Conference in Nottingham “Nation States between the Memory of the Second World War and Contemporary European Politics”

On 27-29 June 2012, the University of Nottingham, England, hosted an academic conference entitled “Nation States between the Memory of the Second World War and Contemporary European Politics”. The conference focused mainly on the uses of the Second World War, and of related themes such as genocide, occupation, collaboration and resistance, for the articulation of political positions in the contemporary context. Thirty scholars from Europe and America took part in the conference, analysing the “politics of memory” in its various dimensions: political manifestos, ceremonial rituals, media discourse, school textbooks and everyday practices.

A representative of the Political Sphere Institute, Aliaksei Lastouski, also took part in the conference and presented a paper entitled “Nationalising the Soviet Myth: Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Belarus”. It is widely known that the myth of Victory became a powerful instrument of historical politics for the Belarusian authorities, and various aspects of the implementation and contestation of this policy have already been analysed by numerous scholars, including D. Marples, P. A. Rudling, U. Padhol, B. Törnquist-Plewa, A. Portnov and A. Goujon. This paper, however, paid greater attention to the continuity of the Soviet image of the war in contemporary Belarus and to its functional significance for contextual and situational purposes. It also drew on diverse sociological material, which substantially corrects the widespread “elitist” model for analysing memory politics, where only the interests of the authorities are taken into account, without considering widespread collective perceptions that in fact impose serious constraints on the actors of historical politics.