309 pages

English

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Political Transition , livre ebook

Pluto Press - Edited By Paul Gready

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

309 pages

English

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

In the twentieth century, many countries around the globe experienced rapid and often traumatic political transformations. From East Germany and Northern Ireland to Argentina, Chile and Zimbabwe, political transition has been momentous and has had a deep impact on the individual culture of each society.

This collection explores these periods of political transition and the impact that they have had through an analysis of memory, identity, space/place and voice. Concentrating in particular on post-colonial and post-oppressive regimes in Europe, Southern Africa and Latin America, the contributors assess how individuals come to terms with rapid political change, and the enduring legacies of the past in the present. They examine how political transformations affect people's memories and identities, reworking spaces/places and voices, and how both offical and unofficial mechanisms set up to cope with these changes impact on these issues.

Juxtaposing different country and regional experiences and different historical eras, this is a comprehensive guide to the vast range of issues involved in political transition.
1. Introduction

Paul Gready

2. Remembering To Forgetting 'Zimbabwe': Towards A Third Transition by Christine Sylvester

3. Contested Memories Of Repression In The Southern Cone: Commemorations In A Comparative Perspective by Elizabeth Jelin

4. ‘What Is Written In Our Hearts’: Memory, Justice And The Healing Of Fragmented Communities by Victoria Sanford

5. Memory And Forgetting: The Roma Holocaust by István Pogány

6. Continuity And Discontinuity Of East German Identity Following The Fall Of The Berlin Wall: A Case Study Molly Andrews

7. Mobilising Memories: Protestant And Unionist Victims Groups And The Politics Of Victimhood In The Irish Peace Process by Graham Dawson

8. ‘In The Name Of The Victims’: The Politics Of Compensation In The Work Of The South African Truth And Reconciliation Commission by Lars Buur

9. The Construction Of Voice And Identity In The South African Truth And Reconciliation Commission by Fiona C. Ross

10. Remembering Ordinary Agency Under East German State

Socialism: Revelations Of The Rostock District Record, 1978-1989 by Joan Hackeling

11. Insinuating Spaces: Memories Of A Madrid Neighbourhood During The Spanish Transition by Steven Marsh

12. Public Bad, Public Good(S) And Private Realities by Carolyn Nordstrom

13. Shouting From The Bottom Of The Well: The Impact Of International Trials For Wartime Rape On Women’s Agency by Julie Mertus

14. Networks Of Memory: Chileans Debate Democracy And The Pinochet Legacy Over An Internet Forum by Eliza Tanner Hawkins

15. Reconciling Reconciliation: A Personal And Public Journey Of Testifying Before The South African Truth And Reconciliation Commission by Yazir Henri

16. Empire Dies For Irish Freedom: Silence And Amnesia In Anglo-Irish Talks by Ella O’Dwyer

Sujets

Social Science

Sociologie, société et politique

General officer

Anthropology

General

Informations

Publié par	Pluto Press
Date de parution	20 avril 2003
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781849641722
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,6250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Political Transition

Politics and Cultures

Edited by Paul Gready

P Pluto Press LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

First published 2003 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166-2012, USA

www.plutobooks.com

The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7453 2042 2 hardback ISBN 0 7453 2041 4 paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Political transition : politics and cultures / edited by Paul Gready. p. cm. ISBN 0–7453–2042–2 (hc) –– ISBN 0–7453–2041–4 (pb) 1. Political culture––Case studies. 2. Political science. I. Gready, Paul. JA75.7 .P6627 2003 306.2'09'0511––dc21 2002154508

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Towcester, England Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England

Contents

1 Introduction Paul Gready

PART I

The Politics of Memory

2 Remembering and Forgetting ‘Zimbabwe’: Towards a Third Transition Christine Sylvester 3 Contested Memories of Repression in the Southern Cone: Commemorations in a Comparative Perspective Elizabeth Jelin 4 ‘What is Written in Our Hearts’: Memory, Justice and the Healing of Fragmented Communities Victoria Sanford 5 Memory and Forgetting: The Roma Holocaust István Pogány

PART II

Identities

6 Continuity and Discontinuity of East German Identity Following the Fall of the Berlin Wall: A Case Study Molly Andrews 7 Mobilising Memories: Protestant and Unionist Victims’ Groups and the Politics of Victimhood in the Irish Peace Process Graham Dawson 8 ‘In the Name of the Victims’: The Politics of Compensation in the Work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission Lars Buur 9 The Construction of Voice and Identity in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission Fiona C. Ross

