The literary conceit of the Dynasty is always that the president is eternal rather than just being a contingent moment.
So the Habsburgs made these odd claims that they were descended from the Romans.
The actual audience had an odd connection with the sovereign nations.
The Romanoffs had a certain hadn't have a certain is this insistence on their connection to hear the news and so on and so forth.
These are examples of a general tendency in monarchical systems to throw back what I think of as a kind of straight line to the past,
a kind of vertical politics of history, when what you're trying to show is that there's an unbroken line from that.
From an unbroken line. Not a problem here, but a number of things line, a dynastic line,
a genealogical line from the past into the present, and therefore automatically, so to speak, into the future.
Now, republics obviously challenge this.
The concepts I want to try to introduce here and then try hopefully a little bit later
to conjure with are the ideas of Republican and Democratic politics of history.
What I want to try to claim in a very general way is that in the 19th century,
as mass politics of various forms, challenged monarchies, challenged dynasties, in some cases overcame them.
We see the emergence of of two different kinds, the politics of memory, both of which arise at about the same time,
both of which still exist, and both of which have a lot to do with the nation.
So there's what I would like to call the Republican politics of memory.
Where were people who form republics, for example, a new one like the French,
where people who were loyal to republics, for example, an old one but proportionately in Commonwealth,
are no longer entirely embracing this notion of an unbroken vertical continuity into the past, since there's usually some kind of break,
whether it's a revolution or whether it's the election of a monarch who presents a different family history.
You can't rely passively just on continuity.
There has to be breaks. And usually these breaks this is or have something to do with a social contract, a real social contract, for example,
the Confederation of Warsaw for the Force of the Commonwealth and imagined social contract,
for example, in Rousseau's justification for the French Republic.
But in any event, something which involves a class of people out of time who who can break continuity and contract and transform things.
Now, that Republican notion of the politics of memory is different from what I want to call the Democratic politics of national memory,
which arises in about the same time by the Democratic politics of national memory.
What I mean is the following. You can see that the people replace the sovereign in history.
History is is is still about continuity.
It's still about unbroken continuity. But the subject of history has changed.
It's no longer an individual family. It is instead the people, the mass population as such.
Now, these kinds of arguments from history can be used to confirm a republic.
For example, Michel, they learned about France. They can also be used to challenge an empire.
In the case, for example, of how Russia's great Ukrainian national history challenged Russian and indirectly Hapsburg rights to rule.
If the subject of history is the people rather than sort of the family, then it follows from this that the people have a moral right to be in charge.
So shifting the subject from from the monarch to the people is a methodological move.
It's the beginning of what we call social history. Some people still practice, but it's also moral because it shifts the local contingency as well.
It implies if it does not outright state that so far as the people are in charge of politics, something which is not quite right is going on.
Now, the difference, of course, and I'm sure you've already noticed this,
there's a profound difference and a profound source of challenge here, because we're is an old fashioned politics of history.
Dynastic politics of history throws down the narrow line, literally a line,
something very something something visible and black and distinguished from its surroundings.
But very narrow social history or the democratic politics of memory is throwing down the road.
History is not one person or one family. History involves thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people.
In other words, it's vertical. It goes down goes down into the past, but it's also horizontal.
It's a broad swath. It's something much larger.
It's something much something much greater. And it's also reflective and interesting sort of way.
It's very easy. I mean, you can try this at home with your own children if you have.
It's very easy to invent history, which just involves one family.
You can, you know, before you can go home and convince yourself and then your children that you're descended from greenness around us.
It's not. But doesn't everybody do this? My kids like this.
They like the walk, especially the that.
It's fairly easy to engineer that sort of history because really all you have to do is educate the court,
educate the children, cultivate a kind of myth around the court.
But the interesting thing about the Democratic politics in America is that it not only involves everyone as as an object of history.
It has to involve everyone is a subject of history. Right.
So part of the democratisation of the politics of history in the 19th century is not just that.
For example, Khodorkovsky says the people are the proper object of our historical history.
It's also that the people themselves have to come to believe this.
Right. The people themselves come to believe this. They become subjects as well as objects of history.
That's the that's the idea. No, there's a certain tension is, of course, because there have to be people who are telling them this.
People are convincing them of this, whether those people are teachers working for educational institutions,
whether those people are national activists,
is an irony here, because there's always has to be an elite which is passing on this Democratic version of history.
But nevertheless, there's also another kind of irony about these stories about the Democratic politics of history,
and that is that these stories have a certain end.
And when they end, then you're faced with them, when you're faced with the difficulty of making up the story again,
all of these national politics of history, these democratic politics of history tended to be structured in three parts.
And as soon as I say what these three parts are, they'll be familiar to you. There is a long ago golden age when everything was terrific.
There is the current period of fragmentation, partition,
let's call it dark times through which the nation must pass in order to properly understand the sources of its own tragedy,
in order to prepare itself for its renewal. And then there's and then there is the golden future.
