This volume of essays and interviews by Polish, British, and American academics and journalists provides an overview of current Polish politics for both informed and non-specialist readers. The essays consider why and how PiS, Law and Justice, the party of Jarosław Kaczynski, returned to power, and the why and how of its policies while in power. They help to make sense of how “history” plays a key role in Polish public life and politics. The descriptions of PiS in Western media tend to rework old stereotypes about Eastern Europe that had lain dormant for some time. The book addresses the underlying question whether PiS was simply successful in understanding its electorate, and just helped Poland to revert to its normal state. This new Normal seems quite similar to the old one: insular, conservative, xenophobic, and statist. The book looks at the current struggle between one ‘Poland’ and another; between a Western-looking Poland and an inward-looking Poland, the former more interested in opening to the world, competing in open markets, and working within the EU, and the latter more concerned with holding onto tradition. The question of illiberalism has gone from an ‘Eastern’ problem (Russia, Turkey, Hungary, etc.) to a global one (Brexit and the U.S. elections). This makes the very specific analysis of Poland’s illiberalism applicable on a broader scale.

Bringing together the work of sociologists, historians, and political scientists, this book explores the increasing importance of the politics of memory in central and eastern European states since the end of communism, with a particular focus on relations between Ukraine and Poland. Through studies of the representation of the past and the creation of memory in education, mass media, and on a local level, it examines the responses of Polish and Ukrainian authorities and public institutions to questions surrounding historical issues between the two nations. At a time of growing renationalization in domestic politics in the region, brought about by challenges connected with migration and fear of Russian military activity, this volume asks whether international cooperation and the stability of democracy are under threat. An exploration of the changes in national historical culture, The Politics of Memory in Poland and Ukraine will appeal to scholars with interests in memory studies, national identity, and the implications of memory-making for contemporary relations between states.

An examination of the role of history and memory is vital in order to better understand why the grand design of a United Europe--with a common foreign policy and market yet enough diversity to allow for cultural and social differences--was overwhelmingly turned down by its citizens. The authors argue that this rejection of the European constitution was to a certain extent a challenge to the current historical grounding used for further integration and further demonstrates the lack of understanding by European bureaucrats of the historical complexity and divisiveness of Europe's past. A critical European history is therefore urgently needed to confront and re-imagine Europe, not as a harmonious continent but as the outcome of violent and bloody conflicts, both within Europe as well as with its Others. As the authors show, these dark shadows of Europe's past must be integrated, and the fact that memories of Europe are contested must be accepted if any new attempts at a United Europe are to be successful.

This Report consists of two main parts devoted to Poland’s and Hungary’s remembering of and dealing with the past, including with the use of memory laws and other deployments of legal and extra-legal means in historical policy, including soft law. It also discusses relevant domestic courts’ jurisprudence. The report situates these practices against European human rights law standards, inferred from the ECtHR case law. The aim of this exercise is capturing the dynamics of the Polish and Hungarian state’s relationship to the past after 1989 in a concise form and examine the current legal framework. The Polish and Hungarian sections are structured around common themes. In what follows, we shall discuss mnemonic constitutionalism, the institutionalisation of mnemonic governance, memorialisation of the Second World War and the Holocaust, reckoning with communism, education, and memory. The report includes discussions of political, social, and cultural factors that contextualise the legal framework. The final part concludes with broader reflections on the state of Polish and Hungarian memocracies, understood as constitutional and political regimes based on references to the past and a specific form of governance of historical memory. The report is supplemented by Conclusions and Recommendations addressed to a wide range of players and participants of public deliberations over history and the past, including lawmakers on domestic and European level, academia, and the civil society.

History is no longer the exclusive domain of historians, but is now often used as a tool for politics. It is not without reason that the term “state historical policy” has been coined, which must be a kind of aberration for those who believed that the role of history is to objectively determine the course of events. The fact is, however, that the distortion of historical facts, the concealment of crimes is now part of the “information war”. Therefore, new acts of public international law, EU law and national law are introduced in order to combat public condonation, denial or gross trivialisation of the core international crimes which are certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia. States have to determine for themselves how they understand “denial” or “gross trivialization”, which may lead to abuse. In many cases, when introducing criminal law provisions, States wish to decree historical truth, to establish once and for all the general facts and determine who was the victim, and who was the perpetrator. This does not have to be the result of bad will, but of a desire to exclude the possibility of nuance, which could turn into dangerous trivialisation. The aim of this publication is to specify the reasons for holding accountable for denial of international crimes, indicate legal obligations in this respect, look at the Polish case, both in terms of criminal provisions (partly repealed) and standards of a civil law nature, and compare the Polish regulation with the legal systems of other states, which were chosen because of the region (Central and Eastern Europe) or due to having current problems with denial of crimes or doubts about prosecution on this account.

