Sites of International Memory

By Glenda Sluga, Kate Darian-Smith and Madeleine Herren

Whether we think of statues, plaques, street-names, practices, material or intangible forms of remembrance, the language of collective memory is everywhere, installed in the name of not only nations, or even empires, but also an international past. The essays in Sites of International Memory address the notion of a shared past, and how this idea is promulgated through sites and commemorative gestures that create or promote cultural memory of such global issues as wars, genocide, and movements of cross-national trade and commerce, as well as resistance and revolution.

In doing so, this edited collection asks: Where are the sites of international memory? What are the elements of such memories of international pasts, and of internationalism? How and why have we remembered or forgotten “sites” of international memory? Which elements of these international pasts are useful in the present?

Some contributors address specific sites and moments—World War II, liberation movements in India and Ethiopia, commemorations of genocide—while other pieces concentrate more on the theoretical, on the idea of cultural memory. UNESCO’s presence looms large in the volume, as it is the most visible and iconic international organization devoted to creating critical heritage studies on a world stage. Formed in the aftermath of World War II, UNESCO was instrumental in promoting the idea of a “humanity” that exists beyond national, regional, or cultural borders or definitions. Since then, UNESCO’s diplomatic and institutional channels have become the sites at which competing notions of international, world, and “human” communities have jostled in conjunction with politically specific understandings of cultural value and human rights.

This volume has been assembled to investigate sites of international memory that commemorate a past when it was possible to imagine, identify, and invoke “international” ideas, institutions, and experiences, in diverse, historically situated contexts.

Contributors:Dominique Biehl, Kristal Buckley, Roland Burke, Kate Darian-Smith, Sarah C. Dunstan, David Goodman, Madeleine Herren, Philippa Hetherington, Rohan Howitt, Alanna O’Malley, Eric Paglia, Glenda Sluga, Sverker Sörlin, Carolien Stolte, Beatrice Wayne, Ralph Weber, Jay Winter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Aug 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781512824063

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Sites of International Memory

Glenda Sluga, Kate Darian-Smith, and Madeleine Herren

The statues, plaques, street names, practices, and other material and intangible forms of historical remembrance found in the cities and places where we live are everyday reminders that the collective memory of the past is everywhere. Some of these sites of memory are intended to celebrate and honor local events, others attest to the need to record and celebrate historical moments and people who are tied to wider narratives of nations and empires. This volume studies sites of international memory: the commemoration of a twentieth-century past when international ideas, institutions, and experiences also mattered.

Consider the memorial (Figure 1.1) unveiled to great pomp and ceremony in 1909 in the Swiss city of Berne marking the thirtieth anniversary, and the headquarters, of the Universal Postal Union (UPU). The memorial’s design was the product of a competition that required attention to how the world might be represented, and how a model of international cooperation might appear. Entitled Around the World, the massive monument (ten meters high and four meters across) was constructed in bronze and granite by the French sculptor René de Saint-Marceaux, and depicts the earth’s globe embraced by five female figures in classical robes. Each figure represents one of the continents of the world, and each is frozen in the act of transmitting communications, one to the other, as if linked in a dance. The figure of Berna, the city personified, lies at its base. The monument, and its symbolic representation of a really existing technocratic internationalism had currency throughout the twentieth century, and was adopted as the UPU’s official logo in 1967. Its motif can be found on over 800 postage stamps issued by many of the UPU’s 191 member nations, including a special 2009 UPU centenary stamp.

Figure 1.1. Weltpostdenkmal (Autour du monde—René de Saint-Marceaux 1909). Photo credit: Gürkan Sengün, CC BY-SA 3.0.

As significantly, the memorial’s engagement of the ideal of international cooperation, like the philatelic culture or even globalization it has supported, now seems relatively passé; as the UPU’s relevance has since faded with the invention of alternative digital forms of communication and the rise of populist nationalism, it has attracted criticism as an old-fashioned and biased body.¹ It could be argued that in the early twenty-first century, the UPU memorial—relatively neglected in one of Berne’s riverside parks—marks an absence of international memory. It is against the background of this complex landscape of memory and forgetting that we have assembled a collection of essays to track the material and textual clues of an international past, often simultaneously imperial and national, cosmopolitan and global, and only sometimes self-consciously remembered.

