>> My name is Maria Mälksoo and I am Senior Lecturer in International Security at the Brussels School of International Studies, University of Kent, at Brussels. 

>> Today I would like to invite you to think along with me on Memory Wars and Memory Laws. I have spent the better part of my scholarly life studying the periodically re-intensifying conflict over the meaning and legacy of the Second World War and the Soviet communism in Eastern Europe.

>> This contestation involves debates over the origins of World War II, the contents of history books and legitimate ways of remembering the conduct and consequences of both World War II and the overall legacy and meaning of the Soviet communism as such in Eastern Europe. 

>> It also entails the diverging assessments of the universal applicability of the law formulated in 1945 for the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal as demonstrated by various rulings of the
European Court of Human Rights in the recent decade. But what does it really mean to talk about memory wars? Think of the famous Prussian strategic thinker and equally famous strategic practitioner Carl von Clausewitz, who maintained that war is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse with a mixture of other means. 

>> Now referring to political contestations over historical remembrance as memory wars further blurs the line, and an already thin line at that, between politics and war - possibly even to the point of risking thus to devalue the concept of war. But then again if we do accept this Clausewitz that war is a chameleon, that it constantly changes its forms as well as appearances, what kind of war is a war over historical memory. 

>> Memory war is certainly a captivating metaphor yet it is not an innocent one. The logic of war calls for the destruction, rather than understanding, of one's opponent. The lax use of military metaphors also conditions and legitimates the rhetoric and means of security for handling contested memories, thus also enhancing the potential for militarising the state's historical self-understanding, its self-vision and possibly its culture as a whole.

>> Consider the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. We have witnessed a powerful emergence of the so-called historical memory front, next to physical and online spaces of confrontation between Ukraine and Russia. With the reinvigoration of rich brew of the Second World War era political rhetoric, Russian media has systematically demonised and denigrated pro-democratic forces in Ukraine as Nazis, as fascists as Banderites.

>> It has insinuated their intention to erase the historical memory of the Soviet victory in the war over Nazism and against Nazism and willingness to perpetrate genocide against Russian and Jewish minorities in the contemporary era. Ukrainian counter rhetoric towards the mosque voice or mass Kiley has been at times competitively derogatory and colourful. So what we see here is essentially the old struggle of defining who we are by juxtaposing us to who and what we are not. 

>> Historical memory provides a backbone to the stories that nations and states tell of themselves. The problem of international relations and the problem of survival in international relations is accordingly not just about the survival of the body of the state or its territorial intactness, the inviolability of its borders along with the security of its people and the sovereignty of
state institutions.

>> It is also, and importantly, about surviving as a certain kind of a state, as a certain kind of vector and hence defending and safeguarding of one's memory and identity as a state of a particular sort. So states seek to secure their understandings of themselves which might well provide the key to our understanding as scholars and analysts of international politics, why they would approach their own past wrongdoings and the other's past wrongdoings in a particular way and how they would consequently act on the international stage. 

>> But now the question emerges: should a political community's understanding or remembrance of certain historical events be protected by means of law, if so deemed necessary by its governing elites, in case this very remembrance is perceived to be challenged or even openly attacked by some other community or a state and thus potentially undermined in this struggle between contesting historical remembrances. And this is indeed a very topical question, not just in the context of handling the question of Holocaust denial, but equally so in an era saturated by bus routes such as nonlinear warfare propaganda and information offenses. 

>> Psychological defense and strategic communication. Hybrid war and hybrid warfare is indeed something that has come to frame the contemporary international security debate, security commentariat, ever since Russia's swift annexation of Crimea in 2014 with the help of the “little polite green men” and Russia's involvement in the protracted conflicts in eastern Ukraine. 

>> The European Union has consequently adopted a joint framework to counter hybrid threats and foster the resilience of the Union, giving prominent crowns to the problematic also in its new global strategy on foreign and security policy of 2016. And NATO in its turn has also agreed on a strategy on its role in countering hybrid warfare to be implemented in coordination with the European Union. Now zooming back into Eastern Europe. Russian penal code, for example, has a new provision since 2014. 

>> Namely article 354, point one on the rehabilitation of Nazism which criminalises among other things the public dissemination of knowingly false information about the activities of the USSR during the Second World War. Meanwhile, Ukraine adopted a set of so-called decommunisation laws shortly after the Maidan revolution in the spring of 2015. 