And the golden future is the restoration or the creation of the nation state.
So there's there's a very nice logic to this because this because it simultaneously explains why it is that you are so wonderful,
even though things are not right, which is the sort of basic human needs and things you get out from biographies every day.
Right. There are reasons why things are going so badly for us, but they don't have to do with our own character.
They have to do with dreadful external forces.
But one day we will overcome them with the help of psychotherapy for in this case, with the help of a profound historical narrative.
Right. So the third part of history is the part where the state is restored.
And of course, once the state is restored, then then new face of politics, of the period of analysis, and these narratives are much less use.
Which brings me to the question of how all this and Ukrainian politics of memory of Europe side by side,
and how how they represented these Republican or Democratic challenges, how they related to to each other,
you know, both Polish and Ukrainian nation builders and pioneers, the inventors,
the entrepreneurs of the politics of memory in the 19th century were starting from a very similar place.
They were starting from the legacy which they all knew they shared of the Polish, Lithuanian Commonwealth.
We were we were all concerned with what they were going to do with this legacy of a state which had once been very powerful,
which had once extended from the Baltic to the boxes, which in early 17th century was the largest state in Europe,
which had won all sorts of interesting battles from Hailsham to Vienna,
which also represented a certain interest in European political position to claim that it was a republic.
For example, both Polish and Ukrainian nation builders in the 19th century had to grapple with this inheritance.
And I want to mark this, by the way, in the 19th century, no one thought,
as people sometimes do today, that you could simply do away with the whole inheritance.
Right. And start afresh.
You you had to start with the inheritance, transform it and manipulate it in some way so that it was useful for political needs.
But you couldn't you couldn't dispense with it. And Ukrainians simplify that.
What happens is that the the very real fact of the social oppression of Ukrainian
speaking peasants under the Polish-lithuanian Commonwealth becomes a key concept.
The Ukrainian people who really were in large measure peasants who really were in many ways colonised under,
under, under that regime, they become they become the centre of a social, historical narrative.
Also very real rebellions, rebellions of Cossacks, for example, in the 17th century against this sort of take on a very central class.
This is true not just in the classical books. The but also in the poems of.
Shevchenko. In both cases, the real problem is the Polish feudal order and the real source of historical morality and future political legitimacy
are those masses of people who are oppressed by it and someday will bring the injustice to the Polish side.
Things are different on the Polish side. Things are rather interesting and different.
There are two basic ways of dealing with that legacy, that legacy of greatness.
One way is a kind of Republican style, a nostalgia for the old, the grand,
the the in its positive reading, the tolerant, the nostalgic Republicans of the late 19th century.
Generally, people of the left make the claim that there are certain features of this republic which should be restored.
For example, it was multinational. That was good. It was tolerant.
That was good. It was colourful, intellectually interesting.
All these things are good and it's fine for us, the people who wish to rebuild Poland to refer to these ancient examples.
At the same time, there is another country and the Polish politics of general coming from the right,
from people called the national Democrats, who take exactly the opposite view.
They say that the Polish, Lithuanian Commonwealth was a hindrance, it was an oppression.
It oppressed the Polish peasants, which is true enough. The peasants who are the future of our nation do not identify with it whatsoever.
And by the way, its tolerance was a bad idea. Toleration was what brought it down.
And intellectually, it wasn't that great. So it was a kind of complete rejection of this tradition in dialogue, of course,
with the people who were nostalgic about what this means is that these two different positions about the politics of memory,
about what memory should mean for the future,
have different attitudes towards Ukrainians from the side of the people who were nostalgic about the republic,
from the side of people who believed in toleration and the possibility of continuity inside of people inside the state, rather the ethnic nation.
There was the possibility for Ukraine. Ofelia Right.
If you think that a future Poland is going to include Poles and Ukrainians and Jews of the other Russians and Iranians and so on,
then it's very possible for you to be Ukrainian while under certain conditions.
Ukrainians have to understand that that restored state is going to be nevertheless a Polish state.
So is a pretty important qualifier to this Ukrainian area. But it's the Ukraine affiliated as possible from the right.
If you are displacing the politics of memory from the elite, from the republic on to the Polish people,
onto the Polish peasantry, then Ukraine, Ophelia is is is much, much more difficult.
In fact, what you have is a kind of rationally grounded Ukraine, a phobia.
If it's true that the Polish nation are just the peasants, there's no particular reason to glorify them.
We know that they're in a competition with other peasants, for example, Ukrainian peasants.
And it's important that they win this competition, and therefore it's important that they develop a kind of natural sense of hostility towards
others so that the politics of the of the way Poles and Ukrainians begin to interact.
It has to do with these possibilities of Republican Democratic identification.
On the Polish side, you see a Republican version. We're going to that.
We're going to glorify the state and you'll see a Democratic version.
We're going to try to make the people, the books of history on the Ukrainian side.