Half a century ago, the French historian Pierre Nora’s three-volume Lieux de mémoire (Sites of Memory) seeded a revolutionary analysis of the making and nature of national communities.² Nora’s historical focus was on the politics of memory—its significance, structures, and purposes—with the nation serving as the point of reference. Sites of International Memory builds on Nora’s innovation and other more recent work on the transnational nature of memory to recover and map twentieth-century international lieux de mémoire. These sites include the range of subjects-objects Nora catalogued as national sites of memory: memorials and buildings, libraries and books, passports and stamps. We bring a focus on the politics of memory to the accelerating historical interest in the last hundred years of international forms of governance and thinking.

Since the 2000s, just as the valence of international norms and institutions declines, and new nationalisms intensify across the globe, a new international history—the offspring of the marriage of political, social, and cultural historical methods—is zooming in on the internal workings of multilateral institutions through the twentieth century, the liberal and illiberal internationalisms that nurtured their relevance, and the individuals who were key international actors.³ Historians of all stripes are drawing attention to the affect of internationalisms, and their effects on how we understand the potential and limits of nation-states, including the movements for collective rights and representation exploited by internationally organized women or colonial subjects with national ambitions.⁴ The influence of the new international history means we now know much more about intergovernmental bodies such as the interwar League of Nations and its ambitions, bureaucracies, and extensive social underpinnings.

Historical investigations have also opened up the inner workings of intergovernmental bodies such as the International Labour Organisation (ILO) as well as the UN and its offshoots such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).⁵ This scholarship is capturing the regional and national connections between a left to right political spectrum of international thinking and institutions. It is also paying close attention to how internationalisms were caught up in imperial and colonial entanglements, reflecting at times the arrival of the globalized cosmopolitized world.⁶ In other words, the memory of this international past is not only traceable through the installation of international institutions, it can also be traced through the ideas of liberal and socialist internationalists, colonial and postcolonial internationalisms, and across local, national, and universal levels of political agitation. Situated at the intersections of such wider historical lines of inquiry into the geopolitics and fraught ambivalences of a world connecting, this volume sets out to map material and ideological sites of international memory, to interrogate the political and cultural legacies of the recent international past, as evident in conceptualizations of nationhood and identity today.⁷

Sites of International Memory

Historians are now well-practiced in the study of lieux de mémoire: whether explicit in material forms of community and national identities, or implicit in the drawing of territorial and national borders and the symbolic representations and locations tied to these, or in a vast array of tangible and intangible objects and heritage. Written and visual culture, social and cultural practices, and commemorative events and their depictions, are all conventionally understood as sources of tangible and non-tangible memory. More recently, and in the context of the flourishing field of cross-disciplinary memory studies, historians no longer only focus on the social memory or collective memory of nations and their communities, but also aim to capture wider transnational flows of identity and experience that cross sovereign borders.⁸ New scholarly discussions have moved away from the default national framings of lieux de mémoire in other ways: whether by testing and fleshing out the potential of memory-making and its memorialization as it has occurred in imperial and global settings; or by addressing broader national and community memories that may be detached from patrimonial narratives or invested in them. This can be seen too in the historical experiences and expressed forms of memory that are associated with international migration and the identities and connections of diasporic communities, even when they invoke national imperatives and interests.⁹ In acknowledging the mobilities of memory, for example, Michael Rothberg’s influential conceptualization of noeuds de mémoire, or knots of memory, and his work on multidirectional memory is one example of how memory scholarship has increasingly accommodated the complicated and evolving layered relation of remembrance to the nation.¹⁰ For Rothberg, the public sphere—where historical memories are given material and symbolic validation through commemorative forms—is not limited to the contestation between differing groups for representation within national states. Rather it is a non-nation-specific discursive space enabling new identities and interests to come into being.

In the midst of the expanding historical debates about the locations, scales, and forms of individual and collective memory, memory across space and time, the essays presented here locate forms of memory—and the remembering and forgetting of historical events—in diverse international settings that call up various historically specific political, cultural, and ideological definitions of international. Rather than ascribe to any one version of memory studies, the contributors to Sites of International Memory explore a range of approaches. Among them is the conceptualization of historical memory as palimpsest. In using this specific image of the layering of meaning, the opening essays by Jay Winter and Philippa Hetherington signpost the relationship of national memory to more expansive international and transnational perspectives on the recent past. As a celebrated interpreter of Nora’s work, Winter interrogates how multilayered, and concealed forms of memory may disappear and reappear to achieve a potentially contradictory meaning in corresponding historical contexts. Hetherington refocuses our attention on sites of memory as at once personal, localized, national, international, and transnational. In all cases, particular places and objects concentrate individual experiences and their meaning within widening frames, spanning countries and borders, and gaining their significance through networks, institutions, and ideas that are beyond national interests. Taking an alternative conceptual frame, Rohan Howitt experiments with the geological idea of stratigraphy to evoke the layering of local, national, and imperial pasts that combine (and compete) in the constitution of sites of international memory.

