective memory. It is rather that major events are represented in enduring cultural artefacts; for example, they are described in school textbooks, depicted in paintings, celebrated in political speeches, and commemorated in public holidays, street names, and so on. Citizens of later generations learn about these events while they are at school, and this knowledge is reinforced in their day-to-day lives. Over time, conceptions of a nations history change, and some events retreat to the background, while others are promoted to centre stage. These brief accounts suggest that there are major differences between individual memory and its social counterpart. In the case of the individual, the transmission of the original experience is through processes that are internal to the individual (Martin and Deutscher make this a condition of memory), and the ultimate nature of these processes is a question for the natural sciences to determine. In the case of the group, the transmission of the original experience is cultural, that is, through external artefacts. And although there are

important causal linkages between the original events and the various acts of recollection, these links involve social processes and political decisions of one kind or another, and these are appropriately studied by sociologists and cultural theorists. This suggests that individual memory is in some broad sense a natural phenomenon, whilst collective memory is a social, and even a political construction. This suggestion is, we argue, false. Both forms of memory are based on the natural capacities of human beings, but both may be viewed as social, even political, constructions. When we recognise this, we will come to a better understanding of the nature of individual and social memory, and of the afnities between them. Let us start with the issue of externality versus internality. No doubt, much of our memory work is internal: things come to mind more or less as needed. But it is also the case that as individuals, we often store our memories in the external world. When we turn on our computers in the morning, we are reminded of what we were thinking the night before, of birthdays we need to celebrate, and of appointments we must keep. For most readers of this journal, the memory on their hard drive will have become an essential complement to their own. And this is not just a computer-age development. Ever since the invention of writing (and probably well before), human beings have made use of items in the external world to compensate for the limitations of their internal equipment. Some philosophers and cognitive scientists have argued that we should think of our minds as extended into our environment (see, e.g., Clark 2010; Clark and Chalmers 1996; Menary 2010; for criticisms, see Rupert 2004). We need not go this far. All we need to emphasise is that in our day-today lives, our individual memories work through the various items (computers, diaries, notebooks, numbers on the back of our hands, marks on trees, etc.) which we have endowed with meaning, and these enable us massively to increase the resources of our minds. Once we recognise that memory, together with much else in our cognitive and emotional lives, depends on a complex interaction with our socially and individually formed environment, we are unlikely to think that externality marks an important difference between collective and individual memory. Nor need we be troubled by Kleins secularist worry (2000, pp.130,141142) that nding meaning in the material world resurrects the archaic notion of memory as the union of

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divine presence and material object (2000, p.142; see also p.130). Humans have had the capacity to create meaning in the material world since well before the beginning of written history; it is something we do whenever we put pen to paper or ngers to keyboard. It is fundamental to communication and is a necessary condition of the most secular and scientic discourse (including, of course, Kleins own). One of the indispensable functions of memory is to remind us what from the past we must take into account in the present. Its role is not simply to store information; it is also to make it available to us as and when we need it. But this is not the only function of memory. While memory always has a cognitive aspect, it also functions to remind us of what we ought to do. Or, to put this more precisely, its role is to alert us to events in our past that we must take into account in deciding what to do in the present. If, to take an example discussed by Nietzsche (see Nietzsche 1887, Essay Two), we have promised to do something, we must remember the promise at the appropriate time. But the memory cannot merely be that we have promised, or even the mere recollection of the act of promising. It must also be that we are bound by that promise. That is, our memory presents us with an event in our past that remains as a present commitment; it is thus a constraint on our current desires. This aspect of memory is a pervasive feature of our moral lives. It is present whenever we undertake responsibilities reaching into the future. It is involved when we form friendships, have families, join associations, or enter into professional relationships. In each of these cases we imply an undertaking to behave in certain ways in the future. For us to enter into these forms of human life, we must have a form of memory that retains these undertakings as current constraints on what we do. Nietzsche refers to this form of memory as memory of the will; we might also call it conative memory (see Poole 2008, pp.153155; 2009, pp.125128); both terms are intended to capture the idea that memory functions not merely to inform, but also to form our present will. Memory transmits the demands of the past into the present; for it represents the persistence of the past in our moral lives. It is for this reason that memory is normative. Conative memory does not operate independently of cognitive memory. Indeed, it is crucial that it always has a cognitive aspect. But if memory were merely cognitive, it

