The focus of the current issue of Ab Imperio continues the exploration of the year-long theme “Archeology of Memory in Empire and Nation” and targets the pivotal relationship between historical memory and national paradigm. The issue discusses the role of nation-centered categories of analysis in the construction and perception of history, the process of imagining non-national pasts in the form of a national tradition, and the relationship between the universal and local in the construction of national memory narratives.
Modern historical memory is embedded in the semantics of national discourse. Modern states, with all their demiurgic powers, seek to shape the historical memory of their populations and create a narrative of national history. One of the materials in the methodological section is a translation of the introduction to Yale Zerubavel’s book on national memory in Israel. Zerubavel’s key argument is that memory and historiography are framed by similar cultural texts and practices, which makes it impossible to accept at face value the claim that memory is distinguished from and juxtaposed to historiography, and that it represents a more democratic and personalized way of approaching the past. Zerubavel’s argument appears as one of the most articulate on the discursive interdependence of memory and nationhood.
The problem of mutual influences of memory and the national paradigm has been central to the thinking of many theorists of nationalism. At the same time, the very intellectual trajectories of these theorists themselves should come under scrutiny. They demonstrate the dependence of analytical approaches to nationalism on the lived experience in and memory about the intellectual, social, and cultural context of imperial societies. This aspect of the relationship between memory and the national paradigm is represented by the publication of excerpts from “A History of Nationalism in the East” (1929) by one of the most distinguished theorists of nationalism, Hans Kohn. These excerpts demonstrate the influence of the secularized Western European discourse on the perception of Islam and the construction of a certain “Protestant” and “rationalizing” logic in the non-national world of historical Islam, according to which the Islamic world is doomed to nurture modern forms of nationalism. Notably, Kohn links the dynamics of nationalism inside the historical realm of Islam both to the “civilizational” encounter between the West and East and to the universal processes of modernization.
Yfaat Weis offers a complex interpretation of the intellectual genealogy of Kohn’s ideas. This interpretation explores the impact of Central European cultural and political legacies on the development of Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s. Weis is interested in Kohn not so much as a theorist but primarily as a practitioner and subject-witness of the ethno-political processes of his epoch. Kohn’s personal and analytical relationship with the concept of the nation was closely tied to his critical attitude toward the ambiguous experience of nation-building in post-Habsburg Central Europe. Consequently, there arose Kohn’s preference for a bi-national approach in thinking about the Jewish state. Hans Kohn was a man of the “Habsburg dilemma”, which allowed one to exist simultaneously in the local/national and imperial/universal contexts. This co-existence often triggered a conflict between the practice of nationalism and personal identity.^[1] “Remembering” and conceptualizing the national, Hans Kohn was influenced by the universal, be it the belief in general progress, secularization, or in the historical necessity of the national stage for the development of the humankind.
It is this belief in the universal strength of nationalism that Clifford Geertz criticizes in an interview given to Ab Imperio. From Geertz’s point of view, the national paradigm, which gained particular explanatory strength as the colonial empires collapsed, failed in the long run to adequately describe the complex dynamics of the development of multiethnic polities in the Third World. The deepening processes of globalization and integration undermine the national paradigm’s claim to stand for the explanatory model in the Western world, too. Undoubtedly remaining a potent force of modernity, nationalism loses its position as an analytical category with which to describe transformations of multinational societies in the era of modernization. This weakening of the national paradigm leaves scholars searching for alternatives to “nation” and “nation-state”. In this context, Clifford Geertz’s appeal to give up on attempts to dominate the dialogue [between Islam and the West] by predetermining and scheduling the terms of the dialogue gains special importance, for studies of multinational societies cannot depend on imposed paradigms and versions of memory characteristic of the Western context.
These issues are explored and discussed in a debate on Islam and modernity featured in this issue. The Russian participants in the debate (S. Abashin, V. Bobrovnikov, G. Khizrieva), who follow Clifford Geertz’s “local approach,” criticize the universalist position that presupposes the regular development of modern forms of society and knowledge. They connect the “nationalization” of memory in post-Soviet Islamic societies to specific developments of the Soviet period. On the other hand, the articles in this section pose questions about the significance and relevance of universal experiences in the development of post-Soviet Islamic societies. Abeed Khalid, for instance, suggests taking into account the legacy of Soviet modernization and asserts the importance of ethno-national identities in post-Soviet Central Asia. Igor Alekseev views the mobilization of Islamic societies as an attempt to overcome ruptures in the cultural unity of the Islamic world through memory, that is, by addressing the historical origins of Islam.
Problems of memory and the national paradigm are explored in this issue in different manifestations and perspectives: the politics of language, symbolism of power, mobilization of “national trauma,” and a search for an alternative narrative of the past through the use of family versions of memory. In one way or another, all of the materials in this issue point to the limits of the national paradigm, which formats historical memory. However, while transcending the framework of the national paradigm and addressing both local versions of the past and grand universal contexts, and while trying to reconcile various versions of “memory”, we are faced with a profound methodological and moral problem: the problem of an adequate language for representing and describing diversity. It is this problem of “coming to terms with the past and reconciliation through the past” that will be explored in the last, fourth issue of Ab Imperio in 2004.

Editors of Ab Imperio:

I. Gerasimov
S. Glebov
A. Kaplunovski
M. Mogilner
A. Semyonov