Introduction

In his speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem in 2015, Benyamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister, purported to describe a meeting between Haj Amin al-Husseini and Hitler in November 1941:

The past is a rich resource for populist exploitation as it is directly linked to moral boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. This chapter focuses on the questions of how national memory and moral remembrance have an effect on populism's moral and ethical relations to the past. According to Cas Mudde (2004), probably the most influential scholar on populism, morals are central to the populist appeal. Populism is a political stance that juxtaposes ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’. Populism relies on morals that determine ‘the pure’ and ‘the righteous’ values; hence, it is directly linked with disputes over the interpretations of the past. The rise of populism, which began in the 1970s and grew considerably in the 1990s and onwards, has made the past an increasingly important soft-power resource. This is because the populist revelations on what are ‘pure’ and ‘righteous’ values always lean on allegedly ‘true’ and so far ‘hidden’ understanding of what transpired in the past. Hence, as we will see, historical revisionism and claims over victimhood and suffering are the bread and butter of every populist appeal.

Though the term ‘populism’ was first reported in American newspapers in the 1890s in the context of the rise of the People's Party (Kaltwasser et al. 2017), the scholarship on populism has grown considerably since the 1970s creating a dense and fertile field. One of the first definitions of populism was offered by Gino Germani, an Italian intellectual referring to it as a multi-class movement, which ‘usually includes contrasting components such as the claim for equality of political rights and universal participation for the common people, but fused with some sort of authoritarianism often under charismatic leadership’ (Kaltwasser et al. 2017: 5).

This chapter traces the rise of moral remembrance. It deals with the gradual emergence of memorialisation standards and policy-oriented attempts to engage transitional societies in developing and adopting specific normative forms of remembrance. This perspective of ‘globalised and standardised cultures of memory’ has been heavily embedded and dispersed through an accumulative process – the institutionalisation and ideologisation of human rights. Gaining their power and legitimacy from the world polity level, moral concerns are promoted through a ‘facing the past’, ‘duty to remember’ and ‘justice for victims’ agenda that is supposed to prevent a recurrence of violent conflicts. Following on from the transitional justice paradigm that brought to the fore primarily legal mechanisms to deal with past human rights abuses, since 2000 memorialisation has been seen as central to the processes of democratisation and regional integration. In practice, this has brought a tremendous change in how memorialisation processes are understood, moving the paradigm from a ‘duty to remember’ to specific, policy-oriented ‘memorialisation standards’. Standardisation of memory has further enabled the production of a human rights memorialisation toolkit that has come to be understood as a panacea for post-conflict peacebuilding efforts and the enforcement of human rights around the globe.

This chapter elaborates on how moral remembrance resonates for local communities. It briefly theorises the concept of solidarity as currently understood, placing particular focus on Randall Collins’s work on the significance of interaction ritual chains and emotional energy. Central to his interaction ritual chain theory is the notion that people in face-to-face encounters produce mutual rituals that are sustained through an emotional energy that results in a feeling of membership and in a desire for action that is considered a morally ‘proper’ path. Drawing on numerous human rights–sponsored memorialisation initiatives in the Western Balkans and Israel–Palestine, the chapter analyses the myriad of ‘facing the past’ dialogue groups. The chapter demonstrates that ‘facing the past’ encounters ritualise historical narratives and generate a strong vocabulary of sentiments, which, in the long run, does not translate transnational solidarity into human rights values but ends up strengthening ethnic homogenisation, essentialisation and group polarization. In other words, moral remembrance does not offer a real alternative to sustaining those emotions and transforming them into solid, long-lasting human rights values; instead, contrary to what would be expected, it strengthens the narrow, ethnically based nationalist perceptions of collective memory, and reproduces nationalist discourses and practices.