107

127

148

165

290 295

PART IV

183

212

Notes on Contributors Index

Testimony and Voices

198

The Politics of Memory and International Trials for Wartime Rape 227 Julie Mertus Networks of Memory: Chileans Debate Democracy and the Pinochet Legacy Over an Internet Forum 246 Eliza Tanner Hawkins Reconciling Reconciliation: A Personal and Public Journey of Testifying Before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission 262 Yazir Henri Empire Dies for Irish Freedom: Silence and Amnesia in Anglo-Irish Talks 276 Ella O’Dwyer

PART III

Remembering Ordinary Agency Under East German State Socialism: Revelations of the Rostock District Record, 1978–89 Joan Hackeling Insinuating Spaces: Memories of a Madrid Neighbourhood During the Spanish Transition Steven Marsh Public Bad, Public Good(s) and Private Realities Carolyn Nordstrom

Political Transition

Re-making Space

Introduction Paul Gready

Memory, identity, space/place and voice are central to the vocabu-laries, politics and cultures of political transition. These keywords are mutually informing. Policy decisions in relation to justice, truth and reconciliation imply as well as create a value system for these terms. Similarities and divergences in the way the quartet are understood can reflect converging or fundamentally different under-standings of the lived-through past and the desired future. They provide some of the crucial fault lines of transition and primary moral and political sites of nation-building. The post-Cold War rhetorical mainstreaming of human rights has entrenched a legal/quasi-legal orthodoxy as the preferred way to come to terms with the past. Official mechanisms such as truth commissions and war crimes tribunals are, nonetheless, only ever part of the story of the post-oppression or post-conflict era and also themselves structure and restructure memory, identity and space/place and privilege certain voices while suppressing others. Ross and Mertus, for example, detail in this volume how such insti-tutions have misrepresented the lives and concerns of women. Mertus (2000) has argued elsewhere that war crimes tribunals are most likely to address the interests of the international community and least likely to satisfy survivors, while Mamdani (2000) has per-suasively claimed that institutions such as truth commissions re-make conflicts in a single image (of individual victims and perpetrators, of civil and political rights violations). Officially sanctioned memories, identities, spaces/places and voices are challenged and resisted from within civil society by the margin-alised, disenfranchised and disenchanted, by minorities, political opponents and past perpetrators. Other agents from civil society – the media, human rights groups, academics – have also helped to define the profile of who gets to be heard, where and what is remembered, in ways that can reinforce or undermine official agendas. Furthermore, a number of countries have chosen the path of forgetting or of non-legal and non-institutional responses to a traumatic past, and in all transitions local civil society and non-

Political Transition

governmental responses co-exist with any state- or internationally-sponsored initiatives. These different approaches to the past impact upon the content and form of memory, identity, space/place and voice, and therefore on the cultures and politics of transition. Transition, as it is understood here, implies a change in political regime and culture towards greater democratisation, post-repression, post-colonialism, post-war. Institutional mechanisms define and delimit transition in a particular way: in largely political and legal terms, as temporally and spatially delimited (in part by the institu-tions themselves), as a historical stage or way-station in a narrative of progress. Transition as it emerges in this volume is somewhat different. It is a contested and intrinsically incomplete process, shot through with considerations of politics and power, mobilised as a demand and a promise, and characterised by continuity as well as multi-faceted, if often uneven, change. Patterns from the past are often reconfigured rather than radically altered in the present. Resistance, for example, does not end where transition begins – as Buur notes in this collection, transition creates its own victims. Ignatieff (1996) writes of societies characterised by a simultaneity of the past and/in the present which means that the past is ‘not past at all’ (121). While acknowledging an inevitable and desirable temporal simultaneity, there is a need to liberate the present and future from the burden of the past that threatens to overwhelm them. To come to terms with the past means superimposing serial time on simultaneous time; it means reactivating the movement of time. Transition involves moving on while claiming ownership of the full temporal range, forgetting as well as remembering. There is a geographical as well as a temporal dimension to transition. Transition is spatialised, it re-maps geographical relation-ships, public and symbolic places – as such it re-makes geographies as well as histories, discourses of transition unravelling unevenly across time and space. Furthermore, as Mertus (2000) illustrates, tensions between global, national and local priorities are played out in transitional societies. This book attempts to capture something of the dialectic between the global and the local, top down and bottom up, official and unofficial. In short, transition is understood in this collection of essays to be a rhetorical device or political strategy as well as a layered and often fractured political and cultural reality. More specifically, it is a politics and culture built on the foundations of memory, identity, space/place

