The Mnemonic Warriors of the European Far Right

The Mnemonic Warriors of the European Far Right is a comparative analysis of the politics and policy of memory as seen through the conceptual lens of Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire. More specifically, the research in this volume is carried out through the prism of national-populist and conservative-sovereignist narratives in the Western, Central, and Eastern European public sphere. The overall aim of this book is to examine how the European populist far right, both the governing elites and those operating on the fringes of mainstream politics, has adopted the instrumentalization of 20th-century authoritarian and totalitarian lieux de mémoire to boost their political legitimacy. The contributors to this volume explore critically the interplay between politics and collective memory, the role of historical myths in shaping collective consciousness, and the manipulation mechanisms of political communication aimed at monopolizing the “real” memory of the past. They explore how different and sometimes mutually exclusive narratives about “places of memory” interact in the public sphere of societies that have experienced non-democratic regimes in their history. This volume will be of interest to researchers of European history and politics, the far right, populism, and memory studies.