Much more important is the Democratic version that that the people in the centre of history know.
Ironically, you are, if you will, of course, be surprised to hear this.
But ironically, the people who create that version with the interesting example of Savchenko really was a peasant.
I would think in general, those people are themselves elites.
In fact, in general, those people are often aristocrats.
For example, under the statistic, the most important Ukrainian activist was not an aristocrat, but somebody who was a polish, of course, weren't.
So so far what we have is a very nice and more or less typical story of the tensions within the politics of national memory.
The 19th century, the story that I'm telling you thus far.
You could also tell more or less about Germans. Yes.
Or about about the Germans and the French that there's a tension within one story.
There's a tension between the two stories where things get a little bit different in East European history and history.
Politics is very Eastern Europe is in the 20th century where these very conventional national narratives and national styles of narrative,
which are still with us, are challenged by a too overwhelming and largely successful and very different approaches to challenges to the national
paradigm as such one from the Soviet side and and one from the National Socialists from the Soviet side in early 20th century,
what we see is a kind of a kind of attempt to.
Subordinating the past to to to the future in the Soviet Union, as was established in 1922.
What's what's at stake here is the future. So you have a homeland which is established after the First World War 1919,
which faces this basic problem that the national security has completed itself.
There's a national state. What are you then going to do? Your national story is over.
I mean, as we know ourselves, ends of history are always very difficult times,
because once you go to the army, you still have to do the next day and make choices.
That's the funny thing about the ends of history. The Poland has to get up in the morning, make choices in 1919,
and what Poland does is a complicated mixture in its pedagogy and its foreign policy in every other realm of politics,
and not between these Democratic and these Republican versions of the politics of the past.
On the one hand, some Ukrainians in some parts of Poland are repressed largely on the ethnic logic, the logic of competition.
On the other hand, other Ukrainians in other parts of Poland are propped up with policies of affirmative action,
are treated as partners in the New Republic, are prepared for an adventure against the Soviet Union.
Both the logic of both logic for a president at all, at all times.
But the Soviet Union is where the real action is for Ukrainians, because the huge majority of Ukrainians find themselves in the Soviet Union.
And so you guys, with the politics of memory,
is extraordinarily radical and has most of its consequences focussed precisely on on on the war on trains themselves.
One thing that the Soviet Union does in the 1920s is that it tries to create a national elite with tremendous success.
By the way, Ukraine did the most impressive National League ever created.
The Ukrainian history is that created by Soviet policies, affirmative action in the 1920s.
When we look for the good novels, for the art, for the poetry, for the young bohemians who die young,
they die young for different reasons than young bohemians, usually due to their story.
Those people are found precisely in the 1920s in Soviet Ukraine.
And they are modernists. They're Soviet modernists.
Now, the problem with this,
this kind of affirmative action in the Soviet Union was that it left open the possibility that modernism might go the wrong way.
The hope was that if you give these people the future, they'll understand the Soviet future.
But several of them tended to think that if there was a future, it was going to be rather a European future or a truly cosmopolitan world future.
And so modernism didn't necessarily go as opposed to go the other way.
So that's for the elites. The other way that the Soviet Union subordinated the past to the future was with its with this policy of modernisation.
As soon as the Soviet Union established itself as socialism in one country,
as a as a project which was isolated from the rest of the world, in which had to catch up with the rest of the world.
The whole. The whole past.
Well, what Marxist would have seen as feudalism essentially had to be accelerated so that it could reach the future more quickly.
Overcoming what the Soviets saw as feudalism in Ukraine was an especially difficult
and dangerous business and involved the collectivisation of agriculture,
as I'm sure you know, in world starvation or something like 3 million human beings.
And precisely this adventure, precisely the success of this venture is, is what defined, I think,
the character of the Soviet Union as of January 1934 at the party Congress were taking over, which says that Stalin has created a second revolution.
We have a kind of mastery of history.
The past has actually, from the Soviet point of view, has been mastered and the future has been has been brought into line.
Things are going exactly the way that they're supposed to go. That's the story.
Now, I would claim, though, that over the course of the 1930s in the Soviet Union, there's another process.
And this is an obvious point. There's another process which is at work.
The great family in Soviet Ukraine is not part of anybody's politics of memory at the time.
I mean, this is an important thing to notice that the most the most stirring and the most awful events can transpire.
They can really transpire without becoming part of anyone's narrative at the time.
It's a sort of tragic feature of the difference between memory and history.
At the time, the famine was becoming nobody's politics of memory because it was because it was so overwhelmingly awful,
because in general, people who were literate were dying first day. And of course, the Soviet Union itself had no had no intention of recognising it.
Moreover, the family was linked organically to the great terror that followed one of the sources of the great terror.
One of the arguments on behalf of the Greater Soviet Union was that the famine was somehow a conspiracy by outside agents,
in particular Poles, which meant that in the great terror, the single bloodiest part was actually the Polish opera.
