Jan-Werner Müller

Memory and power in post-war Europe : studies in the presence of the past

Introduction: The power of memory, the memory of power and the power over memory Jan-Werner Muller Part I. Myth, Memory and Analogy in Foreign Policy: 1. Memory of sovereignty and sovereignty over memory Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine since 1939 Tim Snyder 2. Myth, memory and policy in France since 1945 Robert Gildea 3. The power of memory and memories of power: the cultural parameters of German foreign policy making since 1945 Thomas U. Berger 4. The past in the present: British Imperial memories and the European Question Anne Deighton 5. Memory, the media and NATO: information intervention in Bosnia-Hercegovina Monroe E. Price 6. Europes post-Cold War memory of Russia Iver B. Neumann Part II. Memory, Power and Justice in Domestic Affairs: 7. The past is another country: myth and memory in postwar Europe Tony Judt 8. The emergence and legacies of divided memory: Germany and the Holocaust after 1945 Jeffrey Herf 9. Unimagined communities: the power of memory and the conflict in the former Yugoslavia Ilana R. Bet-El 10. Translating memories of war and co-belligerency into Cold War politics: the Italian case Ilaria Poggiolini 11. Institutionalizing the past: shifting memories of nationhood in German education and immigration policies Daniel Levy and Julian Dierkes 12. Trials, purges or history lessons: treating a difficult past in post-communist Europe Timothy Garton Ash.

Is Europe Converging on Constitutional Patriotism? (And If So: Is It Justified?)

Abstract In public justifications, but even more in state practice, it is argued that European countries are converging on a notion of membership and political attachment that is best theorized in terms of the category of constitutional patriotism. What once appeared as a highly idiosyncratic construct for the very specific situation of post‐war West Germany is now becoming an accepted norm and practice across Western Europe at least. A number of specific empirical research questions are suggested that would allow this thesis to be tested. However, regardless of whether there is any convergence on constitutional patriotism empirically, it is argued that normatively such a convergence would be justified.

Comprehending conservatism: A new framework for analysis

This essay argues against the view—frequently put forward by conservatives themselves—that conservatism cannot be analyzed as a coherent political ideology. It then proposes a multidimensional approach to understanding conservatism, defining (and defending a particular interpretation of) four dimensions which are termed sociological, methodological, dispositional and philosophical. It is argued that only if two of these four dimensions are present in a particular variety of political thought is it justified to speak of political conservatism.

Defending Democracy within the EU

Recent illiberal turns in Hungary and Romania have prompted the question what, if anything, the EU could and should do to protect liberal democracy within Member States. The article discusses four principled concerns about democracy-saving EU interventions in Member States: that an institution which is itself largely undemocratic cannot credibly protect democracy; that there are in fact no common European standards which could be used to determine whether a Member State is departing from a shared European understanding of democracy; that interventions are per se illiberal; and, finally, that only small States will be subject to intervention, a form of EU hypocrisy which delegitimizes Brussels both in the States concerned and possibly across the EU as a whole. The article counters all these concerns and argues that the problem with intervention is not to be found at a theoretical level, but on a practical plane: as of now, the EU lacks a tool kit to intervene effectively in Member States; whatever it has recently used by way of sticks and carrots seems arbitrary or opportunistic. The article concludes by proposing a number of remedies for this situation.

The triumph of what (if anything)? Rethinking political ideologies and political institutions in twentieth-century Europe

This note explores new ways of thinking about the history of political thought in twentieth-century Europe. It argues that more attention ought to be paid to the interaction between political thought or imagination on the one hand and, on the other, actual political institutions as they were designed, sometimes destroyed, an often re-designed in the course of twentieth-century European history. With this comes a clearer focus on ‘in-between figures’ (such as public lawyers). The note then outlines an argument concerning the emergence—even triumph—of a particular set of institutions and normative ideas (or sometimes just intuitions) in Western Europe after 1945, a set that was largely extended to Southern as well as Eastern Europe towards the end of the century. What is summed up as a conception of constrained civilian democratic administrative statehood did not reflect any traditional ‘ism’ and constituted a genuinely new ideological configuration. Have you forgotten the other bankruptcies? What was Christianity doing in the various catastrophes of society? What became of Liberalism? What has Conservatism produced, in either its enlightened or its reactionary form? … If we are indeed honestly to weigh out the bankruptcies of ideology, we shall have a long task ahead of us. Victor Serge Democracy has developed wherever the abstract appeal of the ideologue and the concrete experimentation of the practical man have worked together. A. D. Lindsay

