Memory as State Behaviour

This chapter shows how collective memory channels a country’s international behaviour. To that end, it first lays out the nexus between memory and state behaviour put forward by the temporal security concept. It then goes on to distinguish it from international relations’ classical realist and ontological security approaches and their predictions on state behaviour. To keep their temporal security intact, countries are assumed to enter into an ‘in-between-time’ conversation with their ‘significant historical others’. Through the emotional trigger of shame, policymakers avoid potential disconnects with their country’s ‘narrated self in the past’, thus bringing their courses of action in line with collective memory. To illustrate this process, the empirical case study looks at the reaction of West Germany and Austria to two wars in the Middle East. It contrasts their support for either of the warring parties during the Six Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War and international oil crisis of 1973. The qualitative analysis demonstrates that West Germany and Austria’s different collective memories of the Nazi legacy channelled their behaviour along diverse reasonings to support either the Israeli or the Arab side.

Memory as National Values

This chapter places collective memory at the source of a country’s values. In that regard, it enquires into the nature of normative obligations arising from memory. Based on moral-philosophical considerations, it finds normativity in the ‘processes surrounding memory’ described in the temporal security concept. Over time, the relationship between collective memory, identity, and behaviour generates a ‘duty to act’ for countries in the sense of ‘ought’. This last and most diffuse impact of collective memory unfolds and persists into the long run. Through it, collective memory, entirely outside the realm of conscious choice, channels behaviour towards one good course of action. To illustrate this, the empirical study picks up the case countries, Germany and Austria, at a late point in time. In 2015, large numbers of refugees arrived at their borders during what became known as the ‘European refugee crisis’. In this ‘critical situation’, both countries were required to react and thus position themselves vis-à-vis the highly normative issue of asylum. With the help of a content analysis of official speeches, the case study demonstrates how German and Austrian politicians came to identify different versions of what a good response entails based on their country’s diverse collective memories.

Introduction

‘Memory—what a strange thing it is!…We can only think of it, in the line of an abstract time that is deprived of all thickness…Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are’, writes the philosopher Gaston Bachelard in ...

Memory as Political Strategy

This chapter locates the origins of collective memory in international strategy. To that end it first looks at existing sociological and political works which situate collective memory’s beginnings in the domestic sphere. However, in the immediate aftermath of an often-traumatic event to be remembered, publics remain predominantly silent, leaving policymakers with little to gain from making politics with memory, at least at home. In the international sphere, incentive structures, on the other hand, are different. As such, this chapter moves the emerging struggle over the formation of collective memory from the domestic to the international sphere; and with it, away from its origins in a country’s public and into the hands of its foreign policy officials. The new assumptions on collective memory’s beginnings are then demonstrated in the cases of West Germany and Austria. The empirical study illustrates that the two successor states to the Third Reich started to confront their Nazi legacy first in the international, post-war environment. The question of reparation payments to the State of Israel in 1952 forms the ‘critical situation’ for qualitative analysis and demonstrates how West German and Austrian officials initially constructed collective memory as a political strategy directed at an international audience.

Memory as Public Identity

This chapter places collective memory at the basis of a country’s identity and posits that memory returns from the international sphere to the domestic environment. In the course of this process, memory moves from being an official strategy to becoming part of the wider public identity. Memory’s impact thus transforms from a direct, active opportunity to an indirect, passive constraint for policymakers. Notably, as identity, collective memory is unexamined, and assumed to underwrite the mindset of a country’s public and its representatives. To illustrate this transformation, this chapter looks to the cases of West Germany and Austria in the second post-war decade. The ‘critical situation’ for analysis arrived in 1961 in the form of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. The West German and Austrian reactions to the trial demonstrate that by the early 1960s these countries had come to view their role in World War II through the lens of a pre-existing national narrative in almost entirely unexamined ways.

Temporal Security in IR

The first chapter of this book theoretically conceptualizes collective memory in international relations (IR). The link between the IR discipline and the interdisciplinary collective memory concept is provided through the framework of ontological security. The inquiry begins by extrapolating the nature of ontological security and its most essential component: state identity. It then moves on to theorize collective memory as the underlying carrier of state identity. Collective memory highlights identity’s temporal dimension and manifests it within the collective frameworks of narration. At the end, a new approach, ‘temporal security’, is developed. It combines the ontological security of being with the definition of memory as being-in-time. Security-seeking behaviour for states now implies to be temporally grounded in a consistent narrative that links past, present, and future. The reference point for this as of yet untheorized security need is collective memory. Manifesting itself in the varying forms of political strategy, public identity, state behaviour, and national values, collective memory thus navigates countries through time in IR.