Life After Memocracy: Reflecting on a Pan-European Project that Overgrew its Boundaries

By Mirosław M. Sadowski – posted on 19 February 2025

Introduction

From the interview which took place on the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome amidst the first “Heritage in War and Peace” conference in December 2021 to the final project meeting in Munich in September 2024, the experience of the Memocracy project has been far from that of a traditional research exchange, in that for the better and for worse. Now, enough time has passed that I can soberly reflect on what has been a three-year research rollercoaster ride through the arcane intersections of law and memory.

Background

Memocracy was built on the fundaments of the Memory Laws in European and Comparative Perspective project, known as MELA.  This earlier project was tasked with creating a code of best practice for the drafting and implementation of memory laws, which took the form of the Model Declaration on Law and Historical Memory. The new project came to be known as Memocracy, which was chosen as the shorter form of the rather clumsy The Challenge of Populist Memory Politics for Europe: Towards Effective Responses to Militant Legislation on the Past.

Tasked with the creation of several country reports on the state of the law and memory intersections in Europe, the project began in January 2022. While the politicisation of the memory question through law has been an issue in Europe since Jacques Chirac’s attempt at mandatory teaching on the benefits of French colonialism in the early 2000s, there was little expectation that the questions of the distortion of history would soon reach unprecedented levels, with false memory narratives employed as justifications for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine only a month later. This event has cast a particular shadow on the whole project, which went from being one discussing a major, but for many a fringe, issue related to freedom of speech to one with global implications.

Outcomes

Ultimately, four reports and four policy briefs were produced: one on Germany, one on Poland and Hungary, one on the Baltic States, and one on Russia and Ukraine. With their contents recently brought together and analysed globally by their authors in the form of a Verfassungblog post, including yours truly, I decided to make two main points that shine through this very Central and East European analysis of the matters of law and memory (Germany is a part of Central Europe after all, at least geographically).

Point one: there seems to be little room for agreement on the ways of balancing the memory of Nazi and communist atrocities in Europe, with the widely considered West historically focusing on the former and the so-called East unsuccessfully fighting for the inclusion of the latter in the EU remembrance frameworks.

Point two: memory laws, which have been controversial enough at the turn of the century to merit an intervention of major French historians who organised themselves in the “Liberté pour l’histoire” movement, are here to stay – whether or not they will continue to proliferate in years to come (for example, to include the memory of the Russo-Ukrainian war) is the question.

Aftermath

In addition to the reports, policy briefs, and many other tangible outputs – including my book, Intersections of Law and Memory. Influencing Social Perceptions of the Past which was influenced by the research I conducted for the Memocracy project – perhaps the most valuable ones were international network-building activities, which saw the project’s members enter into dialogue with like-minded researchers from Korea, Japan, Brazil and other South-East Asian and Latin American countries, venturing to build bridges between law and memory experts worldwide. These meetings allowed for a free exchange of perspectives and strategies between communities that have undergone different atrocities and today have various approaches to the legal protection of their memory and rarely speak with one another. We are sure these have planted the seeds for future endeavours, some of which are already beginning to sprout, such as the comparison of ways of coming to socio-legal terms with transitions from dictatorship under the working title of Life After Democracy, I am co-leading with two Brazilian colleagues. Many more are bound to join this project in the coming years.

This blog post reflects on Dr Sadowski’s three years on a Volkswagen Foundation-funded project that concluded in 2025.