This book addresses memory politics and their evolution as an academic discipline, including memory studies. It explores national and international debates about conflicting interpretations of the recent past, including WWII remembering, the annexation of Ukraine, the reformed history teaching in Putin’s Russia, Historikerstreit and the holocaust in Germany, and the legacy and role of nuclear weapons in international relations in the USA in the context of the so called New Cold War.

This book addresses memory politics and their evolution as an academic discipline, including memory studies. It explores national and international debates about conflicting interpretations of the recent past, including WWII remembering, the annexation of Ukraine, the reformed history teaching in Putin’s Russia, Historikerstreit and the holocaust in Germany, and the legacy and role of nuclear weapons in international relations in the USA in the context of the so called New Cold War.

This volume focuses on the uses of collective memory in transatlantic relations between the United States, and Western and Central European nations in the period from the Cold War to the present day. Sitting at the intersection of international relations, history, memory studies and various "area" studies, Memory in Transatlantic Relations examines the role of memory in an international context, including the ways in which policy and decision makers utilize memory; the relationship between trauma, memory and international politics; the multiplicity of actors who shape memory; and the role of memory in the conflicts in post-Cold War Europe. Thematically organized and presenting studies centered on the U.S., Hungary, France, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the authors explore the built environment (memorials) and performances of memory (commemorations), shedding light on the ways in which memories are mobilized to frame relations between the U.S. and nations in Western and Central Europe. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and historians with interests in memory studies, foreign policy and international relations.

How has memory - collective and individual - influenced European politics in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Cold War? How has the past been used in domestic and foreign policy? This book is the first to examine the connection between memory and politics directly.

In the vast literature on how the Second World War has been remembered in Europe, research into what happened in communist Poland, a country most affected by the war, is surprisingly scarce. The long gestation of Polish narratives of heroism and sacrifice, explored in this book, might help to understand why the country still finds itself in a -mnemonic standoff- with Western Europe, which tends to favour imagining the war in a civil, post-Holocaust, human rights-oriented way. The specific focus of this book is the organized movement of war veterans and former prisoners of Nazi camps from the 1940s until the end of the 1960s, when the core narratives of war became well established."

What has the end of the Cold War meant for East Asia, and for how its people understand their recent history? These thought-provoking essays explore a vigorously contested area in public culture, the wars of the modern era. All the major East Asian states have undergone a profound reassessment of their experiences from World War II to Vietnam. New and at times aggressive forms of nationalism in Japan, China, South Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan have affected American security policy in the Pacific and posed a challenge to the post-communist world order. Japan has met fervent opposition to its premiers' visits to the Yasukuni shrine honoring the wartime dead. China has reclaimed a forgotten war history, such as the positive contributions of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists. South Korea has embraced an interpretation of the Korean War that is hostile to the United States and sympathetic to its North Korean adversaries. This volume not only illuminates regional and global changes in East Asia today, but also underscores the need for rethinking the Cold War language that continues to inform U.S.-East Asian relations.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Introduction: Memories and Analogies of World War II -- 1 Genocide Memorialization and the Europeanization of Europe -- 2 Appeasement Analogies in British Parliamentary Debates Preceding the 2003 Invasion of Iraq -- 3 How Deeply Rooted Is the Commitment to "Never Again"? Dick Bengtsson's Swastikas and European Memory Culture -- 4 Cultural Memories of German Suffering during the Second World War: An Inability Not to Mourn? -- 5 From Perpetrators to Victims and Back Again: The Long Shadow of the Second World War in Belgium -- 6 L'Histoire bling-bling Nicolas Sarkozy and the Historians -- 7 The Pasts of the Present: World War II Memories and the Construction of Political Legitimacy in Post-Cold War Italy -- 8 "The Nazis Strike Again": The Concept of "The German Enemy," Party Strategies, and Mass Perceptions through the Prism of the Gre -- 9 Who Were the Anti-Fascists? Divergent Interpretations of WWII in Contemporary Post-Yugoslav History Textbooks -- 10 Multiple Dimensions and Discursive Contests in Austria's Mythscape -- 11 World War II in Discourses of National Identification in Poland: An Intergenerational Perspective -- 12 From the "Reunification of the Ukrainian Lands" to "Soviet Occupation": The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in the Ukrainian Political Memory -- 13 "Often Very Harmful Things Start Out with Things That Are Very Harmless": European Reflections on Guilt and Innocence Inspired by Art about the Holocaust in the 1990s -- 14 Epilogue -- List of Contributors -- Index