In general, the essays in Sites of International Memory demonstrate through case studies the links between commemorative artifacts (such as memorials or medallions), institutions (such as libraries or museums), popular culture (including movies and literary and visual texts) and their contexts, whether in relation to liberal and socialist internationalisms, state and nonstate international organizations, or personal ambitions. In this respect, this scholarship reveals the relevance of the international to the layered materiality of national, imperial, and postcolonial pasts. Indeed, just as historians now view internationalism through the perspective of nesting and competing communities, identities, and polities, this volume is intended to contribute to a historiography of international memory that exposes the tensions and convergences between the local and the global, routing through national, imperial, transnational, and global historical landscapes.

Across this volume too, many essays share an interest in the forgotten status of sites of international memory. Nora’s foundational work still provides a useful provocation on this point, theorizing that sites of memory occur in the absence of a community with an immense and intimate fund of memory, where memory survives only as a reconstituted object beneath the gaze of critical history.¹¹ In other words, the memory of the past comes into being because that past no longer exists.¹² In the case of sites of international memory, the material evidence of that past, and its destruction, are equally significant, and point to the politics of memory in the sense that the international past has in fact been forgotten or rendered irrelevant. The authors trace such evidence—in its presence and absence—through the multiple and layered histories of places and events, in evolving political and social contexts. The evolving utility and political and popular understandings of the function of civic buildings, for example, are the focus of some chapters in this collection. Here we might consider, too, the neo-Renaissance red-brick solidity of the Vredspaleis—the Peace Palace built in The Hague on the instructions of the famous 1907 peace conference with the funding of the Scottish-American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie—or the expansive 1930s modernism of the Palais des Nations (also the product of an international competition) located on Geneva’s own lake shores, once home to the League of Nations and now a campus of the UN. Like the famous skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan built as the official headquarters of the UN in 1951, these earlier buildings were designed to celebrate the idea of the international through such explicit elements as external and internal decorative sculpture and artwork. Then there is the internationalist symbolism of purpose-built conference sites that exists outside of Western locales, not least Africa Hall in Addis Ababa. Constructed in 1961 as the headquarters of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, its meaning in the world order is now buried in the changing skyline and everyday life of that city, and in the nationalist narratives of postcolonial African internationalism that won out.

While the memory of the material and ideological origins of many buildings intended to manifest international ambitions may have been long relegated to the past, they nonetheless act as sites of memory-making in other ways, accommodating documentary archives, oral histories, and specialist collections that attest to the history and influences of their twentieth-century internationalist origins. The purpose of essays within this book is to reexamine the histories of such places, surfacing the original intentions of these buildings as the embodiment of historically situated internationalist impulses while tracking forms of memory-making and the unstable politics of memory across time and place. The essay on New York by Sarah Dunstan, David Goodman, and Glenda Sluga, notes the successive rise and fall of internationalisms in the urban fabric of Manhattan. This is a history of memory that connects the late nineteenth-century and nationalist Statue of Liberty to the internationalism of the UN; the creation of the UN to the suppression of the memories of the League of Nations, the first major experiment in international governance tainted by its failures; the UN project, over the decades of its existence, to displaced memories and counternarratives of New York’s cosmopolitan and global as well as internationalist pasts. Then there are the seeming absences within this history of the memory of internationalism. Madeleine Herren’s essay reminds us that the North Pole was perceived as both empty space and global commons, signifying both a geographical absence and a presence. This dual representation was evident in the design of the official UN flag adopted in 1946, the aim of which was to signal an internationalism that overrode national territorial boundaries by having the empty space of the Arctic at its center.

Drawing on a range of historical sources and approaches, Sites of International Memory interrogates recent and ongoing debates among scholars about the ownership of textual, material and place-based memories, the implications for nations and communities where these memories are challenged, and the tensions (productive or not) between local and global responses to the remembrance of historic international events and phenomena that may continue to influence social views and political ambitions. The volume investigates who and what contributes to the making of international memories, and their ongoing relevance today; how sites of memory develop over time and in response to changing imperatives, including, as Eric Paglia and Sverker Sörlin’s essay on Stockholm notes, the Anthropocene and the crisis of climate change. Ultimately, the contributors to Sites of International Memory posit the need for a new historiography of identity-building across borders that acknowledges the international as a characteristic site of memory in the twentieth century and the role of international memory-making in new perspectives on, and narratives of, international pasts.