would not have the force that makes it such an important aspect of our lives. There is no doubt that human memory, as with the memory of other animals, is based on interesting, indeed remarkable, features of our neural make-up. But there is an important social component: we must also learn to remember. We must learn, for example, what kinds of things, and in particular, what events, we need to remember. Some of these will be a matter of individual propensity or interest. But others derive from the various norms governing social interaction. If, for example, children are to acquire the capacity to make promises, they must learn how to commit a future self to do certain things. As we have seen, this requires that the future self has the necessary cognitive/conative memories, and that the child (the current self) knows this. This is not the place to discuss the ways in which the child acquires this capacity; no doubt punishment and reward will play their part, but even more signicant will be the relationships of acknowledgment into which the child enters. The outcome will not merely be a certain memory capacity, but also the sense that in acting and in planning, the child will learn to regard its future self as itself, that is, as its own self in the future. Moreover, the child will also learn to regard a past self as itself in the sense that it is responsible for the actions of that past self. That is to say, the child acquires a sense of its identity through time. Thus dual appropriation of past and future creates a sense of self, that is, not only the subject of a range of present experiences, but also of a range of past and future ones. It is this sense of self which both forms and is formed by the way in which we appropriate the past as ours in memory; it both forms and is formed by the practices of individual accountability and their attendant emotions (pride, shame, guilt, remorse, etc.). There are three interrelated phenomena here. One is the normative force of memory: the sense that it makes a demand on us; another is the set of social practices through which we are as individuals held to be accountable by ourselves as well as others for what we have done (or sometimes failed to do) in the past; and the third is the sense that we have of ourselves and others as retaining an identity through time, that is, of being the same persisting self. Philosophers have been tempted to suppose that the third phenomenon, the notion of a continuant self, is the metaphysical foundation of the other two. But it seems more plausible to

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suppose that the three phenomena are interdependent, that is, that they emerge together in the life of the young human being. The child acquires a sense of its identity, that of itself as persisting through time, as it acquires what we have called a conative memory, and this develops as it responds to the demands and rewards of entry into the human social world. The child becomes a moral agent, a locus of responsibility, and while this has its costs (guilt, remorse, and the like), it also makes possible a wealth of experience (love and other forms of commitment) that would not otherwise be available. We might say that the three phenomena are all part of the same social construction; however, we need to bear in mind that these are not superimposed on but developments of the biological potential of the human body. It is when we recognise that constructed nature, not only of individual memory, but of attendant notions such as individual identity, responsibility, and the like, that we will be able to come to terms with the profound parallels between individual and collective memory. To oversimplify: collective memory plays the same role in the life of groups as individual memory plays in the life of individuals. This is an oversimplication because some groups are, what we might call, mere associations, and do not function as independent moral agents. Or, in other words, they have no moral presence except the one that the individual members bring to it. But where groups are conceived as moral agents in their own right, they function not merely as bearers of responsibility, but as sources of responsibility for the individuals who are their members. For groups of this kind we might appropriately call them communities there will be a strong sense of their identity over time; that is to say, the acts of the past endure as responsibilities for the present. The responsibilities will be transmitted through the various forms of collective memory, and the identity of the community will be constituted in part, though only in part, by the appropriate group memories. These memories will be, as the memories of an individual, both cognitive and conative. They will transmit not only information (or misinformation) about the past, but also the responsibilities associated with that information. In sharing these memories, individual members will be aware of the responsibility they have to (and for) the past of their community. For the past two or three centuries, the nation has been conceived of as a community in this sense: it is not

