On protest and memory

Abstract

The Editorial team welcomes you to the September 2021 issue of New Perspectives. The relationship between protest and memory runs through this issue. All forms of societal critique treat the past and present as the ‘antechamber’ to what may come next (Koselleck, 1988). This means every protest movement is bound up with historical storytelling, today increasingly framed by the unravelling of the post-cold war order visible in domestic political contestation, rising populism and geopolitical tensions in Europe. Standing behind this is a degree of loss of faith in the utopian philosophies of history invented to resolve the crisis of the enlightenment’s challenge to autocracy in Europe. Liberal historiography made it possible to craft memory into a stable vision of political hope during and after the cold war, and to locate societal protest within the progression from the past into a brighter future. Some of those hopes have now faded. This has particular implications for Central and Eastern Europe, linking anti-liberal populism to liberal revolt against established or rising autocracies. The contributions of this issue all, in some way, speak to this folding together of the problematisation of progress with societal crisis at the ‘end of the end of history’ (Hochuli et al., 2021). Themes taken up in this issue relating to questions of rights and gender, ontological security, the nature of the authentic national self, or the emancipatory potential of popular culture, are entangled with liberal historiography, as is the problem of what to do with the memory of a totalitarian and genocidal past. In complex ways, liberalism and its political legacies remain the principle figure at work. Too confident proclamations of the decline of liberal order can fail to recognise the continuing weight that its concepts place on the present, in and beyond Central and Eastern Europe, in forming the conditions of possibility for nationalist resurgence on the one hand (against liberal politics), and underpinning the hopes for a more democratic future (liberalism against autocracy). As Brad Evans (2021: 12) argues in his excellent recent book, Ecce Humanitas, the conceptualisation of victims has always been central to the problem of liberal modernity, because the entanglement of ideas about historical and societal progress with ‘‘the intolerable’’ is the central problem in conceiving a politics fit for humanity. Taking Arendt as a point of departure, the fact that, as she put it, ‘the world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human’ in the holocaust was both spur and nagging problem for the liberal humanism that emerged in its aftermath. Liberal politics hoped to overcome the limits of sovereign states, and inscribe a new inclusive vision of the future, but this carried with it a variety of paradoxes, not least interventionism in the name of the human itself. What to do with horror is the problem of liberal secular modernity, argues Evans, but this is often primarily expressed in forgetting. The search for redemption often involves taking flight from the mistakes of the past. This echoes Nietzsche’s (1989) point that forgetting is central to all cognition. But the flight from the past is peculiarly written into the project of liberalism. New Perspectives