Dealing with the Ghosts of the Past during Transition: A Comparative Perspective

The literature on state-building and memory-politics is divided between those scholars who believe that dealing with one’s past is a requirement for creating/maintaining democracy (Weschler, 1990; Adorno, 1986; Hobsbawm, 1993), and those who argue that public debates on collective memory will only subvert democratic development (Heller, 2001; Markus, 2001). Yet, what might matter for democracy’s health is not the act of remembering or forgetting per se, but the way in which the past is remembered or forgotten. Given the putative importance of the manner in which the splintered memories are handled, what explains the different patterns of managing the divisive past in states in transition and what are the factors that aid some states to form more pluralist spaces, than others? Drawing on extensive comparative quantitative and qualitative data from over 110 in-depth interviews and archival research in Estonia and Georgia—two former Communist states that found themselves embroiled in tumultuous history “crusades” and offered very different solutions to institutionalizing the divisive past in the educational sphere following the collapse of the Soviet order—I offer a multi-variable explanation to this complex and critical question by  focusing on such factors as the extent of   vertical and horizontal interaction between different public spheres and the state,  belonging/prospect of belonging to a “moral community,” and historical institutional precedents.