Scholarly record

THE MEMORY POLICY, IDENTITY AND CHALLENGES OF MIGRATION

D. Kazarinova

Abstract

The EU's collective identity was built on the memory of the Holocaust and, to a lesser extent, colonialism. In the 1990s, this memory began to be replaced by the idea of Captive nations more suitable for new members from CEE and their liberation within the framework of the concept of a ‘Europe Whole and Free and at Peace’. There was a substitution of concepts and the result was a crisis of solidarity. Those integration blocks, where the convergence of the values of migrants and host societies is potentially possible to combine on the basis of common references in the politics of memory, are more sustainable in the long term. Imagining the supranational bodies requires non-controversial politics of the past which had references between migrants and receiving societies. In the context of Eurasian integration, common milestones of historical memory and constructing events are potentially consistent, and migration does not become a challenge for host communities. The identity studies and memory studies are based on constructivism as a methodological approach that suggests that people act in their interaction as value-rational actors whose value structure is determined by how people understand the world in which they live and social facts are an expression of the values that people collectively choose[1]. We also use the normative approach to determine the effective policy vector of historical memory in the case of Russia and the post-Soviet space. Remaining within the framework of Memory studies, we rely on the classical works of Maurice Halbwachs, Le Goff, Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbaum, Paul Ricoeur, Jan Assmann etc. We also used the approach of R.Park and E.Burgess from Chicago School. We follow Gerard Noiriel who presents two approaches to the immigration, collective memory and identity issues: direct intervention of historians in political debates or Annales school approach by F.Braudel and P.Nora with their definition of Nation As a Person who settled in fact “a kind of consensus, that immigration was a new problem for national identity” [2]. The P.Nora’s idea of immigration as a “non-lieu a memoire” or denial memory was a base of this approach.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2018/1.2/S01.041

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