The last chapter engages in a more speculative debate to ponder the significance and possible dangers of this new global human rights memorialisation regime. Three questions are asked that define the impact that moral remembrance has on the ground. The first question deals with the tension between moral remembrance, promoted through the morality of human rights, and the nation-state–sponsored memorialisation agenda. The second question deals with the under-researched and neglected impact that the human rights memorialisation agenda generates on the ground – namely, the production of new social inequalities. Here, the tension between moral remembrance as an ideal and the political interests of various groups, organizations and opposing agendas results in trade-offs and struggles over scarce resources, which lead to new social inequalities and the marginalisation of many who cannot afford to participate in those transactions. Finally, the chapter asks whether moral remembrance has the potential to transform individuals in local communities into believers in human rights values and motivate them to engage in moral action based on those values. I argue that in real-life settings, mandating memory in the name of human rights has been frequently counterproductive and has produced a series of undesired and damaging outcomes on the ground.

This chapter analyses a specific case study, in an effort to discover localised versions of moral remembrance. Whereas the European Balkan states have faced financial conditionalities during the various steps of the EU accession process, Israel and Palestine were much less pressured by the international community to exhibit an even nominal acceptance of a cosmopolitan history, through which global concerns and values become part of local experiences. The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993 and in 1995, which projected an independent state of Palestine by 1999, were of great importance in leading to new memorialisation agendas, never discussed per se in any of the legal documents but indirectly promoted in multiple ways. Even in 2000, when it became clear that the Oslo Accords had failed, memorialisation practices, promoted by human rights institutions and funds, continued to blossom. This chapter deals with the ways in which the memorialisation agenda was promoted in Israel and Palestine, demonstrating how specific historical and political conditions affected it and shaped it in several ways.

This chapter focuses on two main issues. First, it discusses why it is beneficial to understand human rights as an ideology. It explains why ideology in general, and nationalism in particular, can add to our understanding of the impact that the human rights agenda has on the ground. It introduces Malešević`s theory on the organisational and ideological power of nationalism and its relationship to the ideological perception of, and the forging of solidarity attachments for, people on the ground. Though the distinction between the promotion of human rights and the promotion of nationalist-centred memory is allegedly apparent, what is lacking in the scholarly literature and in practice are theoretical tools to assess their impact in the long run. The lack of a suitable theoretical paradigm reduces our ability to grasp the complex meaning-making processes that are crucial and inseparable from the process of memorialising the past. Second, the chapter shows the historical obstacles to conceptualising, in a systematic way, human rights as an ideology, showing how disciplinary baggage (in sociology in particular) has downgraded and suppressed our ability to assess human rights and value production across the globe.

The introductory chapter briefly describes the rise of the human rights memorialisation agenda (known as 'moral remembrance') at the world polity level. Referring to six general theses, the chapter explains the main points presented in the book: (1) why it is important to understand human rights as an ideology; (2) how, when, and why moral remembrance emerged at the world polity level; (3) why moral remembrance clashes with the state-sponsored memorialization agenda; (4) why moral remembrance strengthens the categories of ‘nation’ and ‘ethnicity’ on the ground; (5) why and how moral remembrance produces new social inequalities and divisions; and (6) why moral remembrance does not make people more appreciative of human rights values. The chapter sets out the layout of the book and briefly sketches the main conclusions of the research.

The fifth chapter elaborates how and why, in the Western Balkans – and more specifically in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) –pressure imposed by the international community (and the EU in particular) was a given from the very beginning. Following the wars of the 1990s, these countries all formally committed to the Europeanisation process. Each state's entrance into the EU was supposedly conditioned upon, among other things, facing its criminal past of human rights abuses. The main request made to Croatia, Serbia and BiH by the EU was cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY). In the cases of Croatia, Serbia and BiH, the post-conflict institutionalisation of human rights, as defined and enforced by EU bodies and institutions, created several mechanisms, different in their purposes and efficiency, to implement and impact memorialisation processes and practices. Addressing the post-Yugoslav, post-socialist and post-war legacies, together with the Europeanisation process, this chapter discloses the ways in which the memorialisation agenda in the Western Balkans has been shaped, and the tensions between the human rights and nationalist-centred memorialisation processes embedded in this agenda.