Should states have the right to dictate
laws on memory and interfere in the
field of history?
Governing powers everywhere choose historical accounts and memory
representations that work in their political favour; they have understood
the electoral benefits they stand to gain from “using the dead to
govern the living”. When the Law and Justice Party (PiS) was in power
in Poland for the first time (2005-2007), its governments promoted
the concept of “history policies” to justify state interventionism in
the interpretation of historical facts—even in foreign countries. As I
mentioned earlier, they threw out foreign press organizations who,
either out of negligence or deliberately, spoke of Polish concentration
camps instead of Nazi camps on Polish soil. In that particular case,
Polish indignation is legitimate, but the implication of the Polish state
opens a new and frightening perspective on history and memory games.
The authorities export their version of national history into international
arenas to obtain two types of gains: looking like a hyper-patriot at
home compared to their political opponents, and consolidating their
geopolitical status outside the country. The only reason these actions
are undertaken is the implicit or explicit wager that they will reactivate
an emotion-driven national community around a single memorial
foundation, and so increase the electoral potential of those who impose
norms of historical interpretation. All of this clearly undermines the
autonomy of the science of history: judges, police, MPs and diplomats
have come to think of themselves as experts on history. Meanwhile, in
some countries it is the historians themselves who saw off the branch
they are sitting on: exceeding their professional prerogatives, using their
scientific legitimacy for political ends. Some of the historians in central
and eastern Europe with access to the institutions created to guard the
archives of communism—commonly known as Institutes of National
Memory—have organized leaks of files fabricated by communist police
forces before 1989 to compromise their political adversaries, claiming
that the former executioners and their accomplices are deliberately
sabotaging “transitional justice”.
The fact that electoral strategies of “historicization” have been
multiplying throughout the world makes it clear that we need to
condemn abusive uses of history for political purposes at a much greater
scale than the national one. Obviously, it is in no government’s interest
to obey academic canons; governments are driven by hopes of political
gain. The more a reference to history pays off politically, the more
politicians will use it. In this context, laws on memory, which their
authors say were formulated to protect historical “truth” or repair past
40
Observing Memories
ISSUE 2