International Memories from Local to Global

We have organized Sites of International Memory around four thematic parts that investigate international ideas, practices, policies, and institutions and how their impact on public and private experience have been variously celebrated, commemorated, forgotten, and reinvented by individuals, by states and other kinds of actors over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We begin by locating sites of international memory in relation to the most familiar and yet contested sources of national memory in modern experience: war and migration.

In Part I, From National to International Sites of Memory, Jay Winter teases out a typology of memory by redefining three sites of national war memorialization as either international or transnational in character: the Historial de la Grande Guerre, located on the Somme battlefield and opened in 1992; the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, inaugurated in Berlin in 2004; and the launch in 2014 of the Anneau de la Mémoire or Ring of Memory, erected on the hill of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in France and listing the names of more than half a million victims across nationalities who died in World War I. He argues that each of these memorials of twentieth-century war can be seen as a palimpsest, their multiple layers of meaning about the past in the present as likely to evoke international as local, national, and transnational memories. For Philippa Hetherington, the Nansen passport, which arose from the international governance of Europe’s post–World War I refugee problem, is also a palimpsest onto which international and national, insider and outsider, inclusive and exclusive memories have been simultaneously projected. Hetherington restores not only the significance of the Nansen passport in the determination of individual lives but also how it shaped individual subjectivities invested in narratives of internationalism as much as empire and nation.

Part II, From Imperial to Postcolonial Sites of International Memory-Making, locates the imperial and postcolonial contexts of state-based memory-making in a series of telling case studies that are more commonly associated with the histories of colonization and national expansion—the Boxer War, territorial competition in the polar regions, and China’s current Silk Road ambitions. In these specific settings, the authors each explore alternative readings of how state and nonstate actors either intentionally or unintentionally evoked international, even universalizing memories. Dominique Biehl’s essay concerns the geopolitics of the international concessions in China that were created by the commercially and militarily intrusive European empires. When war broke out between these imperial nations in 1899, the response within the concessions led to the invention of complex and distinctive sites of deliberately international, as well as imperial, and national memories of the conflict. During and after the war, non-Chinese communities sought to place their stamp on the meaning and memory of the Boxer Rebellion in ways that reflected their claims and international status within the Chinese setting. They commissioned the Peking Siege Medal to recognize the existence of a self-identified international community, along with plans for a monument and international cemetery, and the commemoration of a piece of artillery known as the International Gun. As importantly, these self-conscious attempts to create international sites of memory of Western experiences of the Boxer Rebellion were ultimately unsuccessful. In the longer term it was the national narratives and Chinese memories of that imperial war which dominated.

Ralph Weber’s discussion of China’s more contemporary resurrection and renegotiation of a long national memory of the Silk Road moves us into a radically altered international setting. Weber argues that the manufacture by the Chinese state of a historical presence that spans national borders today serves to gild its expansionist ambition with a legitimacy and authority bestowed by the cultural international past that is the idea of the Silk Road.

When Madeleine Herren turns our attention to the Arctic, we find a completely distinctive and so-called empty space not easily filled with any memory. Herren argues that the Arctic is a site of international memory that exists beyond territoriality, offering a focal point for the investigation of new forms of remembrance and identity-building, including denoting an environmental universalism that addresses humankind beyond national or even international institutions. In his chapter on Antarctica, Rohan Howitt takes up a similar analysis at the other end of the earth. Here, at the world’s southernmost edge, the memory stratigraphy of Port Lockroy reveals it as the site of rival imperialisms and internationalisms.

