Public lecture "Memory Laws" by Professor Nikolay Koposov, with Deputy Secretary General Bjørn Berge of the Council of Europe
On Friday 22 March 2024, Professor Nikolay Koposov (Georgia Institute of Technology, US) gave a public lecture based on his book Memory Laws, Memory Wars (Cambridge University Press 2018). The Deputy Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Bjørn Berge, made some introductory remarks about this important topic.
See the words of the Deputy Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Bjørn Berge
Memory laws make certain accounts of the past criminally punishable, such as denial of the Holocaust. They may be aimed at protecting the historical truth and safeguarding democratic values such as fairness, transparency and justice. However, legislation of history risks undermining these very values, by opening up the past as a battlefield for the present.
Memory laws have to specify the facts, the denial of which is criminally punishable. This shifts the discussion to the nature of historical facts, and brings politics to the academic arena of historical research.
Professor Koposov pointed out that democracies require freedom of speech; but if words matter and have real effects, they can harm democracy. Thus, there may be a need to limit this freedom. Democracy in a perverse interpretation can be used to kill historical truth itself as a concept, if everyone feels they have the democratic right to their own understanding of the past. Societies risk shifting from “pluricultural” to “plurimemorial”. These elements of post-modernism under the guise of democratic values open up a large space for “history politics".
Professor Koposov argued that legislation of memory is effective in autocratic regimes because it strengthens an overall strategy of suppressing dissent, while in democracies it can be at odds with its key values.
History inevitably includes elements of interpretation, and recognizing this feature of history needs to be part of the solution. For democracies, the better strategy to prevent abuse of the past by the present can be found in education, knowledge, critical reflection, transparency, and debate. The Council of Europe plays an important role here, as it is exactly those values and practices which it promotes and supports.