In which around 100,000 ethnic poles in the Soviet Union were executed.
That, too, became part of nobody's politics of memory because no one fully understood what was happening at the time.
It's only now becoming an event in historical memory of Poles, because at the time 37 to 38, no one was able to discern exactly what was going on.
Now, why we dwelling on this?
I'm drawing on this because in some sense, amnesia at 24, forgetfulness at point A is the raw material of the politics of memory later on.
But these events that I'm describing in the 1930s are, so to speak, purely historical events.
They're not events in the politics of memory as such because they're not registered.
They're not understood. Their nature can be clarified. Their extent is not known.
But they do become very important for the politics of memory later on as as we will see.
So my general point, though,
is that these very traditional Republican or Democratic modes of dealing with the past are overwhelmed by a Soviet vision of the future.
They are overwhelmed again.
Oh, and that Soviet vision, the future generates, so to speak, raw material from what something similar happens with with the Nazis.
Now, of course, the Nazi vision of the future is very different than the Soviet vision of the future.
In fact, I'm simplifying a bit, not too much to say that what the Nazis were concerned about was much more timelessness than than history.
If anything, their assault on history was more violent, more extreme, more consistent morality.
And the Soviet one, because they weren't simply trying to force history along to catch up to where it should be.
They were abolishing the notion of history as such. For them, the sequence of cause and effect of past and future was not so terribly important.
What mattered was a racial struggle, which doesn't really require a history, requires a zoology, requires knowing who's up and who's down.
Who's better is worse. There is no meaning to history decides the outcome.
So therefore, there's really no meaning to history at all. There's just the struggle. Nothing runs small.
And in this particular wilderness in the world, I'm sure all of you know, both the Poles and the Ukrainians are seen as subhuman intervention.
And the Jews, who are a very important population in this part of the world, are seen as the source of everything.
It was wrong for the Germans as well as the governing people of the Soviet Union.
Now, this, as with as in the Soviet case, this in the short run,
this sort of approach to the world and this sort of approach to the war on the eastern front cannot create memory.
All it can create is history. So when, for example, the Germans tried to kill the entirety of the Polish educated classes,
they're doing that in order to make Poland look more like the subhuman group of motley labourers.
This was to already, always have been. They're doing it for that reason.
That's not an event which is easy to process.
Historically, Polish intellectuals had a hard time understanding where this was coming from, what it was supposed to mean.
It was going to take a long time.
Copying is the paradigmatic example of this, but the entire assault on the Polish intelligentsia is is a bit like that as well.
This is generating raw material for future memory, but it's, so to speak, not in reading the politics of memory as such.
Now, something very interesting happens here in the relationship between Polish and Ukrainian memory and I to return to that.
It seems at first glance that the way that Poles, patriotic Poles and patriotic Ukrainians remember the Second World War,
as all of these as these horrible experiences begin to be processed as time passes, couldn't be more different.
At one level, the memory of the Second World War seems to be something where Poles and Ukrainians have exactly the opposite perspectives.
Why? Because a Polish state existed and was destroyed, whereas Germans recruited many Ukrainians from that state to be their collaborators.
And since Poles were losing the state,
they were fighting against Germans insofar as they fought to get a state back because Ukrainians did not have a state.
It was politically plausible, politically reasonable then to think that Germans might help them to build a state.
So the politics of this seemed to be in opposition. And worse than that, there's an event that takes place in the Second World War,
which seems to be the most extreme example of how national memory would be impossible to reconcile.
And that is the ethnic cleansing of 1943.
Over the over the course of the war, conditions were created in part of what happened in Poland that led to a campaign of massive ethnic cleansing,
massive violence and killing by of Poles, by Ukrainian nationalists in 1943.
And that particular moment, which was horrible, which I can talk about more if you're interested in the question and answer,
that particular moment seems to be the moment from which Polish and Ukrainian memory.
Must depart and. And never, never, never, never return.
Never reconcile themselves to again. I want to claim, though, that what happens is a little more interesting than that,
because in in both the Polish, this is going to seem subtle and maybe a little bit perverse,
but I hope you'll see where it goes in the end in both the Polish and the Ukrainian recollections of the ethnic cleansing and of the war itself.
It's the Democratic version of memory which is triumphant.
It's the ethnic version of history. The triumphant people killed and eliminate in the name of ethnicity.
People died because of ethnicity. That seems like an opposition, but it actually means that memory is happening in the same kind of mode.
And I'm going to come to why that matters a little bit later on. Know what happens with the Soviet Union is crucial because remember,
most Ukrainians who were alive in 1941 when one eastern front against most Ukrainians were alive and 1945 more comes to an end,
are living in the Soviet Union. But in 1945, it's almost all of because the Soviet Union is extending to the West.
And so what happens in the Soviet Union is incredibly important for what's going to happen to Ukraine memory.
And again,
making a large point very briefly and very roughly what happens in the process of the war is that the Soviet Union ceases to be about the future.