The essays in Part III, City-Sites of International Memory, explore the built fabric of cities as sites of international memory, where the materiality of that memory is buried, exposed and obscured. While the contemporary political geography of cities locates them firmly in nation-states, we see that cities have acted as hubs for political activism by nonstate actors, as well as state actors, engaged in global endeavors. Carolien Stolte explores the attraction of a non-metropolitan Tashkent as a site of radical and utopian strands of shifting twentieth-century Asian/Indian internationalisms; Beatrice Wayne examines Africa Hall in Addis Ababa as a forgotten site of African/Black internationalisms and the contested visions of anticolonial worldmaking that arose around decolonization. Sarah Dunstan, David Goodman, and Glenda Sluga explore New York as a site of the intersecting memories of cosmopolitan, global, and international pasts, where the cosmopolitan invokes cultural communities, the global economic conditions, and the international the influence of internationalist movements since the late nineteenth century. Their analysis draws out the contested race-differentiated sites of those movements over this same period. Like Addis Ababa, remapping New York’s internationalist past brings us closer to a complex understanding of the diverse Black internationalisms inspired by the invention of the UN and even in opposition to it; in Addis Ababa, as Wayne notes in her complex deconstruction of the significance of the Africa Hall building, we can see the role of memory in competing versions of African/Black internationalisms, and which wins out. The contested nature of African unity, and of its national or supranational form, are fought out in the design and purpose of Africa Hall, and the idea of the spirit of Addis Ababa, evoked in memory of the spirit of Geneva. For Stolte, the reconstruction of Indian memories of the international purpose of the regional hub of Tashkent is necessary in the absence of material evidence given the repeated rebuilding of the city and destruction of the layers of the past since the 1920s across shifting geopolitical thresholds. By contrast, Eric Paglia and Sverker Sörlin are able to map the city of Stockholm as a crucial site for the memorialization of environmental global governance as a kind of public history.

Part IV, Memory-Making and Multilateral Institutions, engages with international institutions and their multilateral ambitions alongside the idea of the heritage of humanity in the past and the present. These essays look at how international mobilities and laws have fostered new sites of collective and world memory. Roland Burke’s fascinating study of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) examines the memory of the document since its acceptance by the United National General Assembly in 1948. The UN granted the UDHR an officially designated calendar day to encourage its commemoration and spur wider reflection on human rights as an ongoing struggle. The valorization of the UDHR’s virtues required it to affirm a timeless universalism as a universal international memory beyond both space and time.

In their analysis of the ideas promulgated by the powerful concept of a universal cultural heritage that exists beyond national, regional, or cultural borders or definitions, Kristal Buckley and Kate Darian-Smith turn to ongoing controversies between member states in UNESCO’s iconic world heritage system and its lesser-known Memory of the World program. The diplomatic and institutional politics of heritage nominations have become the sites at which competing notions of international, world, and human communities have jostled alongside understandings of cultural value and human rights to promote the protection and conservation of places and practices of universal significance for humanity. Debates around such world heritage programs substantially illuminate the tensions between the national and international memorializations seen in other contexts of historical commemoration and how these shape national and cultural identities.

In the final chapter in this volume, Alanna O’Malley introduces the cosmos of internationalism through a close study of the published memoirs of two idealistic and extraordinary women employed by the UN Secretariat from the 1950s to the 1990s. She demonstrates how different individual memories can divert and contest the official historical narratives of the UN by revealing the gaps between the lofty idealism of internationalism and the daily tedium of bureaucracy and decision-making within a gendered and hierarchical workplace. O’Malley’s dive into the history of the UN through the gendered perspective of memoirs reminds us again of the very personal dimension in the politics of memory that swirl within and around institutional sites of internationalism.

Conclusion

Our present feels far distant from the rhythms and cadences of a century ago, when the the UPU memorial was intended to symbolize the triumph of an international outlook—or internationalism—encompassing political multilateralism and economic liberalism. It is against the background of this relative amnesia that the rich case studies and approaches of the essays collected are intended to draw historical attention to the resonance and remnants of the international in the remembered and forgotten past: When, why, and how have international sites of memory been remembered or forgotten? How have memories of the institutional, intellectual, and material traces of the international past worked to enhance and diminish the history of politics?

Sites of International Memory is an intervention that steps out of the methodological nationalism that was long the default location for historical memory studies and, as importantly, pushes forward ambitions for a methodological cosmopolitanism. We hope this collection will be considered a vital contribution to empirical explorations of the reality of the ‘cosmopolitan outlook,’ and to the historicization of the cosmopolitanized world so far unexplored by either international history or memory studies, or the heritage literature.¹³ The essays collected here remind us that memory makes community, whether memories of cities or buildings, geographical locations such as the Arctic, or objects such as Nansen passports issued by states for deterritorialized subjects, or human rights bills promoted by intergovernmental organizations to make the abstract more material. In each of these distinctive cases, the mapping of the international past radically shifts depending on whose memories matter, and what we have remembered.

