Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the concept and possibility of the democratic policy of collective memory in national and trans‐national, or European, contexts. The presupposition of the paper is that memory, while largely unintentional, is also intentional and even partially constructed and, as such, always subjected to influences, even manipulations, i.e. to different policies. Memory is no doubt a “political question” and every policy deals with it, trying to shape social memory according to some political and ideological objectives. In particular, communism implied a very strong policy of memory aiming at destroying many sorts and layers of memory in favour of another. After the fall of communism there have also been many attempts at reshaping collective memory. These recent attempts have been certainly much more democratic than the communist manipulations but far from being based on the democratic principle of equality of different perspectives and discussion. The attempt was rather, namely in Poland, to replace, once again, one kind of “official” memory by another. The really democratic policy of collective memory should imply, on the contrary, a free confrontation of different and sometimes opposing memories in the open public sphere where no “symbolic violence” has place and where all participants not only treat each other as equals but are also ready to modify the meaning of their particular memory and look for mutual comprehension, if not for agreement. The question is whether such democratic policy can ever be more than a moral postulation.
Highlights
The paraphrase of the Kantian question, constituting the title of this text, leaves the fundamental problem open, but implies a solution of some preliminary questions
In case politics means activity aiming at organising collective life through relations of power in a broad sense, including symbolic power, the result of which – and, to some extent, the basis is the common identity of individuals, and if what decides such an identity is mainly memory, a policy of memory is a necessary dimension of any politics
The connection between a concrete policy and a concrete sort of memory is certainly not simple, not linear, rather circular or “dialectical”: a certain policy emerges from a certain kind of memory and, vice versa, a certain memory results from a certain policy
Summary
If we admit that democratic policy of memory ought to fulfil the general criteria of democracy and that, among such criteria, the most important are the principle of equal treatment and the right to equal contribution, related to the principle of freedom understood both as freedom from constraint and as freedom to self-determination, we should conclude that the democratic policy of memory is the one which renders possible a really open public space where everyone can reveal his/her memories and where the common memory is only a changeable configuration of different individual and local memories, or, better, a subject of constant discussion Such a discussion should be free from violence, even only symbolical, which means that different points of view – different local memories – should be treated as having equal rights to be publicly articulated and taken into account as “moments” of the common memory. Democracy can turn either into camouflaged authoritarianism, or into anarchy
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