Thursday, July 9, 2015
S2 (28 rue des Saints-Pères)
Over the last decades, IR research has shown that norms and ideas can and do travel across time and spaces. Do similar processes occur with regards to (social) memories? Or are memories rather so attached to specific national contexts that they evolve independently from each other? On the theoretical level, memory scholars do not agree on these questions; some, such as Levy and Sznaider, argue that the Holocaust has become a universal memory, whose normative interpretation is shared across national borders. Others, such as Pierre Nora, maintain that only the nation-state can provide that sort of emotional symbols which are required for the transmission of social memory. This paper contributes three elements to this debate: First, a theoretical argument that sketches an analytical model of the transnationalisation of memory, based on arguments drawn from research on transnational communication. Second, the paper suggests a methodological approach for the empirical operationalization of this argument through a corpus-analytic comparison of uses of historical references in contemporary debates on wars and interventions. Third, it provides first results of such an analysis, taken from media discourses from several West-European countries.
