Conclusion

Abstract

The European continent is marked everywhere by traces of earlier interstate and ethnic conflicts. Opportunities and constraints have come into being after the Cold War that bring social memory issues to the fore and enable the actors using them to be favorably heard. Together with what Samuel Huntington (1991) called the ‘third wave of democratization’ (including the ‘velvet’ and ‘colour’ revolutions), the phenomenon of globalization and the flourishing normative European Union (EU) construction process – issues involving representations of the past – have made memory issues polymorphous and infused with new energy. The high salience of memory-related conflicts in post-Communist Europe is linked to three region-specific phenomena: the legacies of two successive dictatorships and the contentious issue of the comparison and/or equivalence of Nazism and Stalinism, which implicitly or explicitly informs most discussions about recent history; the external pressures to ‘deal with the past’ that comes either from European organizations (EU, Council of Europe) or from transnational actors (activists, non-governmental organizations, lawyers, etc.); and the fact that political and social actors from post-Communist countries simultaneously use the national and the international arenas when they make memory-related demands or implement policies of remembrance.