A major contribution to our understanding of present-day historical consciousness through a study of memory laws across Europe.

The volume encompasses eleven articles which discuss the critical views that Polish and Russian women writers have articulated with regard to the notion of experience and constructions of femininity in the national imagination from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Major themes of the articles include women s experiences as writers in the 19th century; women s embodied experiences of a traumatic past; body and sexuality in the different ages of women; political and aesthetic discourses and femininity. Although the articles are arranged in chronological order, they do not form an absolute chronological or periodic continuum, i.e. from Romanticism to Postmodernism, although references to certain aesthetic periods are made. The authors of the articles reflect in detail on how the women writers and their literary texts represent different understandings and experiences in relation to dominant perceptions, for example, of the memory of war, of motherhood, of art and aesthetics, and so on. Readers are encouraged to seek parallels and continuities between the different historical times and spaces; between women s writing in Russia and Poland; between different scholarly approaches and aims. The articles of this volume bring together important critical standpoints in women s writing in Poland and Russia, in which parallels, continuities, and resemblances can be traced, but in which discontinuities, breaks and differences also make themselves visible. Apart from the conspicuous resemblances between individual Russian and Polish women writers works, or even between groups of women writers, the articles document the diversity within Russian and Polish women s writing, respectively, and even within individual writers.

In March 1968, against the background of the Six-Day War, a campaign of antisemitism and anti-Zionism swept through Poland. The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland is the first full-length study of the events, their precursors, and the aftermath of this turbulent period. Plocker offers a new framework for understanding how this antisemitic campaign was motivated by a genuine fear of Jewish influence and international power. She sheds new light on the internal dynamics of the communist regime in Poland, stressing the importance of middle-level functionaries, whose dislike and fear of Jews had an unmistakable impact on the evolution of party policy. The Expulsion of Jews from Communist Poland examines how Communist Party leader Wladyslaw Gomulka's anti-Zionist rhetoric spiraled out of hand and opened up a fraught Pandora's box of old assertions that Jews controlled the Communist Party, the revival of nationalist chauvinism, and a witch hunt in universities and workplaces that conjured up ugly memories of Nazi Germany.

Instrumentalization of the wartime past for political gain is the subject of this study of eleven World War II commemorations. Using a comparative, conceptually original approach, Yoder identifies the actors who manipulate memory surrounding wartime anniversaries, such as the bombing of Dresden and ceremonies to honor fallen soldiers and fascist collaborators. The cases of memory contestation span three geographic regions, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and Russia, recognizing that each developed distinctive interpretations of the war and different patterns of memory politics. This empirically rich study reveals the grievances that motivate memory challengers and their strategies for shaping the commemoration discourses and rituals. The memory challengers' toolkit includes varieties of emotional manipulation, subtle distortion, revisionism and full-scale denial. The study finds that, while there are differences in context and strategy across cases and regions, there are also areas of convergence. Moreover, a memory challenge in one country can spill over into others with serious consequences for foreign relations. While World War II Memory and Contested Commemorations in Europe and Russia deals with debates and narratives about events in the last century, its focus is on power, persuasion, and identity in the present.

Moving from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the present day, this book traces the trajectory of the six East Central European former satellites of the Soviet Union (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria) that have joined the European Union. It seeks in particular to explain these countries’ disenchantment with the “return to Europe” in spite of their significant advances. The book proceeds country by country and then devotes chapters to some contemporary issues, such as minorities, migration, and the relations of these “new” members with the European Union as a whole. The book eschews theory and is intended for a general audience, including students at all levels in political science and history classes devoted to the EU and to contemporary Europe, and to an academic and practitioner audience interested in world affairs and the evolution of the European Union. The book strives to fill a persistent knowledge gap in the English-speaking world concerning East Central Europe, and to offer fresh insights about the region in the context of contemporary geopolitics.