only the locus of certain responsibilities, but it is also their moral source. It makes demands on its individual members, and at the same time has provided them with a strong sense of identity. The major political role of the nation has been to legitimise, or sometimes to delegitimise, the state. For the nationalist, a state is legitimate if and only if it embodies a nation, and the hybrid term nation state signies the ideal union of community and polity. It is this central political role that explains the peculiar synergy between memory and nation noted by Olick. Let us now address the two other criticisms mentioned earlier. The rst was that collective memory is simply another name for myth; and the second, that it is a squishy, moralistic substitute for history. These criticisms may be treated as complementary. Taken together they suggests that the term memory is ambiguous; in one sense, it means myth, and in another, history. If we are to understand the concept of memory, we need to resolve this ambiguity, that is, to explain both of these temptations and also provide the means to resist them. Avishai Margalit gestures towards this problem when he writes: Modern shared memory is located between the push and pull of two poles: history and myth (Margalit 2002, p.63). But he does not pursue it. What is needed is an account of memory that explains its own eld of force. There is no doubt that collective memories and myths occupy overlapping cultural ground. To the extent that collective memories provide stories that members of a group share and depictions of larger-than-life heroes with whom they can identify, this aspect of memory comes close to that of myth. Much memory is mythical. But to identify the two notions would be to ignore the specic normativity conveyed by memory. Myths are normative to the extent that they embody ideals to which members of the group aspire. For example, the story of Robin Hood speaks to a kind of egalitarianism and challenge to authority thought to be characteristic of the English people. Perhaps the various depictions of the American West in nineteenth and twentieth century ction helped form an ideal of self-sufciency and independence that speaks to the American self-understanding. To the extent that myths have a certain narrative indeterminacy, they allow different conceptions of national character to be advanced and disputed. But the role that mythology plays in collective life does not depend upon any assumption about its

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truth. It may be, for example, that an outlaw corresponding to Robin Hood did actually exist in thirteenth century England and that many of the stories of the American West are based on actual incidents and people. But this is irrelevant. The force of the stories lies in the stories, not in their historical truth. Myths usually take place in the past, but it is in the imaginary past of once upon a time; it is not the past investigated by historians. It is in this respect that memories differ from myths. In practice, of course, the borderline between memory and myth is a blurred one. Many nations have stories of their origins, the founding moment in which the nation came into existence, and it may not be clear what the status of these stories is. Did God actually give the land of Israel to the children of Israel? Or does this story merely express an intimate connection between land and religion, not uncommon in national identities? The answer to questions such as these is not without political signicance. But in the present context it is sufcient to emphasise that the normative role of memory is to point to particular incidents and events in the past that have force in the present. It is because we promised something yesterday that we must do it today. It is because slavery and institutional racism were part of the life of the United States for around two hundred years of its existence that the United States of today has special responsibilities towards AfricanAmericans. The specic normativity of memory arises from its claim to represent an actual past. What passes for memory both in groups and individuals may be distorted or simply false. But the distortion and falsity is often due to the attempt to evade the responsibilities of the past. There are lots of ways in which we might criticise myths as, for example, sexist, racist, or imperialist. But it would be a misunderstanding to criticise them as false. Whether or not Robin Hood existed is irrelevant to his place in English national mythology. But it is never irrelevant to evaluate a nations memory for its truth or falsity. Memory is about the past. This is a tautology (though one that social scientists often need to be reminded of). This means that memory has the same subject matter as history. But this does not mean, as Klein charged, that memory is simply a squishy and unreliable substitute for history. Memory is history told in the rst person. That is to say, memory always has a bearer; a subject whose past it depicts. Of course, much history is written in

the rst person, as potential memory (we borrow the phrase from Assmann 1995, p.132). Indeed, the academic discipline of history came into existence as historians competed with each other to tell the stories of the nations which were now moving onto the centre stage of history. Today, many historians revisit their nations past not merely to celebrate it, but also to revise their countys understanding of it. The preferred audience of their work is the nation. Of course, not all history written from the point of view of the nation comes to be part of that nations memory. Manuscripts do not get published; books remain unread or only attract the attention of scholars. Often major reinterpretations are met by counterarguments, and national memory remains fractured between two opposing accounts of the past (think of the debate in Israel about the fate of the Palestinian residents in 1948). Indeed, most national memories exhibit, if not fractures, at least tensions as different accounts of the national past compete for a place on the moral agenda of the present generation. Historians debates about such fractures and tensions are commonplace. The animosity with which these debates are carried out and the public attention they receive give some indication that these are not merely scholarly differences, but bear on issues of national selfunderstanding and public policies. We will not understand what is at issue in these debates if we conceive them as being solely about current politics; they are also about the past. Here as elsewhere, the normativity of memory, what we called its conative character, depends on its cognitive credentials. Memory is hostage to history, however much it tries to controvert it. That memory is subject-centred history, does not mean that it is subjective.

