Abstract
This is a chapter about how nations imagine possible futures in the context of transitional justice and coming to terms with the communist past in Eastern Europe. For post-communist countries engaged in democratic development, the most significant question was that “of the relation of the treatment of the state’s past to its future” (Teitel, 2000, p. 3). This chapter focuses on the condemnation of communism in Romania in the Tismăneanu Report and on how the Report is constructing the image of a collective future around the issue of how to represent the communist era in public consciousness.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Historians and political scientists also emphasize the role of socio-structural and political factors that have hindered or limited the reach and significance of these acts of remembering—see, for instance, for the case of Romania , Grosescu and Fijalkowski (2017) on the influence of legal culture, and Gussi (2017) on the role of the timing of transitional justice measures.
- 2.
- 3.
Report, pp. 35–36, 211, and 776, respectively.
- 4.
‘In narratives of national progress in which time is constructed as a forward movement or flow, there is an implied determinism, or, more colloquially, the notion of fate or destiny’ (Taylor & Wetherell, 1999, p. 51).
- 5.
Report, pp. 774, 775, 774, 765, respectively.
- 6.
Report, pp. 461–462.
- 7.
Report, p. 765, 773, 30, respectively. cf. also Tileagă, 2009.
- 8.
As LaCapra continues, “working-through implies the possibility of judgment that is not apodictic or ad hominem but argumentative, self-questioning, and related in mediated ways to action.” (1994, p. 210).
- 9.
As Tismăneanu himself acknowledges: “For me, as historian and political scientist, the verdict of such a commission was not needed in order to argue that ‘communism has been an aberrant system, criminal, inhuman’” (Tismăneanu, 2007b). For the professional historian, like Tismaneanu, communism is both an object of loathing and desire. A process of “canonization” of a unique representation of recent history requires that alternative experiences, perspectives , and interpretations are actively suppressed.
References
Adorno, T. (1986). What does coming to terms with the past mean? (T. Bahti & G. Hartman, Trans.). In G. Hartman (Ed.) Bitburg in moral and political perspective (pp. 114–129). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Andrews, M. (2007). Shaping history: Narratives of political change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Billig, M. (1997). Discursive, rhetorical and ideological messages. In C. McGarty & S. A. Haslam (Eds.), The message of social psychology (pp. 36–53). Oxford: Blackwell.
Billig, M. (1998). Talking of the royal family (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.
Billig, M. (1999). Freudian repression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brescó de Luna, I. (2018, this volume). Imagining collective futures in time: Prolepsis and the regimes of historicity. In C. de Saint Laurent, S. Obradović, & K. R. Carriere (Eds.), Imagining collective futures: Perspectives from social, cultural, and political psychology (pp. 109–128). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Brown, S. D., & Reavey, P. (2013). Experience and memory. In E. Keightley & M. Pickering (Eds.), Research methods for memory studies (pp. 45–59). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Brown, S. D., & Reavey, P. (2015). Vital memory and affect: Living with a difficult past. London: Routledge.
Byford, J., & Tileagă, C. (2017). Accounts of a troubled past: Psychology, history, and texts of experience. Qualitative Psychology, 4, 101–117.
Cesereanu, R. (2008). The final report on the holocaust and the final report on the communist dictatorship in Romania. East European Politics and Societies, 22, 270–228.
Ciobanu, M. (2009). Criminalising the past and reconstructing collective memory: The Romanian Truth Commission. Europe-Asia Studies, 61, 313–336.
Connerton, P. (1989). How societies remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
de Saint-Laurent, C. (2018, this volume). Thinking through time: From collective memories to collective futures. In C. de Saint Laurent, S. Obradović, & K. R. Carriere (Eds.), Imagining collective futures: Perspectives from social, cultural, and political psychology (pp. 59–81). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dunmire, P. (2005). Preempting the future: Rhetoric and ideology of the future in political discourse. Discourse & Society, 16, 481–513.
Eiland, H., & Jennings, M. (Eds.). (2003). Walter Benjamin: Selected writings (volume 4: 1938–1940; translated by Edmund Jephcott and others). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Frosh, S. (2010). Psychoanalysis outside the clinic: Interventions in psychosocial studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Grosescu, R., & Fijalkowski, A. (2017). Retrospective justice and legal culture. In L. Stan & L. Turcescu (Eds.), Justice, memory and redress in Romania: New insights (pp. 100–123). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Gussi, A. (2017). Paradoxes of delayed transitional justice. In L. Stan & L. Turcescu (Eds.), Justice, memory and redress in Romania: New insights (pp. 76–99). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Habermas, J., & Michnik, A. (1994). Overcoming the past. New Left Review, I/203, 3–16.
Keightley, E., & Pickering, M. (2012). The mnemonic imagination: Remembering as creative practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
LaCapra, D. (1994). Representing the Holocaust: History, theory, trauma. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
LaCapra, D. (2001). Writing history, writing trauma. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Margalit, A. (2002). The ethics of memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nussbaum, M. (2013). Political emotions: Why love matters for justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rose, J. (2007). The last resistance. London: Verso.
Rothberg, M. (2009). Multidirectional memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the age of decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Santiso, J. (1998). The fall into the present: The emergence of limited political temporalities in Latin America. Time & Society, 7, 25–54.
Stan, L. (2006). The vanishing truth: Politics and memory in post-communist Europe. East European Quarterly, 40, 383–340.
Taylor, C. (2003). Modern social imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press.
Taylor, S., & Wetherell, M. (1999). A suitable time and place: Speakers’ use of ‘time’ to do discursive work in narratives of nation and personal life. Time & Society, 8, 39–58.
Teitel, R. (2000). Transitional justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tileagă, C. (2009). The social organization of representations of history: The textual accomplishment of coming to terms with the past. British Journal of Social Psychology, 48, 337–355.
Tileagă, C. (2012). Communism in retrospect: The rhetoric of historical representation and writing the collective memory of recent past. Memory Studies, 5, 462–478.
Tileagă, C. (2017). Conceptions of memory and historical redress. In L. Stan & L. Turcescu (Eds.), Justice, memory and redress in Romania: New insights (pp. 2–23). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Tismăneanu, V. (2007a). Confronting Romania’s past: A response to Charles King. Slavic Review, 66, 724–727.
Tismăneanu, V. (2007b). Refuzul de a uita: articole şi comentarii politice (2006–2007). Bucharest: Curtea Veche.
Tismăneanu, V. (2008). Democracy and memory: Romania confronts its communist past. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 617, 166–180.
van Leeuwen, T. (1995). Representing social action. Discourse & Society, 6, 81–106.
van Leeuwen, T. (2005). Time in discourse. Linguistics and the human. Sciences, 1, 127–145.
Veyne, P. (1984). Writing history: Essay on epistemology (M. Moore-Rinvolucri, Trans.). Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Zittoun, T., & Gillespie, A. (2018, this volume). Imagining the Collective Future: A Sociocultural Perspective. In C. de Saint-Laurent, S. Obradović, & K. R. Carriere (Eds.), Imagining collective futures: Perspectives from social, cultural, and political psychology (pp. 15–37). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to John Wiley & Sons for permitting me to reproduce and adapt here material published elsewhere.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tileagă, C. (2018). Troubled Pasts, Collective Memory, and Collective Futures. In: de Saint-Laurent, C., Obradović, S., Carriere, K. (eds) Imagining Collective Futures. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76051-3_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76051-3_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-76050-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-76051-3
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and PsychologyBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)