Okay, I realise there are millions of people in Western Europe for him that can't possibly have been true.
But I think in a fundamental way California as well.
You know, fundamentally New York in Cincinnati, Ohio in a fundamental way, the reference point for Soviet Union, the Soviet Union changes,
the fundamental reference point becomes the great parliament before it becomes the Second World War,
it becomes an event of the past which is fundamentally different from a socialism which is going to arrive in the future.
It's a different structure. It's a much more conventional structure.
You have to remember the past and you have to remember it the right way.
And I would say that from May 1945, this happens and immediately everyone has to account for it immediately.
Political political correctness inside the Soviet Union depends upon the fact what you did, what you didn't do,
what can be announced during the Second World War, and importantly in the new satellite states in Poland, for example, this is true as well.
Suddenly, the politics of memory is all about correct interpretation of an event in the recent historical past.
Now, to give a dramatic example from Poland, in order for Polish Communists to rule the country,
they have to have a view of the Second World War, which is both correct from the Soviet point of view and appealing for the Polish mind you.
And this is what leads us to the convenient notion, which is still repeated by historians in Poland to this day,
that in Poland during the Second World War, three women Poles were killed and 3 million Jews were killed.
If you reflect upon that for just a moment, I mean, what are the chances, honestly, that it would be 3 million to 3 million?
It wasn't. It was about it was a total was about four and a half million to 3 million for the Jews.
Is about rates a little bit higher for the Poles? It's maybe a million, a million and a half.
And those figures were known at the time. And the communists who knew Poland in particular, Yahoo, Vermont,
made the active decision to change the demography so that Poles and Jews died in the same numbers.
Why? Because that makes it seem like the death and the suffering in the Second World War wasn't national, was part of a national.
It was part of the general national experience. And that this thing, which we call the Holocaust, so to speak, didn't happen as a distinct event.
What happened was something which happened to Polish citizens and this was acceptable
to the Soviets because this is a minor key version of the general Soviet story,
what happens in the Second World War, which is that whatever the Germans did, they were doing it to Soviet citizens,
to peaceful Soviet citizens, not to Jews or to the other Russians, but to peaceful Soviet citizens.
And the interest implication of this, a very important implication of this for for the politics of memory,
is that communism, after the war, both in the Soviet Union, but especially in Poland,
this is actually what subject is is is ethno communism from the very beginning,
because it has no relation to the Second World War and because it has to do with ethnic terms and sort of speak democratic terms,
it is ethnic from the very beginning. Ethnicity is built into it from from the very beginning.
Okay. So this brings me to what happens to the politics of memory after the Second World War.
And it seems to me that the very interesting story, the very interesting intellectual story,
and one about which I think that the great bookstore has to be written,
is the way in which the Republican version of national memory reasserts itself and
begins to challenge the Democratic and the particular the place where this happens.
I mean, this really happened inside the minds of two people.
Julius Maciejewski in music, whether it's the place that this happened was was in Germany Harris School to attack.
The general principle to attack going against not only the official propaganda of communist Poland,
but also the general and perfectly understandable sentiments of Polish immigrants survivors around the world.
Pretty much the notion that Poland was fundamentally a state and that the experience of the
Second World War had to be processed in the terms most likely to help that state thrive,
survive and regain independence in the future.
Now, this this was a very, very important move that was made, and you're probably familiar with the particular ways that it was just being given.
It's made this argument that rather than being concerned about the correct match between ethnicity and political borders,
we accept the borders in the way they are,
rather than being concerned with the very true, legitimate historical grievances between Ukrainians and Poles or Lithuanians and Poles.
We put those aside and concentrate on the politics of regaining sovereignty.
This was all this can all be seen as a kind of recovery of the Republican mode of thinking about the past,
that the past has to do with the state rather than about the ethnicity.
Now, this created an interesting possibility for negotiation with Ukrainian intellectuals inside the Soviet Union and outside the Soviet Union,
because Ukraine intellectuals, especially those from Western Ukraine, were themselves undertaking a similar move.
The ethnic concept of the past, which had been highly motivating during the Second World War,
which had led to not just the horrors of ethnic cleansing,
but also to a very impressive and long lasting resistance movement in western Ukraine, horribly destructive for everyone involved,
but nevertheless certainly testifying to an amazing local dedication and courage that this had not worked out,
and that one of the reasons it hadn't worked out was that this ethnic idea,
the idea that the past that the past of the polity, the past of the people had to do with ethnicity was not working in most of Ukraine.
So over the course of the 1950s, sixties and 1970s, many of the Ukrainians who we know as the dissidents,
many of the Ukrainians who some of them came to power after 91,
reframed the story so that it was less about the past of the nation, less social history, and much more about the past of the state.
They began to think about Ukraine in terms of a civic identity, this identity, which is more and more predominant in Ukraine discourse today.