Given the social and political turmoil of the twenty-first century, and its resurgent populist nationalisms, presuming that shared memory has an identity-building function beyond the nation-state in international/transnational contexts may seem misguided. However, the accumulating evidence—including in debates about transitional justice, for example—is confirming the crucial ongoing function of transnational heritage and memory institutions in our own times.¹⁴ Indeed, the history of memory practices reveals a process of continuous evolution in response to wider cultural currents and shifting geopolitical realities. If, as we argue, sites of international memory exist at the intersections of national, imperial, and overtly international territorial domains, these intersections return us to crucial questions about the specificity of sites of international memory, in contradistinction and in relationship to other conceptual framings, not least cosmopolitan, global, and planetary identifications.

As a global pandemic unfolds and, at the time of writing, a new war was waged by Russia against Ukraine, it is timely to reflect on reconceived ways of remembering twentieth-century internationalisms. Just as the narratives of war extricate layers of older histories, the desire for peace is increasingly argued in the institutional and normative terms of an international past, remembered in conventions, processes, and institutions. Even if sites of international memory are often about forgetting as much as remembering, the work of historians is surely to excavate the forgotten from the layers of memory work to re-center the displaced and furnish a richer understanding of the lost past. From the perspective of a methodological cosmopolitanism, forgetting is all the more reason to remember. Remembering is not simply an act of courtesy, it can also be a more radical gesture, expanding our horizons of future orientation.

We dedicate this volume to the memory of our colleague, the late Philippa Hetherington, an inspired and inspiring historian of Russia, and a generous fellow-traveler in all-things-international history.

Notes

1.  See Madeleine Herren and Glenda Sluga, The Trump Administration Deals Another Blow to International Cooperation, Washington Post, 14 December 2018, accessed 4 May 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/12/14/trump-administration-deals-another-blow-international-cooperation/.

2.  Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984).

3.  See, for example, Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, eds., Internationalisms: A Twentieth Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Philippa Hetheringon and Glenda Sluga, eds., Liberal and Illiberal Internationalisms, special issue, Journal of World History 31, no. 1 (2020); Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Suzanne Bardgett, David Cesarani, Jessica Reinisch, and Johannes-Dieter Steinert, eds., Justice, Politics and Memory in Europe After the Second World War: Landscapes After Battle, vol. 2 (London: Valentine Michell, 2011); Jessica Reinisch and David Brydan, eds., Internationalists in European History: Rethinking the Twentieth Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2021); Simon Jackson and Alanna O’Malley, eds., The Institution of International Order: From the League of Nations to the United Nations (Boca Raton, FL: Routledge, 2018); and Florian Wagner, Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

4.  Ilaria Scaglia, The Emotions of Internationalism: Feeling International Cooperation in the Alps in the Interwar Period, Emotions in History series, ed. Ute Frevert and Thomas Dixon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Manu Goswami, Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms, American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (2012): 1461–85. Most recently, see Glenda Sluga, Nationalism as Historical Method, in special forum, Rethinking Nationalism, American Historical Review 127, no. 1 (2022): 364–369.

5.  Sunil Amrith and Glenda Sluga, New Histories of the United Nations, Journal of World History 19, no. 3 (2008): 251–74; Glenda Sluga, UNESCO and the (One) World of Julian Huxley, Journal of World History 21, no. 3 (2010): 393–418; Glenda Sluga, The Transnational History of International Institutions, Journal of Global History 6, no. 2 (2011): 219–22; Karen Gram-Skjoldager, The League of Nations: The Creation and Legitimization of International Civil Service, in Peacemaking and International Order After the First World War, ed. Peter Jackson, William Mulligan, Glenda Sluga (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023); Karen Gram-Skjoldager, Haakon A. Ikonomou, and Torsten Kahlert, Organizing the 20th Century World: International Organizations and the Emergence of International Public Administration, 1920–1960s (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

6.  We take cosmopolitized from Ulrich Beck. See Sabine Selchow, The Paths Not (Yet) Taken: Ulrich Beck, the ‘Cosmopolitized World’ and Security Studies, Security Dialogue 47, no. 5 (2016): 369–85.

7.  Emily S. Rosenberg, ed., A World Connecting, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

8.  See, for example, Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, eds., Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Robert Aldrich, Introduction: Sites of Colonial Memory, in Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums and Colonial Memories (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Rick Crownshaw, ed., Transcultural Memory (London: Routledge, 2016); Rick Crownshaw, Introduction, Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 1–3; Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney, eds., Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014); Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory, European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 1 (2002): 87–106; Etienne Achille, Charles Forsdick, and Lydie Moudileno, Postcolonial Realms of Memory: Sites and Symbols in Modern France, Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures 68 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020); Dominik Geppert and Frank Lorenz-Muller, Sites of Imperial Memory: Commemorating Colonial Rule in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016); and Annika Björkdahl and Stefanie Kappler, The Creation of Transnational Memory Spaces: Professionalization and Commercialization, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 32, no. 3 (2019): 383–401.

