Controversies over historical interpretation have become a key focus of contemporary politics. Recently, these issues have taken on particular prominence in Europe, where a burgeoning array of “memory laws” has sparked heated debates. While laws prohibiting Holocaust denial are their progenitors, most of the newer laws are intended to shape, rather than simply to reflect, social norms about how the past should be understood and discussed. They also reflect concerns about maintaining national unity and cultural coherence in the face of European integration. As such, these laws constitute both a response to the postnational order and a threat to liberalism.
About the Authors
George Soroka
George Soroka is lecturer on government and assistant director of undergraduate studies at Harvard University. He is coeditor of Ukraine After Maidan: Revisiting Domestic and Regional Security (2018).
Félix Krawatzek is senior researcher at the Centre for East European and International Studies in Berlin and an associate member of Nuffield College, Oxford. He is author ofYouth in Regime Crisis: Comparative Perspectives from Russia to Weimar Germany (2018).
A look at liberal democracy’s complex historical evolution shows that elite fantasies of liberalism without democracy are ill-founded. Authoritarian legacies and democratic deficits lie at the core of trends that threaten…
Slobodan Milošević fell in the fall of 2000 after he tried to pervert national election results. He had tampered with elections before and survived. What made 2000 different, and what…