What this meant in turn was that there was a possibility for discussion because, you know,
the difference between one of the major differences between the Democratic and the Republican
versions of the past is that the Democratic one is very difficult as a foundation for dialogue,
because it leads to conversations which you have all seen, heard, taken hard,
and where I say I suffer more, you say you suffered more, I say it was your fault.
You say it was my fault. Right. That is what the ethnic understanding of the past leads to.
And there can be merit to those discussions. There are certainly questions there that can be answered.
You can count how many people were killed. That's a useful exercise, but it's that has a limit in terms of how far the dialogue can go.
If the past is reframed in civic terms, then the questions become things like What was the problem that led to your state falling apart?
What was the problem that led to my state falling apart?
Are there things which we might do in common or even together, which would make it less likely that our states would fall apart in the future?
That's the way that the dialogue shifted, at least in this particular conversation on the pages of Paris School Twitter.
And this conversation was very relevant, extremely relevant in 1989 to 1991, because in this in this incredibly interesting period between 1999,
when Poland had become a sovereign state and Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union.
And here we see one of just the absolutely crucial moments in the politics of memory.
Things could go very wrong during this period.
Just to give you the example of Yugoslavia, things could things could go less wrong, but still rather raw.
Czechoslovakia, in the case of in the case of Poland and Ukraine, what happens between 89 and 91 is extremely interesting.
Polish foreign policy embodies, in a highly radical form, the civic politics of now.
The Polish Foreign Ministry takes the position that it is going to treat Ukraine
as a sovereign state and that it's going to recognise Ukraine's boundaries.
Now, Ukraine is not a sovereign state, right?
And those boundaries are, of course, created in a way which is highly controversial, involves taking half of Poland.
If you were to have there were things to talk about with those guys if you want to talk about populations.
If you thought about history as social history, right. If you were taking the Democratic view history, the rules, the goal was a topic, right?
But if you take the civic version of history,
if you're concerned only about the state and what you learned about preserving the state, it's not a topic.
So the Polish Foreign Ministry took a radical I mean,
an incredibly right that you go to all these things saying literally became a kind of mantra we're going to.
Leave history to the historians, which is very flattering, of course.
I mean, you want to know you want to believe that you have some kind of mission like, yeah,
but but the truth is used so radically that I think it actually did affect the way things turned
out in Ukraine in a way which is probably still relevant today because the civic business,
it isn't just the nicer way of having a conversation in Paris.
If you're Poland, you're Ukraine. The civic business has direct consequences for how national liberation movements see their problem in Ukraine.
National liberation movements have always had at least two problems the Russian problem and the Polish problem.
I mean, they've usually also had the Ukrainian problem or Ukrainian problems,
but they've traditionally geopolitically there's there's the problem from the east and there's a problem for the West.
And these interrupt because the Russians will direct you towards the Poles and the Poles will direct you towards the Russians.
It becomes very complicated.
In 1989, for the first time in the history of of nationality in national politics, there was only one direction of the problem.
Ukrainian activists working from 89 to 91 were not worried that Poland is going to claim the wolf.
We're not worried in general about Poland at all. In fact, tended to think in some rough way.
Poland was on their side, was an example.
And so that was something very new, arguably, that contributed to the end of the Soviet Union, because, of course,
the tactics of the KGB was using in the Baltics, in the western Ukraine, was to direct national movements against each other.
The KGB was, in particular trying to take advantage of the history of 1943 to make sure that Poles and Ukrainians couldn't possibly cooperate.
But since the discussion had been framed not in ethnic,
but instead of terms not a Democratic than a Republican terms, that didn't actually work itself out.
So what I'm trying to claim is that this this, this, this, this turn in discourse,
this possibility for a different understanding of the politics of memory, which is still the politics.
It's still politics. It's still memory. It's it's framed in a different way.
Has different has foreign policy implications, which may in this case have been rather significant.
Okay. So what happens after Poland and Ukraine are both independent this period from 1991 to the present in Ukraine, broadly speaking,
most of the things that Poles taken very seriously, like the ethnic cleansing in Bologna in 1943,
like the loss of Polish territory in the old Soviet troops in 1939.
In general, these things are not at all significant in Ukrainian discourse.
These are West Ukrainian issues. But Ukraine is a very big country and for the most part of the things that the Poles find significant
when they're in the ethnic movement and democratic mode are not that significant in Ukraine in general.
What one sees in the Ukrainian politics of memory after 1991 are two kinds of pluralism.
The first kind of pluralism is oligarchic pluralism, which is the kind of pluralism that Ukraine has in every sphere of life.
That is different. Centres of power could favour different ideas of history at the same time.
So unlike in other places, you do have a certain amount of discussion about the past.
The other kind of frozen that Ukraine had was sequential prism.
So when you Stingo comes to power, he advocates a different politics of memory in which the family is very important.
When Yanukovich wins the elections, all of a sudden the family is less important.