The universalisation thesis

The force of memory depends on its claim that it represents an actual past, and that the past it represents is the past of a specic subject. Truth and identity are crucial to the politics of memory. What then is the role of collective memory in a world in which the claims of truth are suspect, and the very existence of its favoured collective identity the nation is under threat? We will not attempt to chart the various trajectories pointing towards a decline of the nation (for one account, together with some cautionary remarks, see Poole 1999, ch.5). However, one that

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is especially relevant concerns the fragmentation of culture. When earlier theorists projected the globalisation of economic relations, they anticipated that it would bring in its train a world culture (Marx and Engels spoke of a world literature). But what has happened has been the reverse. Economic globalisation, together with the associated changes in transport and media technology, has generated a diversication of cultural forms, both within and across the boundaries of nationstates. Internal minorities, migrants, and diasporas who might previously have been assimilated into the prevailing national cultures have increasingly sought and achieved recognition in their own right. As with other cultural forms, there has been a diversication of memory. A common narrative of events is more difcult to achieve, and the past becomes little more than a site of cultural contestation. Andreas Huyssen speaks of the mnemonic convulsions of our culture, as memory now seems chaotic, fragmentary, and free-oating and without clear political or territorial focus (Huyssen 1995, p.7; see also Huyssen 2003, p.17; Olick 2003, p.3). One feature of memory debates is the increasing appeal to symbols that originated outside the national frame of reference. Often, these transnational symbols have accrued such symbolic power that their incorporation in localised struggles provides extra leverage to claim-makers. In some cases, the experience of other communities has become so well known that other groups make sense of their own experiences in analogy with it. When German demonstrators in Dresden refer to Guernica and Coventry, they are using the power of these names to claim their own place in the pantheon of victims. The suffering of others is recognised but largely as a route towards the recognition of their own. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider have argued that the way in which universally recognised transnational symbols enter into national debates points towards a development of new forms of cosmopolitan memory (Levy and Sznaider 2002, p.102) . In their scenario, the nation continues to be the preferred subject of memory; they argue, however, that as national memories take on transnational tropes their content becomes increasingly universal. Following Ulrich Beck, Levy and Sznaider use the concept of cosmopolitanisation to refer to a process of internal globalisation, that is, a process in which national identities are transformed by translating universal

symbolic elements into the everyday local experiences and the moral life-worlds of the people (Beck 2002, p.17). It is this transformation which gives the universal its political presence:
[S]trong identications are only produced when distant events have a local resonance. But paradoxically, this ethnocentric focus on events is precisely the process that causes a belief in, and then willingness to act on, universal values. (Levy and Sznaider 2002, p.92)

This universality is not the universality of abstract principles. It is, at least initially, the recognition of the universality implicit in a specic, perhaps unique, event. But through comparison or identication, the universality is detached from its original referent and reattached to other events. It is because universality is fused with particularity that it has motivational force. Cosmopolitanisation, in this special sense, is a widespread phenomenon. Stories and themes which may initially have played a role in specic national imaginings have become a common cultural property, if not of mankind as a whole, at least of those with access to movies and television. The stories of Robin Hood and the American West are good examples of this form of universalisation. But Levy and Sznaiders special concern is with the Holocaust, and the way in which it has become a universally recognised symbol of evil. They argue, surely plausibly, that through media depictions and its role in political rhetoric, the Holocaust has become available to play a role in any number of local and particular contexts. They recognise that the Holocaust does not necessarily mean the same for everyone. Nor does it replace national memories. These memories do not vanish, but are nevertheless transformed. This dual process of particularisation and universalisation of the Holocaust means that it will ultimately function as a symbol of transnational solidarity (Levy and Sznaider 2002, p.93). There is something of a paradox here: on the one hand, the images of the Holocaust have a concrete particularity camps, gas chambers, emaciated prisoners in striped clothes, tattooed numbers on wrists; on the other, if it is to work as a universal signier of systematic violence, especially against ethnic groups, it must be detachable from the circumstances in which the Holocaust actually occurred. It is only because of this detachment that the Holocaust can serve as symbol of human rights violations in general.

