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Keynote Lecture "A useful past? Collective memory, security, and international relations"

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This talk analyses the use and misuse of collective memory in international relations. The perceived past, articulated by cultural and political elites, becomes a universal tool for representing the states and identities cherished by these states in the international arena. As a result, international relations turn into the scenery of competition between various official memory narratives, often resulting in mnemonic conflicts and memory wars. Conventionally, this issue is considered mainly through the prism of Realpolitik in the context of elites’ rational interests. This paper proposes a different approach: to examine the problem in the context of ontological security considerations and mnemonic anxiety, where rational and irrational motifs and actions entangle. The paper presents two cases of mnemonic anxiety in action: the extreme case of bilateral Russian-Ukrainian relations (shared history as a casus belli) and transnational memory politics, represented by the idea of a common European history.