Myth, law and order: Schmitt and Benjamin read reflections on violence

To talk about Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin in one breath still seems to have an air of the sacrilegious, maybe even an air of violence—doing violence to Benjamin, that is of course. Is one not reinforcing what, at least at the time of Benjamin’s suicide, seemed to be the work of the historical victor, making, as Benjamin put it, death unsafe from the enemy? Escaping this suspicion by employing Benjamin’s own concept of ‘constellation’ seems merely an ultimately blocked intellectual escape-route: how can one associate Schmitt, the ‘Crown jurist of the Third Reich’, unrepentant until the end, with Benjamin, its tragic and terrorized victim?. The answer is of course that they associated themselves, through Benjamin’s famous (or infamous) letter in which he expressed his appreciation for Schmitt’s ARTICLE IN PRESS

European Intellectual History as Contemporary History

The first part of this essay examines the peculiar role European intellectual history played in coming to terms with the twentieth century as an ‘Age of Extremes’ and the different weight it was given for that task at different times and in different national contexts up to the 1970s. The second part looks at the contemporary history of politically focused intellectual history — and the possible impact of the latter on the writing of contemporary history in general: it will be asked how the three great innovative movements in the history of political thought which emerged in the last fifty years have related to the practice of contemporary history: the German school of conceptual history, the ‘Cambridge School’, and the ‘linguistic turn’. The third part focuses on recent trends to understand processes of liberalization — as opposed to the older search for causes of political extremism. It is also in the third part that the so far rather Euro-centric perspective is left behind, as attempts to create an intellectual history of the more or less new enemies of the West are examined. Finally, the author pleads for a contemporary intellectual history that seeks novel ways of understanding the twentieth century and the ‘newest history’ since 1989 by combining tools from conceptual history and the Cambridge School.

Towards a new history of Christian Democracy

Political thought grouped under the rubric ‘Christian Democracy’ is often considered as profoundly unoriginal and as the product of politicians and party activists (rather than political philosophers). This note puts forward the argument that there is an important—and in parts original—body of thought responding to the challenge of how to reconcile Christianity and modern democracy in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe. In rather schematic fashion it then traces three strategies for finding a place for Christianity—and Catholicism in particular—in the modern democratic order: the idea of creating or re-creating a Christian demos; the notion of constraining the demos through recognizably Christian institutions; and, lastly, Christian Democratic party politics. Apart from a research agenda, the article then suggests some lessons from this history, especially for thinking about the relationship between Islam and democracy.

Julien Benda’s Anti-Passionate Europe

In the early 1930s, Julien Benda provided one of the most uncompromising visions for a united Europe. In line with his rationalist universalism, Benda sought a continent that was cleansed of passion and particularism, and called on European intellectuals to act as a rationalist vanguard in constructing such a Europe. However, Benda fatefully wavered between polity-building strategies of reshaping and redirection. For the most part, Benda seemed to demand nothing less than a comprehensive reshaping of the moral and political psychology of European citizens. However, his universalism faltered frequently, and he conceived of Europe rather as a large nation, in which the ‘passion for reason’ would come to dominate other passions. Such ambiguities - and failures to draw a clear line between normative ideals and the pragmatics of polity-building - persist in many present debates on European unification.

The Paradoxes of Post-War Italian Political Thought

Summary This article examines the complex nature of post-war Italian political thought, stressing the importance of Italys unusual institutional and historical political arrangements, but also the vibrancy of its political ideologies in this period. In the past it has often been argued that the dysfunctional nature of post-war Italian democracy with its rapidly changing governments, and widespread corruption—which nonetheless coexisted with the one party, the Christian Democrats, being constantly in power—led to the atrophying of political theory in general, and political ideologies in particular. But this picture is strongly disputed here—on the contrary it is argued that Christian Democratic, Left and liberal political ideologies were all complex and interesting. Thus if Christian democracy should ultimately be seen as an ‘ideology of transition’ which existed to help Catholicism adapt to the parameters of modern mass democracy, and which lacked a thinker of the calibre of Jacques Maritain, it nevertheless contained within it important debates on the role of the state, between such interesting thinkers as Giuseppe Dossetti and Alcide De Gasperi. And if anything, political thinking on the Left in the post-war period was even more complex, with visceral debates within the (large) Communist Party (PCI) over whether to work within the law—between such thinkers as Palmiro Togliatti and the Il Manifesto group. Equally on the more revolutionary Left, there were important debates about how quickly capitalism could be made to collapse through revolutionary action between thinkers such as Raniero Panzieri and his more radical disciples, Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri, while later, due to the general failure of these revolutionary efforts, post-modern thinkers such as Gianni Vattimo sought to abandon grand metaphysical narratives, whilst retaining a commitment to Left of centre political commitments. Finally, although not part of a widespread mass movement, the liberal thought of Norberto Bobbio was also highly interesting and sophisticated—borrowing from Hobbes and Kelsen, he sought to advocate a modest form of liberal democracy which allowed for civilised forms of conflict, and the protection of minorities, and which rejected the contention of Marxists that civil rights could not be distinguished from economic ones. Overall, if normative aspirations in post-war Italian politics were often frustrated in practice, this was certainly not due to any lack of theoretical vibrancy.