>> This package of four laws which was heralded by the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, this package contains legislation criminalising both Nazi and communist totalitarian regimes, prohibiting their symbols and propaganda and two further laws commemorating Ukraine's fighters for twentieth-century independence movements and the victory over Nazism during the Second World War, and the law guaranteeing access to archives of repressive Soviet-era origins respectively.

>> Now it's not particularly surprising that Russia's reactions to Ukraine's memory laws were indeed rather predictably pained but there has also been a wide scholarly and media criticism that has been aired towards these laws in the West, expressing concern about their violation of the right to freedom of speech and thus their general incompatibility with Ukraine's alleged road to democratisation and Europeanisation. And indeed attempts at fixating on certain understandings of the past by juridifying the frames of legitimate social remembrance raise a host of thorny questions about the attempted delimitation, or even a closure, of a political discussion on various violent and controversial historical events.

>> Based on my previous and ongoing research on conflicts over remembering World War II and the Soviet legacy in Europe, I would argue that the attempts to make our memory secure by means of law actually tend to amplify the existing security dilemmas, and also what is worse, lead to new ones. 

>> Trying to defend our memory by law often leads to a lesser sense of security among the competitors over issues of public remembrance in international relations. If law is reached for in an attempt to thus defend our narrative of the past from the allegedly vicious misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the others, their vision of the past is accordingly rendered to be existentially endangering for our being as 'us'. 

>> So instead of alleviating mutual insecurities, memory laws tend to reproduce and reinstate historical animosities between the carriers and agents of competing memories. Hence, legislation of memory on the assumption that the security of identity, the security of our self-vision can be cemented by law. In fact, has a deep politicising effect.

>> Setting legal frames on how our story can be remembered also enables to solidify the power of the ruling regime, encouraging state bounds remembrance practices and thus constituting the political community in a particular way. 

>> Seeking to outlaw struggles over possible narrations thus rejects the fundamentally political nature of state identity. It also potentially curbs certain political and societal activity defined as undermining and endangering for this very identity. 

>> So we could say that ordering historical remembrance by means of law in fact constitutes a legal way of closing off a particular notion of identity. So we see how making social historical memory, collective historical memory, an issue of security politics is actually problematic both morally and politically. So the upshot of all this is that we should always ask whose history, whose memory, whose identity and security we are really talking about in each particular case. We should always distinguish between the modalities of public, social and political remembrance for there is always this tendency of states to homogenise their national identity at the expense of certain strangers, certain others. 

>> The successful endorsement of a state's story of origin hardly merges without the exercise of power over what to remember and how to remember. So I suggest that public historical remembrance of the past naturally needs to be politically discussed and preferably not purified by laws that prescribe or proscribe the ways of relating to the past, if we borrowed the definition of memory laws by the Dutch historian Antoon De Baets who also happens to be the founder for the network for concerned historians. Memory laws as a rule tend to depoliticise. 

>> They tend to shift public remembrance out of the realm of an open and non repressive political debate between various state and non-state access. And more generally it is probably reasonable to let go of the pipe dream of being able to fully secure one's self, collective and individual alike. 

>> Moving beyond the politics which is seeking to defend our memory, to make our memory secure, would entail the ability of political actors to also learn to tell new stories about themselves, to break away from the old and possibly harmful routines for both themselves and their others. 

>> So in a nutshell, this would entail their ability to also renew and not just to survive as a certain sort of being. And of course the problem here is that questioning oneself, being very reflective, is often viewed as a signal of weakness especially in certain cultures by both internal critics and external adversaries and opponents - which is also perhaps the reason why self interrelation tends to be suspended more often than not in the memory political practices of states. 

>> But if we do assume, if we do subscribe to the view that certainly differences and the contestability of social remembrance remain irreducible, then the public relationship towards the past also has to remain in the realm of speakable, in the realm of debatable, in the realm of discussable.

>> That is, in Hannah Arendt's words, it should be allowed to live in the sphere of the political or in the realm of speech. I would subsequently call for more politics of memory instead of the widespread attempts to fix the public relationship to the past by juridified rules as a tactic of thus buttressing competitive selves. 

>> In the Laurentian spirit we should recognise the importance of a genuine debate between plural equals along with the right for an open struggle of a memory instead of indeed vain attempts to secure one's own national memory at the expense of others. And indeed if the other in the debates over collective remembrance becomes conceptualised as someone whose vision of the past we might not agree with, but whose right to defend that very vision we do not put into question. 

>> As such, I believe in more benevolent space for settling these debates of an historical memory is actually created. And on this call for an opening rather than a closure I will stop and thank you very much for listening.