Introduction

and voice, and it is here that critical and comparative perspectives are sought in this collection. The regions of Europe, Latin America and Southern Africa have been chosen for comparative analysis in this volume because they have been central to the macro discourses about justice and truth, influencing policies in an increasingly global exchange and, it is suggested here, will perform a similar role in relation to the debates about memory, identity, space/place and voice. The collection, therefore, juxtaposes different country and regional experiences and historical eras or phases of transition. It is also multidisciplinary, with individual contributions often drawing on a range of disciplinary approaches. The sub-divisions of the book – ‘The Politics of Memory’, ‘Identities’, ‘Re-making Space’ and ‘Testimony and Voices’ – are by no means watertight, so debates can be traced within and between the sections. The approach taken in the collection to these four concerns is introduced below.

THE POLITICS OF MEMORY

This is an over-used and under-theorised term in the literature on political transition. For example, in one study that carries the term as its title, it is a rather thinly conceptualised and partially applied cloak for a discussion primarily focusing on mainstream transitional justice and accountability measures.

It can be said that the politics of memory is two things. Narrowly conceived, it consists of policies of truth and justice in transition (official or public memory); more widely conceived, it is about how a society interprets and appropriates its past, in an ongoing attempt to mould its future (social memory). (de Brito et al. (eds) 2001:37)

Other similarly titled books fail to define their key term at all (Amadiume and An-Na’im (eds) 2000). This collection begins to develop a more comprehensive definition, stretching beyond the confines of transitional justice initiatives. Some components of the definition are overtly political: the use of memory in electoral politics (Sylvester); the nature of official, insti-tutionalised memory, such as that enshrined in truth commissions, war crimes tribunals and other criminal prosecutions, strictly cir-cumscribed by politics and power (Sanford, Buur, Ross, Mertus); the

Political Transition

nationalisation and ‘ownership’ of memory by the state or party (Sylvester) or, conversely, its privatisation, which can democratise memory and/or constitute an abdication of state/party responsibil-ity (Jelin); selective, partial memories and the struggle between opposing memories of the past (Sylvester, Jelin, Pogány); memory’s reach and its mobilisation within the politics of the present (Sylvester, Jelin, Sanford, Pogány): ‘memory on-call, an all-purpose memory, a memory for all seasons’ (Zertal 2000:120). Struggles over the meaning of the past are also struggles over power in the present – Jelin, for example, in her chapter in this collection notes the possibility that the original reason for commemoration becomes a ‘pre-text’ for present struggles. The politics of memory is interwoven with the repetition and recasting of past divisions and conflicts, as the past continues to influence, sometimes literally exploding into, ongoing societal disputation (Sylvester, Jelin, Sanford, Dawson, Buur, Hackeling, Tanner Hawkins). The politics of memory must also address broader issues and struggles, such as whether to remember (Pogány), what to remember and control of memory (Sylvester, Jelin, Sanford, Pogány, Tanner Hawkins), when to remember (O’Dwyer), and the history of memory itself (Jelin). Crucial to the politics being outlined here are disputed lines of inclusion and exclusion, solidarity and fracture, memory and forgetting. Examples of these contests range from controversies around the issue of ‘victims’ in Northern Ireland and South Africa (Dawson, Buur, Ross), to disputes over the selection and meaning of specific commemorative dates and events (Jelin), attempts to enforce invisibility, silence and forgetting in the war zones of Angola (Nordstrom), and to the re-working of the profile of debate and democracy in new forms of technology such as the internet (Tanner Hawkins). Another line of tension underpinning many contributions to this book is the relationship between official memory (state-sponsored efforts at memory creation and dissemination), collective 1 2 memory, and individual memory: what Jelin (1998) calls the ‘layers and levels’ of memory. Memory carries an almost overwhelming set of political expecta-tions during transitions that frame its form and delivery: an emancipatory potential often ascribed in the idea that even those without and outside history still have memory (although this notion is interestingly countered by Pogány’s suggestion that for the Roma memory is a luxury given ongoing deprivation and persecution); a final, even ultimate, victory for resistance and liberation; a form of

