HISTORICAL POLICY AND MEMORY POLICY IN THE FOCUS OF THE CENTRAL EASTERN EUROPEAN THINK TANKS RESEARCH

Abstract

The article deals with the general characteristics of the role of the Central Eastern European think tanks in the study and formation of the memory policy on the example of selected countries of the region. It is shown that for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, whose past was built on false memory, issues of history have traditionally had a great political influence. That is why, at the state level, the memory policy in Central and Eastern European countries is often regarded as a part of the official national security doctrine and is accompanied by a strong regulatory framework for condemning totalitarian ideologies as well as by the strict laws in the field of commemorative practices. Providing independent expert analysis of social processes, think tanks act as a mediator between the government and society in heated discussions on historical memory issues, changing interpretations of historical experience, mostly extremely traumatic. Think tanks provide consolidation of the multi-vector representations of the past, which significantly affect the formation of national memory; limit the fragmentation of collective history visions and search for the ideas of the national integration.