9.  See Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton, eds., Remembering Migration: Oral History and Heritage in Australia (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

10.  Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Michael Rothberg, "Introduction: Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de mémoire to Noeuds de mémoire, in ‘Noeuds de mémoire’: Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture," ed. Michael Rothberg, Debarati Sanyal, and Maxim Silverman, Yale French Studies 118/119 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 3–12.

11.  Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire, trans. Marc Roudebush, in Memory and Counter-Memory," special issue, Representations, no. 26 (Spring 1989): 7–24, 12. See also Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, 160.

12.  Jay Winter, Realms of Memory, H-France Review (October 1997): v, accessed 4 May 2021, https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=1354. Winter went on to explain: "The significance of this approach for the study of cultural history is of the first order. Its primary effect is liberating. Like the pioneers of the French journal Annales Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, Nora has dared historians to broaden their vision and to widen their repertoires of evidence."

13.  Sabine Selchow, Starting Somewhere Different: Methodological Cosmopolitanism and the Study of World Politics, Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs 20, no. 3 (July 2020): 544–63, 544; Sluga, Nationalism as Historical Method, passim.

14.  Rachel Kerr, Henry Redwood, and James Gow, eds., Transitional Justice: Historical Perspectives on Transitional Justice (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2021).

PART I

From National to International Sites of Memory

CHAPTER 2

Palimpsests: National, International, and Transnational Sites of Memory

Jay Winter

Palimpsests

All sites of memory are local and national, in that they draw attention to a particular site in a particular place where a significant event or events happened. What Dolores Hayden calls the power of place arises when people tell stories about a past that unfolded here, in this town and in this country. The question arises whether these local or national sites at one and the same time can also be international or transnational in character. I believe they can. International sites of memory mark events and movements that unfolded in more than one country—for instance, the operation of and abolition of the slave trade. Transnational sites are those that were constructed or designated as significant by people from different places who worked together to achieve transnational goals—for instance, the emergence of the European Union or the drafting and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

What makes a site international is the coming together of associations in more than one country to mark events that were significant in different national contexts. What makes a site transnational is the way it is marked by people who work outside of or beyond nations to achieve transnational objectives. International sites are marked by the efforts of different actors operating in national associations, like the Second International, the League of Nations, or the United Nations. Transnational sites are fashioned by people working in transnational associations, such as the Médecins sans Frontières, the Roman Catholic Church, or the Red Cross. They have national standing, as does the archbishop of Paris, but their primary allegiance is to a transnational church or organization or coalition.

I claim therefore that all sites of memory have local and national meanings since they say that something happened here or to the people who live here that is worth remembering in public. Only some sites of memory are international, in that they are constructed not solely by locals or residents of a particular region or country but by groups of people in different countries drawing attention to events they think are significant. And other sites of memory involve other groups, whose identity arises not from national associations but from transnational affiliations.

Diasporic memory, for example, is both international since it refers to a homeland and to the scattered members of that homeland, and transnational since it frequently refers to a town or region from which people migrated. They frequently practice transnational memory in Landsmanschaften. I discovered that my Russian grandfather came from Brest-Litovsk, on the Polish-Byelorussian border, from a notice the association of emigrants from Brest-Litovsk published in a newspaper in 1924. My family came from that transnational entity the Pale of Settlement, which was both part of the Russian Empire and a Jewish world that spanned many national and imperial borders. After 1945 Germans expelled from many parts of Eastern Europe created their own Landsmanschaften. The word is also used for alumni of universities who want to recall the fun of being young and relatively free. That freedom spanned borders and continents. Former students at my old college, Pembroke at Cambridge, run such an association, as do my former students at Yale University.

These associations are global in character, but they do not necessarily perform acts of global memory. In most of these groups, there is a core and a periphery, a place of origin, semisacred in character, and a place of nostalgia, where those attached to the origin can recall its delights. Here, memory dissolves into nostalgia, as Svetlana Boym observed, a warm and cloudy place, like a sauna, where we can conjure up a past that (we know) never existed in the first place. Global memory, in my view, is an illusion, a site of fantasy rather than a site of memory.

