Memory as Politics: Narratives of Communism and the Shape of a Community

This work traces how the past is politicized in post-transition spaces, how it enters the political language, and what effects it produces. Expanding the framework of collective memory literature and anchoring the story in Poland, I argue that the narratives of past communism structure political competition and affect the present-day imaginary of common belonging - that is, they determine political positions of players and they reveal who is included in and excluded from the conception of the ‘we.’ First, I develop the concept of mnemonic capital - a politically productive symbolic resource that accrues to political players based on their turn to, and judgment of, the past - and demonstrate how the distribution of that capital results in sharply differentiated political identities. (I identify four positions generalizable to other post-transition settings.) Second, I trace how narratives of the past constitute the boundary of the ‘we’. I find that in their approaches and judgments of communism, the current political elites conflate communism and Jewishness. In doing so, they elevate the nation and narrow its meaning to ascriptive, religion-inflected, ethnicity. Third, I argue that the field of politics and the field of belonging interact and do not simply exist on parallel planes. I develop a concept of a mnemonic procedure - a patterned and relational way of narrating the past - to show how the narrative techniques performed for present-day political payoffs, constrain the vision of a polity. The concepts of mnemonic capital and mnemonic procedure intervene in the literature on transitions to democracy in that they help to apprehend how a politics contines to be organized by the repudiated ancien régime, now inserted into the political space as a productive symbolic trope. In other words, the concepts explain how the past continues to haunt and affect the quality of post-transition democracy and post-transition belonging.Ph.D