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There are various problems with this scenario (for more criticisms, see Poole 2010). One is of particular concern to us here. If the universalisation of the Holocaust requires detachment, what is the process by which it gets reattached (see Rothberg 2009b, p.28)? It is important to speak of the interplay between the particular and the universal, but we need to look much more closely at the motivation and to put it bluntly the politics involved in the process of reattaching. Despite Dubiels (2003, pp.6970) reassurances, the status of the Holocaust is no guarantee that it will not be mobilised to serve particular interests indeed, it is a near guarantee that it will be. Levy and Sznaider (2006, p.18) note the way in which the media and politicians justied military intervention during the Kosovo conict by emphasising the parallels with the Holocaust. However, we should complement this with Michael Ignatieffs (2001, pp.4546) claim that those involved deliberately provoked atrocities so that the human rights agenda would be mobilised on their behalf. We have argued earlier, that the specic normativity of memory depends on its relationship to a subject. Memory works to remind an individual or collective subject of something in its past that it must take into account in the present. How then can the Holocaust be incorporated into the memory of nations that were not themselves involved in the Holocaust? Levy and Sznaider illustrate their account of the universalisation of Holocaust memory with the examples of Israel, Germany, and the United States. All of these are atypical. Germany and Israel both have the Holocaust as a central item in their history. They were involved, as victims and murderers, in a way that other countries were not. To be sure, there is an element of political choice involved. After the Second World War, the German Democratic Republic conceived itself as institutionally, politically, and culturally distinct from the Third Reich; consequently, the Holocaust was not on the GDRs agenda. On the other hand, the German Federal Republic recognised a form of national continuity, and took (some) responsibility for reparations, apologies, and the like. For East Germany, the deeds of the Third Reich were history; for the Federal Republic, memory. The state of Israel did not exist at the time of the Holocaust. However, it afrmed its continuity with the victims, with the right to speak and receive reparations on their behalf, and this afrmation has been recognised by other states. The

case of the United States is more complex, and in a way more interesting. In an obvious sense, the United States had only a marginal role in the Holocaust. It might well have done more than it did, especially with regard to refugees; and it played a signicant role in the defeat of the Third Reich and bringing the slaughter to an end (though the direct involvement of the Soviet Union was much greater). Very few historians would judge the Holocaust to be a signicant episode in American history. However, in terms of political rhetoric and commemorative practice, the Holocaust has been written into a central place. Levy and Sznaider interpret this in terms of universalisation, but it is more plausible to see it as elevating a particular event to a place in a nations self-understanding. It is as if the Holocaust has retrospectively become an event in American history. American citizens can now remember it as an event that is on their moral agenda. As we shall see, something like this is envisaged in the construction of a European memory. But in the case of the United States, the appropriation of the Holocaust seems to have more to do with the relationship with the state of Israel than with the adoption of a universal political agenda. In no other country does the Holocaust occupy anything like this position. Proponents of the universalisation thesis are right to point out the incredible reach of the Holocaust in popular culture and political rhetoric. There can be no doubt that it is recognised as an event of unimaginable evil. They may even be right that this helps generate empathy for those suffering from extreme violations of human rights (though we are inclined to believe that the very specicity of the images of the Holocaust might also stand in the way). But this has little to do with memory, at least in the sense that memory generates specic responsibilities. Because we have learned about the Holocaust, we remember that terrible events occurred. But this is semantic memory. This form of memory is cognitively omnipresent: it refers to whatever knowledge we have learned or acquired in the past. It does not place a specic responsibility on those who have that knowledge. The Holocaust may carry some moral purchase from the perspective of the observer, but not as a memory in the sense of the word relevant here. When, for example, Australians make use of historical and emotional comparisons to the Holocaust in working through their history of displacing and killing the aboriginal population on the continent,

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they do not remember the Holocaust instead of Australian history (Levi 2007, p.127), but they remember their history through the prism of the Holocaust. This does not mean that we might not form the appropriate episodic memories of the Holocaust. Indeed, we have suggested that the Holocaust seems to have achieved this status in the United States. But this requires the existence or the creation of an appropriate subject of that memory. We will look at a project of this kind in the next section.