World heritage sites are not global sites of memory but rather those designated by a transnational organization, or by one of its auxiliary bodies, to be worthy of preservation. The work of UNESCO, founded on 16 November 1945 in Paris, was and remains the promotion of peace through education, science, and culture. Being founded and centered in Paris just after the end of the Second World War, UNESCO faced multiple tasks. One was the repair of European culture from the damage inflicted on it by the Nazi occupation of France and the rest of Europe. The great powers then were still proudly imperial, and no one saw this as a contradiction alongside UNESCO’s campaign against racism. It was only from the 1960s that it became a crime (or at least an embarrassment) to be an imperial power. Only in 1966 did the British Colonial Office merge with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Not always, but all too frequently the term global culture means the products of the Atlantic world marketed to everyone else. Nike, the maker of footwear, or the United Colors of Benetton, show us the way global culture has been reduced to a marketer’s slogan. Those who sell designer clothes are not agents of global memory.

Colonial and imperial sites of memory are both international and transnational. They originate to express a binary bond between the settler and the country of origin. Two examples are two statues honoring Cecil Rhodes, the British magnate and prime minister of the Cape province. The first was installed in 1934 prominently at the University of Cape Town and removed in 2015. The second is on the external wall of Rhodes’s college in Oxford, Oriel, in 1911. It will remain in place with an explanatory plaque alongside it. Initially, these monuments tied London or Oxford to Cape Town, but the controversy over preserving them in place was transnational, drawing in people from all over the world. The same distinction between the international and the transnational may be seen in the establishment of the Rhodes scholarships in 1902. Initially a project to bring the sons of white settlers to Britain, it was expanded in 1903 to include German students, nominated by Kaiser Wilhelm II. These scholarships were redirected in 1914 to Canadian and West Indian candidates, and then restored for Germans in 1930. That came to an end in 1939 but, once more, in 1970 the Rhodes Trust opened the competition to students from the Federal Republic of Germany. The Rhodes scholarships were imperial in origin but became transnational over time.¹ The same is true for sites of memory in other imperial or colonial settings.

I stick to my view that there are four levels on which sites of memory operate. What distinguishes them is the subject position of the memory activists who create or sustain them. We find traces of these four levels of memory work in local and national archives. But we also learn about them through the records of international and transnational movements and associations.

Sometimes, a site of memory attracts all four levels of associational activity. Consider the example of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, a museum and documentation center on the Holocaust. Here is a Jewish site, transnational in character. It is also an international site, recognizing the Just among the Nations, those people who were not Jewish who risked their lives to save Jewish people during the Holocaust. It is a national site, the place where foreign dignitaries and heads of state go on official visits. And it is a local site, facing the hills of Judea and the coastal plain.

St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome is similarly a palimpsest. It is local, national, international, and transnational, at one and the same time. The tomb of Lenin in Red Square, in Moscow, near the Kremlin, is a local site, to be sure, but also where national and international Communist leaders paid their respects and where tourists follow in their footsteps to this day. In its early days, after 1917, Communism attracted people who believed it was a transnational project; that belief did not last long, but while it lasted, this site was transnational as well. Levels of meaning arise from the collective work of those who create, preserve, appropriate, use, or destroy particular sites of memory.

This four-part typology of sites of memory is useful heuristically since it helps us see that meanings are multiple, and flexible, and so are the narratives people build on them. What matters most is to recognize how porous the boundaries are between the local, national, international, and transnational character of the work of those we call memory agents. They are the ones who tell us what a site of memory means.

Memory Agents

This focus on memory agents leads to what I have termed a social agency interpretation of sites of memory. The source of this intervention was a sense of discomfort first with the original idea and second the subsequent free-floating and at times vague notion of what Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire actually did. For him and the authors of the extraordinary seven-volume series published between 1984 and 1992, what they did was to act as political astronomers, attempting to describe the political and social universe of France after the twin demise of Communism and Gaullism. To see the future of France one had to see the past, inscribed in a host of places, traditions, and texts.

It was a brilliant success, both as a publishing venture and as an inspiration to hundreds of other scholars, myself included. Here was an approach that offered an alternative to two schools of historical thought that appeared in the 1980s to have exhausted their potential. By the 1980s, Marxism as a theory of history and as a theory of action had disintegrated, well before the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites. In the same period, social-scientific history based on quantification in demography, urban history, and economic history had lost its appeal. The scholarly work appearing in these fields was useful, but it did