Maria Mälksoo, Who’s afraid of memory laws? Introducing ‘militant memocracy’ in International Relations, British International Studies Association, 13 April 2021.

Maria Mälksoo discusses her new article in BISA journal Review of International Studies (RIS), available on FirstViewnow. The article investigates status-seeking through memory laws on the example of Russia, Poland and Ukraine’s governance of historical memory.

Read more at https://www.bisa.ac.uk/articles/whos-afraid-memory-laws-introducing-militant-memocracy-international-relations.

MEMOCRACY post-doctoral researchers Dr. Dovilė Sagatienė (Copenhagen University), Dr. Anna Wójcik (Polish Academy of Sciences) and Dr. Paula Rhein-Fischer (University of Cologne) jointly authored a blog post on reaction mechanisms in Lithuania, Germany, and Poland to Putin’s Russia war symbols.

Dr. Paula Fischer, a post-doctoral researcher in the MEMOCRACY team at the University of Cologne, has published a blog post at Verfassungsblog, discussing legal grounds for prohibiting public use of symbols demonstrating support for Putin’s Russia’s war in Ukraine. She situates her argument against a broader discussion on militant democracy provisions and freedom of expression.

Dr. Anna Wójcik, a post-doctoral researcher in the MEMOCRACY team at the Polish Academy of Sciences, has published a blog post in Verfassungsblog, analyzing the Court of Justice of the EU judgment of 29 March 2022 in case C-132/20, originating from a preliminary reference submitted by a one-person panel of the Polish Supreme Court. Dr. Wójcik situated the judgment against the context of the rule of law crisis in Poland and the decommunization of judiciary debate and concluded that:

From the standpoint of EU law, the Court argued, what matters is judicial compliance with the EU accession criteria and individualized assessment, based on sound evidence, of today’s pressures on specific judges that could raise legitimate doubts in individuals over the court’s impartiality and independence. The CJEU drew a thick line between the present of Polish EU membership and the past before Poland joined the EU, and chose to look at the future.

From Dr. Barbara Grabowska-Moroz’s review:

“The editors introduced a term of “mnemonic constitutionalism”, which they define as bringing the legal governance of historical memory to the constitutional level. Abuse of historical narrative results in an exaggeration of state sovereignty (discussed by N. Weil both in the context of illiberalism and liberalism), which plays the role of major justification of the public authorities’ arbitrariness. Law becomes a tool that guarantees further arbitrariness. Numerous chapters of the volume analyse different historical aspects relevant in the current debate regarding the state of the rule of law. Multidimensional character of the volume is enhanced with the scholarship regarding numerous jurisdictions, such as Albania, Germany or Ireland.”

Read the review on EU Law live website.