A (New) Spectre Is Haunting Europe: National Memory

History is under attack, all over the world, for both the political and propagandistic uses of the past – which increasingly frame the actions of autocratic governments – and for the bans on writing, studying, teaching subjects that may be regarded as offensive to the memory of one country or even a threat to its national unity. These two perspectives are closely linked, because it is precisely in those countries where history, or rather an idealised or politically-oriented image of the past, is employed with greater ideological zeal that it is more difficult to write history without repressive state intervention. The examples are many: prison sentences for those who tackle certain topics, state censorship of school curricula, inaccessible archives, destroyed documents, marginalisation of disobedient officials, coercive rewriting of the past. It has become increasingly difficult to maintain the vital link between historical research, dissemination of results and teaching, to the detriment of an official history increasingly bent to the ideological pretensions of governments to create unitary histories in homage to a distorted idea of national prestige.