But there's nevertheless a kind of pluralism that happens to be someone.
There's a difference of opinion which which which is visible.
Now, when I say that Cohen is insignificant in Ukrainian debates about the past, I would of course recognise that there are some exceptions.
One one recent exception, which I'm going to return to, is 1943.
But I also want to point out that even though Poland seems to be strikingly insignificant in Ukraine's discussions of the past,
Poland nevertheless pops up at certain crucial moments.
I want to ask why, in 2004, in the middle of the Orange Revolution, it was the Poles.
In that case, when your guest for tomorrow, Kwasniewski,
other presidents who came and served as a mediator in 2014, it was about a small support scheme.
The Polish foreign minister again, who served as the most important mediator in the middle of of the revolution.
And there's this funny tendency for some of you who are paying close attention to my of notes where
in the general critique of Europe by the by the activists on Maidan last year and this year.
The general overwhelming and sort of heartbreaking critique of the European Union generally.
There was an exception. That exception was Poland. Why is that how the how that came about?
Where does that where does that come from? Now, I want to suggest that the place where that comes from is, again,
the difference between this Democratic and this Republican notion of solidarity or this Republican and Democratic notion passed most.
Days for the I think you can correct me in question and answer because I can tell that 28% of you reports.
Most days, 28% of you are.
And in most days, the standard way that polls feel about Ukrainians and at least this is what the opinion polls tell us, is suspicion and even fear.
Indeed, for most of the 1990s, if you look back at the opinion polls,
polls consistently said they were more afraid of Ukrainians than of Germans, which is rather which is rather interesting.
And it has everything to do with the very real ethnic cleansing of the war and also the way that communist politics exploited that particular,
particular fear. So in a kind of default ethnic mode, there's the polls do not generally.
You can correct me again, but at least let's put it this way, sociologically, very little sympathy was registered.
But nevertheless, in moments of high politics, like 2004 or more recently, this year, 2014,
what seems to happen is that there's a shift in mentality from the ethnic, the democratically, it's history to the civic way of seeing history.
So all of a sudden, the register, the armaments changes.
So people who are who one day are criticising Ukrainians for not recognising that 1943 was a genocide,
that literally the next day are campaigning for a much more active Polish policy to support Ukraine.
And I think that has to do with the possibility that people can switch between modes that what
I'm talking about when I say the Democratic and Republican version of the politics of the past,
this isn't just different people. It's different modes which can exist inside inside the same person.
And so I would I would talk to you as a claim, which I can't prove that what has happened in 2004.
And what happened is that part of what's happening now is that in moments of crisis,
Poles are capable of seeing Ukraine as a parallel state, as even a fraternal state to abuse a much abused notion.
A state which is in a in a parallel position worthy of sympathy becomes worthy of support.
Right. Worthy of sympathy because worthy of support. The sympathy follows a certain kind of logic.
But I want to close with the thought that what is happening in the politics of
memory between Ukrainians and Poles right now may involve something rather new.
Something rather different.
Something which goes beyond these two logics of of of the politics of the past, which come from the 19th century in general.
I think it's fair to say that in conditions of independence in the last decade and a half,
what's happened is that both of these logics have reappeared on both sides with with the end of communism and,
of course, with the end of National Socialism,
you see a very you see the resurgence of very familiar ways of talking about the past in general and on both sides.
But I think, interestingly, something else, something new may be, in fact, happening.
And I think that the novel thing is that events which are themselves rather recent,
are suddenly being enfolded into both nations more, or to put in a different way,
events which aren't from the 19th century and aren't from the thirties and forties,
events which happened in communism or even in post communism are beginning to register to become central in the memory politics on both sides.
And that is is having a certain kind of effect. Let me give you first what might seem to be just a minor example, which I think is very.
If you're like me, you've been doing a lot of reading of press reports about the revolution and counter-revolution in Ukraine.
You might have noticed that people writing in English and French and German most Western languages don't
quite know how to describe those Ukrainians who are on the Maidan who then choose chose to use violence.
It's an unbelievably, actually unbelievably opportunistic situation.
And so opera that people one day will say activists, you know, and then the next day for, say, combat, or one day there's an activist.
Next day they'll say terrorists. You know, they're describing, you know, the same the same people.
If you read the Polish press, you notice that this problem does not exist in Poland because the Poles have the word they see this was a postal,
it was an uprising, has brought industrial business and more skilled occupations.
There's a word for someone who carries on a national uprising. That person is, of course, Thanos.
And so if you read the sort of report itself, you can read about constancy.
That category exists in Poland because that experience exists in Poland.
And it and as you read, if you read again incorrectly,
if you follow as you read that word persistently over and over and over again in the press as a description of what's happened in Ukraine 2014.
It can't help but in some way make that make that thing which is happening in Ukraine, more claims,
make it make it, make it more approachable, make it seem like something which is sympathetic.
And of course, there are similarities.
