Historical reckonings.

Christopher Clausen's essay on the role of historical memory in the latest Wilson Quarterly should not be overlooked. While Clausen muses about civil war re-enactments and the role of war memories on US foreign policy-- nothing too original, his focus on the role of history as liberator or prison is crucial to understanding the success or failure of transition states.

For example, in Romania, the success of transition has depended on a reckoning with history in at least one manner that comes to my immediate attention-- the question of the Holocaust. In building national socialism (i.e. the worst of all worlds-- radical, right wing nationalism buttressed by socialism which created an unswerving and unquestionable loyalty to the popor, or "the people", represented solely by the one-party state), Ceausescu mandated textbooks that stressed the ethnic purity of Romanians, their innocence in the Second World War, and the dangers of cosmopolitans (read Jews) who wanted to "open up" economies and nations. Many Romanians learned their school-lessons well, and anti-Semitism remains significant in the mainstream media. For President Iliescu and the Romanian government to gain accession to NATO and other international status clubs, history had to bee rewritten to acknowledge the role of some Romanians in the Holocaust and the persecution of Jews. Michael Shafir provides excellent reportage of the continuing balancing act performed by the Iliescu regime on this topic.

History inspires, as it legitimizes and shames. The Bush administration has attempted to legitimize the Afghan and Iraqi transition to a democracy by involving historical institutions assumed to resonate with the local public. The extent of Russian and Chinese liberalization is constantly conveyed as a grappling with history-- scholars resort to descriptions of strong-man rule and reverence for authory as stumbling-blocks in the path to free societies. Dale Richmond even goes so far as to define "South Eastern European values" entirely with reference to historical political institutions in the area.

While government-oriented institutional theories prove effective in short-term comparisons, their comparisons are often limited to explaining the political behavior of elites. Truly effective institutional paradigms would encompass social and non-governmental institutions, for it is these institutions which act as incubators of social change, creating classrooms of oral history and legendry, encouraging the laboratories of revolution. You don't have to be a radical deconstructionist to acknowledge that the tale told by history textbooks is often a politically-motivated one, which sustains and reinforces current political arrangements. And you don't have to worship Howard Zinn to acknowledge that the most crucial history for transition states is "the people's history"-- the one that legitimates and supports regime change.

Clausen's includes a moving quote from one of my favorite authors, William Faulker. In "The Jail" (1951), Faulkner channeled the memory of a Alabama Civil war soldier's widow to unveil the vividness and poignancy of historial memory:

"so vast, so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream...there is the clear, undistanced voice as though out of the delicate antenna-skeins of radio, futher than the empress's throne, than the splendid instantiation, even than matriarch's peacful rocking chair, across the vast instantaneous intervention, from the long long time ago: Listen, stranger, this was myself: this was I".

Who am I? Who were "we"? Must the "we" be delegitimized to make room for the repentant "I"? Every time I return to Romania, I silently observe the reckonings of individuals seeking to reconcile their present conceptions of morality with their past communist complicity (or lack). The older generation brushes off such difficult reflection with statements like, "It was better then.." or "Who cares? Politicians are all the same-- I just did what I had to do to put food on the table".

How we justify past horrors is the cornerstone of future political arrangements. How governments obscure past and present horrors can be exhumed through an analysis of propaganda. The stories we tell to hold our worldviews and self-images together cannot be discounted, especially when the stories don't quite match the official explanation.