A European memory?
In the past sixty years, Europe has become a name not just for a geographical region, but for a political project. Just what the project is remains a matter of debate. But we will begin with a minimal characterisation. At the very least, it involves the transfer of powers and responsibilities from the constituent states to political and legal bodies representing Europe as a whole (or at least, those who are members of European Union). The project involves the creation of an integrated Europe, one which is democratic, inclusive, and tolerant of minority cultures, and for which a return to the enormously destructive wars and genocide characteristic of its recent history would be unthinkable. One way of describing this project is to say that Europe would not be a scene of conict, but an identity. This sets the scene for this discussion. For a European identity involves a common understanding (We are Europeans), and this in turn involves the creation of a common memory, that is of a past that with all its diversity could yet be recognised by all current members as their own. The project of creating a European memory is not dissimilar to the various nineteenth century projects of creating national memories, in which different regional identities were appropriated into a common narrative. Consequently, several authors think of a European memory as a larger unifying memory that can overcome national differences precisely by repeating on the European level what has worked on the national level: the creation of a political community around a unifying narrative. In this model, European memory would be a national memory writ large. One feature of this form of memory politics has been the search for a foundational moment, a common source that created and formed the European people. Perhaps

the revolutions of 1848 marked the beginning of a democratic Europe (see Krner 2003 on the European character of the democratic revolutions). Or perhaps it was the Treaty of Rome that marked the beginning of Europes success story after 1945 (Leggewie 2008, p.230). But these examples are unconvincing. Despite their European dimension, the democratic revolutions of 1848 were markedly different in their causes and outcome, and a common overarching narrative seems too obviously imposed by retroactive concerns. And the pragmatic character of the Rome Treaty and the involvement of only six of the current twentyseven member states make shared enthusiasm around this particular event unlikely. Indeed, its very exclusivity suggests a higher status to the founding members, and this helps divide Europe into a core and a periphery (Hutchinson 2003, p.47). Moreover, the very moment that was supposed to provide for a more extensive and symbolically weighted refounding the constitutional effort of 2005 was famously rejected in two national referenda, in France and in the Netherlands. Consequently, in 2007 the EU went back to the language of treaties (the Lisbon Treaty), amending the treaties of Rome and Maastricht rather than fully replacing them. This failure may indicate that the search for an iconic moment, one that contains in embryo the future history (if not the original sin that must be worked through), represents a distorted form of memory politics. It may be more appropriate to search for necessarily complex and conictual narratives, than to mythologise the moment of origin. From this perspective, the fact that European identity constructions lack the sacralised founding event characteristic of traditional nations should be conceived not as a weakness but as a strength. However, there remain many features of the search for a European identity that resemble the undesirable aspects of nation building. Europe is conceived of as Christian, civilised, or enlightened, where these notions are dened against various non-European others. This exclusionist logic has re-emerged as a dominant sequence of European identity building (Challand 2009a, p.87), most notably in attempts to posit Europe against an Islamic other, in either Christian or secular terms (Casanova 2004; Challand 2009b). The debate about the admission of Turkey provides evidence of the continuing presence of these exclusivist conceptions of identity.

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A more interesting interpretation both politically and conceptually of the European project involves the attempt to go beyond the nationstate model. This is the idea that European integration is a political project of a radically different kind, intended to go beyond the nation, not reproduce it. It involves the chance to rethink the possibilities of politics on the basis that Europe really isnt there (Diez 2004, p.332, quoting Walker 2000, pp.2829). In this interpretation, the political project is an essentially creative one: the new Europe will not be built on pre-existing models, and especially not that of the discredited nationstate. In this spirit, theorists, political actors, and commentators alike have sought a different kind of founding moment, not one that sets the agenda for Europe, but one that limits itself to setting out what must be avoided. They have sought, in other words, a negative foundational moment. Something of the normative interest in this idea emerges if we compare it with more traditional notions of national identity, where all too often the celebration of what is ones own depended on differentiating oneself from what is other. But, as Arash Abizadeh (2005) has argued, this differentiation need not take as its target the foreigner outside (or inside) ones borders; it may focus on ones own past from which one has to differentiate oneself (Abizadeh 2005; see also Diez 2004). The shift from ones relationship to a spatial other to ones relationship to ones temporal other has profound political implications. We differentiate ourselves from our spatial others by excluding them; we differentiate ourselves from our past by changing ourselves. And this provides a new slant on the politics of memory. We remember the past not to emulate it, but to repudiate it. In accordance with this shift from the spatial to the temporal other, authors like Waever (1995) nd a tendency in Europe to formulate cooperative political projects as a response to the conictual past. There is no doubt that the immense destruction of the two wars was a strong motivation in the initial moves towards European unity. In more recent years, there has been a shift in emphasis. It has not been the war as such, but rather the Holocaust that has been assigned the role of the negative foundational event (Diner 2003; Hackmann 2009). One reason for this choice is that it seems uncontroversial, at least amongst the political elites. No one in mainstream politics will disagree with the idea that the Holocaust is the ultimate

