The Mnemonic Warriors of the European Far Right: Memory Politics, Laws, Narratives

The Mnemonic Warriors of the European Far Right is a comparative analysis of the politics and policy of memory as seen through the conceptual lens of Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire. More specifically, the research in this volume is carried out through the prism of national-populist and conservative-sovereignist narratives in the Western, Central, and Eastern European public sphere. The overall aim of this book is to examine how the European populist far right, both the governing elites and those operating on the fringes of mainstream politics, has adopted the instrumentalization of 20th-century authoritarian and totalitarian lieux de mémoire to boost their political legitimacy. The contributors to this volume explore critically the interplay between politics and collective memory, the role of historical myths in shaping collective consciousness, and the manipulation mechanisms of political communication aimed at monopolizing the “real” memory of the past. They explore how different and sometimes mutually exclusive narratives about “places of memory” interact in the public sphere of societies that have experienced non-democratic regimes in their history. This volume will be of interest to researchers of European history and politics, the far right, populism, and memory studies.

About the Author

Joanna Sondel-Cedarmas is Associate Professor of Contemporary History. She teaches at the Institute of History, Anthropology, Religions, Art History, Media, and Performing Arts at the Sapienza University of Rome and at the Institute of European Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Her previous publications include The Right-Wing Critique of Europe: Nationalist, Sovereignist , and Right-Wing Populist Attitudes to the EU (Routledge 2022, edited with Francesco Berti).

Grzegorz Pożarlik is Assistant Professor and a former deputy director of the Jagiellonian University Institute of European Studies, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland. His current research pursues critical exploration of border governance insecuritization as well as far-right symbolic construction of memory politics in Central Europe.