I mean, not so much with the actual facade of the 19th century, but I would say with the Warsaw uprising, that is the.
Say it's a moment where people of very different politics are brought together.
Right. And if you look at the Polish army, the Polish resistance in Nazi Germany,
the people who are in the army have all kinds of different views, like all the things that you can say about the Maidan today.
Most of the people also applied to the home army that you had men and women and people of different generations.
You have people of different political commitments.
You have people from different parts of the country who were unified because of what they saw as a national cause.
Now, the Maidan was very much like that is still very much like that.
And I think this notion of constancy, like this notion of a special national moment captures that as well.
But there's something there's something that's maybe even more interesting going on in this march.
We saw actually just wrote an article about this. And just your idea, as I said, to a close,
the other thing which is which is recent and which is a bit similar and which I think serves as a kind of matrix onto which Poles can see consciously,
have consciously or unconsciously what's happening in Ukraine is, is, is solidarity.
Now, I don't have to prove this to you because of course,
the way that the way one of the most compelling symbols in Poland is the old Solidarity banner.
Right. But instead of the red and white with the same silver letters and blue and yellow,
which is absolutely ambiguous from from a false point of view, I think that the resemblance is something more than accidental.
I think what's happening is that his recent history, at least in Poland,
in Ukraine, not everywhere, recent history is creeping into the history of Poland.
The 1981 Solidarity Martial law is not so difficult to map onto the history of Ukraine in 2013 to 2014 Maidan external intervention.
And I think something like that is is happening. I also think that there's a certain that solidarity, contentious as it is,
as the tradition in Poland, opens the way for what will what Tim called it, the very end of his book.
He cites Hannah Arendt saying that solidarity proved the human capacity to create new things.
But it's a new kind of politics. It's not entirely captured by right or left, by by elite or mass, by conservative or liberal.
It's something which is new. And that that notion that there can be new kinds of politics and special situations
also seems to apply to Maidan and to be applied more or less under flexibly,
at least by some poles, towards the impact. Now I'm posing with this note about things that are new because of course,
there's another politics of history which is going on now in Ukraine, which focuses on the old.
And I'm just going to just suggest what this might be and what I mean in the way that the Maidan reframed outside of Ukraine,
opposed to, say, in Russia, in the means of mass communication, which are affiliated with one another.
With Russia, you have something entirely different going on.
And you have rather than this sort of complicated discussion, which I tried to lead you to, where there's a history of representation,
there's a history of Poles and Ukrainians as Republican and Democratic, and the language solidarity idea.
Instead, you have a very powerful,
unsuccessful attempt to reduce this to the former categories and same war in in which what's happened what's happening is not a civil society.
It's not a unification of different sorts of people. It's not resistance, legitimate or legitimate.
It's simply fascism. Now, that has been I mean, I saw what you noted.
We don't have time to talk about.
What that has been is extraordinarily successful and not only inside lines of Russia, and it certainly is a politics of memory,
the notion that the good people or the antifascists and the party political activists comes from somewhere.
It comes from my conclusion that injuries and it's also a way of very powerfully
dividing in a manichaean mind that the good the good from the good from evil.
Essentially, what I like to close by suggesting is that one final thing that Poles and Ukrainians have in common,
although and other people often don't share,
is the recognition that fascism and anti-fascism is a politics of memory,
that it's not some sincere and it's not some sincere or emotional or or historical reference.
That fascism and anti-fascism is a politics and that it can exist in all kinds of combinations.
So just to give you the most extreme example,
a lot of the Russian politics in memory have been within the Ukraine has involved claiming that Jews are Nazis,
which from a largely Western point of view is sort of, you know, either you don't register that it's happened,
which I ask people, or you might scratch your head and say, Hmm, that's probably not.
Likely from a Polish point of view, that sort of thing is totally familiar, right?
In Poland, you have the spectacle in 1968 of the the Communist Party expelling Jews while while claiming that it's protecting them from reactionaries.
You have the spectacle during solidarity of 1981 of of the party itself using ethnic nationalism in calling into
the US Jews and calling them enticing but at the same time mobilising both of these things at the same time.
That was the bread and butter of a certain communist politics of memory and that sort of thing is now coming out again.
That is so strange. That is very strange, I think, for most people. So strange that I think we don't even notice.
We don't notice that it's dead or we don't notice the contradiction and we are just sort of moved by it, but we don't really see what's going on.
The thing that I think made it all that Ukrainians still have in common, and again,
I invite you to correct me or to modify what I'm saying is the sense that that is also a politics of memory,
that that is a rival kind of politics of memory, but that it's a politics and that one can think about it politically rather than in some other way.
So that brings me to 2014. It brings me through the ideas of of politics, of memory, traditional Republican, Democratic.
It gives people a certain evolution of how Poles and Ukrainians have interacted,
where Democratic politics is harder, Republican politics is easier, and we may now be somewhere.
So that's where I'd like to close. Thank you very much.