horror which must not recur. It also represents in extreme form some of the features of the old Europe that the European Union is intended to overcome: racism, extreme forms of nationalism, and a form of sovereignty that gave states almost unlimited powers within their borders. There has undoubtedly been a convergence around Holocaust commemoration, for example common memorial days, agreements about the future prevention of genocide, laws against Holocaust denial, etc. Since 1989, there has been a more open debate about the Holocaust, and especially about the complicity or worse of ordinary citizens, in several Eastern European states. As Levy and Sznaider pointed out, Holocaust rhetoric has also played a signicant role in mobilising European public opinion in favour of various military interventions. It needs to be emphasised that the creation of new memories, ones that are appropriate for the political entity that is being formed, is not a matter of making up history. It is rather a matter of recognising those historical events that ought to be conceived as aspects of a common past. This is not a matter of inventing a new history, but of creating a new relationship to the past. However, there are reasons to be sceptical of the proposal that the Holocaust should serve as the primary element in these memories. The centrality of the Holocaust for some countries, especially Germany, suggests that other countries, especially new Eastern members, have to catch up with their partners in working though this heritage, even though many would prefer to focus on the more immediate communist past. Benoit Challand (2009c, p.399) speaks of Holocaust memory as a passage oblige which has the power to reinforce a sense of an EastWest divide. Even Diner, who is more favourable to the idea of the Holocaust as a negative European founding moment, acknowledges its potential to put several countries most notably Germany rmly at Europes core (Diner 2003, p.42). Even if the Holocaust plays a central role in commemorative practices throughout Europe, it does so in ways that show the great differences in the way it is remembered. Polands debate around Jedwabne was conducted through the national lens. It did not address the Holocaust as a European catastrophe per se, but through the question about the specic historical responsibilities of Poland. Lothar Probst describes the United Kingdoms commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day in 2001, which included references to Kosovo, Cambodia, Bosnia,

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and Rwanda (Probst 2003, p.55). He rightly doubts that the same universal message would have emerged from a German commemoration. This does not mean that Germanys debates are foreign to universalisation efforts. One might even claim that much of the discourse in Germany is driven by efforts to Europeanise the Holocaust, to make it less specically tied to Germany. But the constraints on abstraction and instrumentalisation of the Holocaust are higher because of the need to remember the Holocaust as an event in German history. So it is not surprising that there have been moves to promote other events as the symbolic centre of Europes (negative) foundation. Some have argued that the Second World War was the dening European event, and that the Holocaust can only properly be understood in that context. Others have argued for a more abstract understanding of these founding moments. Marc Crepon (2006) has suggested that Europes three negative touchstones are nationalism, totalitarianism, and imperialism, and that these should guide its future as a political project. This is not the place to investigate these suggestions in detail. In our view, it is necessary to move away from the mythology of single founding moments, even negative ones. Europe has an immensely complex history, and if there is a need for a European Union, it must arise out of that history as a whole, not one or two episodes in it. A common European memory must be one that does justice to that history. We should not look at European memory as a zero-sum struggle (see Rothberg 2009a, pp.17) in which one episode must compete with another, the Holocaust with the Second Word War, 1848 with 1989, etc. A more appropriate memory will place episodes, especially iconic episodes such as the Holocaust, in their historical context, so as to bring out their causal connections and conceptual afnities with other episodes in that history. Nor can the project of creating a common memory avoid controversy, and it should not even try. We should bear in mind that memory politics is politics, that is, it involves selecting a past that bears on present directions and responsibilities. Sometimes the past will be uncomfortable. It will challenge the current self-understanding and impose heavy responsibilities. Consider, for example, what has been a telling silence in European memory debates: the memory of imperialism and colonialism (Diez 2004). This is a negative memory that speaks to almost all of