Introduction

deterrence; a leading role in the policy arenas of truth and justice; a walk-on part in reconciliation, democratisation and reconstruction; the raw material of catharsis and healing; the facilitator of continuity within new beginnings. Alongside the sophisticated politics of memory is an equally sophisticated politics of forgetting (Cohen 2001). The ideal for the politics of memory is a move from private memory to public acknowledgement, accountability, debate and ‘ownership’, and a combination of the past- and future-oriented functions of memory.

IDENTITIES

This book looks at transitional identity in a way that complements the dominant discourse in this field (nationalism), by highlighting various trajectories of identity: the politics of victimhood, the link between identity and recognition/resources (Dawson, Buur, Ross), between identity, recovery and action (Marsh, Sanford); interrela-tionships and divisions between individual, group and nation/state (Dawson, Buur, Marsh); identity as a reaction to another time and another place (Andrews); lines of continuity as well as change, grand narratives alongside the everyday (Andrews, Buur, Ross). These provide the contours of a politics of identity, inextricably linked to the politics of memory. Just as memory during transition is plural, so there is a diversity of identity possibilities within a transitional context. As Ignatieff (1996) writes: ‘nations … do not have a single identity … National identity is a site of conflict and argument, not a silent shrine for collective worship’ (116). Transition typically involves a search for new identities, the challenge of dealing with curtailed, fixed (Ross) and proliferating identities (Andrews) – crucially informed by ‘rhetorical frames’ and ‘imaginable possibilities’ (Cruz 2000). It is with such frames and possibilities that this book is concerned. Memory and forgetting are implicated in identity formation at all layers/levels, and vice versa. ‘The core meaning of any individual or group identity, namely, a sense of sameness over time and space, is sustained by remembering; and what is remembered is defined by the assumed identity’ (Gillis 1994:3). A further important component of the memory–identity linkage is that both are relational, funda-mentally forged in, defined by and in turn defining, relationships and social interaction. Both can be collective. Novick (2001), echoing Gillis, talks of ‘a circular relationship between collective identity and

Political Transition

collective memory. We choose to center certain memories because they seem to us to express what is central to our collective identity. Those memories, once brought to the fore, reinforce that form of identity’ (7). The danger arises when identity is run through with essentialist discourses (a ‘chosen people’) and ‘other’, memories of atrocity and the desire for revenge, and narratives ascribing guilt and innocence, infamy and glory. Ethnic nationalism is hard to explain without addressing the mutually enforcing relationship between collective memory and collective identity. Stripped of the fossilising force of Cold War politics, nationalism has become central to political transitions, as both a means and an end. ‘A collective memory that denies full humanity to the out-group allows for various shades of “getting rid of”’ (Cohen 2001:97). Memory of atrocity becomes self-duplicating. But it is important to note that democratically forged collective memory can be an agent of inclusion and reconciliation (Tanner Hawkins). Further, this is only one identity strand within transition – collectivism battles pluralism and identities collapse inwards and expand outwards – and one way in which identity bears memory into the future in terms of rhetorical frames and imagined possibilities. One key, and related, rhetorical frame relates to the identity status of victimhood. As part of wider trends often associated with a post-modern identity politics, and politically loaded identity-naming during transition (victims, survivors, perpetrator-victims, bystanders, beneficiaries, etc.), the politics of victimhood takes a particular form in transitional states. It can be a means of self-help, seeking redress, reclaiming voice and critiquing new forms of marginalisation, forgetting and power. It can also take on a more sinister guise. Although the different faces of victim politics are not always easy to distinguish, the process of identity formation is more likely to be dangerous if it produces a group, national or diaspora identity-politics dominated by the embrace of exclusive and intolerant victim claims. Such identities can be competitive and fragmentary, dominated by grievance, history, a sense of injustice, and the pursuit of recognition and resources. Sometimes such identities are based on ethnicity or religion. Chapters in this book examine the politics of victimhood in Northern Ireland and South Africa as it affects a range of issues: ‘hierarchies of victimhood’ as they inform an uneven remembering of the past and access to resources and recognition in the present;