Europe; it also powerfully addresses the relationship to the other (in this case, a territorial other) in ways that bear on the present, and especially on one of the key issues in contemporary Europe, that of immigration and refugees. It would be a difcult memory, reminding Europeans of the ways in which their predecessors imposed themselves on the non-Western world, and of the economic exploitation, cultural destruction and loss of life that this involved. It is not, like the Holocaust, a horror that can be relegated to the never again past. It would require the recognition that the current problems of immigration and minorities are only the most recent episodes in Europes relationship with the non-Western world. Of course, there are well entrenched strategies of denial, most notably historical amnesia (e.g., Belgium in relation to its African past), imperialist nostalgia, especially but not only in Britain (Kumar 2008), and so on. In Germany, all other crimes seem overshadowed by the Holocaust, though, interestingly, German colonial crimes have recently emerged in academic debates precisely because they were linked to the Holocaust (a connection noted years ago by Hannah Arendt 1973, ch.7, and Aim Csaire 1950). Perhaps the main problem is that the European project has been inward looking from the beginning. It was designed to overcome problems in the European past, and these were conceived as problems within Europe, not problems of Europe. But the abstraction of European history from the wider world is self-serving mythology. Hitlers invasion of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was an explicitly colonialist and genocidal project (Snyder 2010). Even today, some countries on the periphery of Europe see themselves as victims of a Franco-German imperial strategy (Hutchinson 2003, p.49). We should not lose sight of some positive aspects of the European memory debate. Too often, collective memory debates have focused on which aspect of a glorious past to celebrate. But more recently we witness a politics of negative memories, or what Gudehus (2008) has called postheroic remembrance, the self-critical engagement with a problematic past. Beck and Grande (2007, p.134), and other theorists of a cosmopolitan Europe, have encouraged us to direct our attention to the genuinely European self-contradiction, which expresses itself in the fact that not only the very traditions from which . . . the Holocaust [and)] the colonial, nationalistic, and genocidal

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madness spring are European, but also the standards of evaluation that help us deal with them. Others (e.g., Giesen 2003) have found one such emerging standard in the practices of commemoration themselves. But we must be careful. Shame about the past can easily slide into pride in ones moral capacity to judge that past. In Germany, where the critical engagement with the past is most pronounced (Gudehus 2008), there are signs of self-satisfaction, an atonement pride (Warburg 2010, p.53, our translation) that has the consequence of placing Germany at the forefront of Europe once again. The other positive feature of the European debate is the recognition of the relationship between memory and a particular political project, namely the creation of a European Union. It is the weakness of what we called the universalisation thesis that it claimed that the cultural presence of the Holocaust was enough to create a politics of human rights. The European project recognises that the political work needs to be done; that a new memory must be associated with institutional transformation. Creating a European memory will be part of creating a European identity, one that recognises an identity with the historical past, even one fragmented by political borders and rivalries, but also a difference from it. It will recognise the continuing signicance of national memories, even when it seeks to go beyond them. This is not easy, but nor is it impossible. What is essential for understanding both the project and its problems is a recognition of the political issues at stake. Too often, and here some of the critics we considered above are on the right track, memory talk has served as a substitute for engagement with current politics. The demands of memory are that we do justice to the past, not simply as a kind of ritual of remembrance (We will never forget . . .), but in addressing the problems and challenges that we inherit from our history.

Memory as unnished business

We have argued that if we are to understand the force of memory we must recognise its relationship to a subject. We recognise that memories are social constructions; but they are social constructions that work though a relationship to a specic past, namely, that of that subject. There is no reason to rule out the possibility of the formation of new post-national communities of memory, especially in the globalised world of today. But we must bear in mind that the creation of memories is an aspect (and only an aspect) of the creation of new forms of identity. These are not created in a space devoid of historical constraints; the force of memory depends on the claim to provide a plausible link between the new community and what it recognises, or comes to recognise, as its past. Both of the approaches to memory that we discussed in the last two sections attempt to break with the national paradigm. What we called the universalisation thesis overlooks the way in which the force of memory remains tied to old (and new) particular identities. The quest for a memory appropriate to a post-national Europe is more promising, but it remains unclear precisely what a post-national memory might look like. In its search for a neutral, and hence non-political memory for Europe, it falls prey to some of the problematic features of national memory building. One step forward would be to acknowledge and make explicit the politics involved in the creation of collective memories, and to recognise that memory involves complexity, conict, and contestation. We must also recognise that the language of memory implies particularity. In the wake of disintegrating national narratives about the past, conceptions of post-national memory will be served better if they make these elements explicit, rather than hide them behind claims of newly integrated memories on the European or global level.

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