Overcoming European Civil War: Patterns of Consolidation in Divided Societies, 2010–1800

Divided, sometimes antagonistic, communities in officially unified nations seem to be the rule in Europe. In some cases, they conjure up the most painful memories of actual civil-war events, but usually they constitute the common experience of most Europeans, who lived through different kinds of war, revolutions, counter-revolutions, coups d’état, dictatorships, totalitarian systems, regime changes, territorial losses, ethnic cleansings, and exchanges of population. In spite of major breakthroughs, we find all over Europe that the experiences and humiliations of previous generations have remained mainly unspoken and unelaborated at both individual and community levels. Dangerous as they are, such narratives and undigested traumas necessarily call for well-advised, learned and thoughtful acts of overwriting and reworking. A broadly based, well-founded, historical, multi- and interdisciplinary research project for the comparison of the various modes of trauma management in the different countries and regions of Europe can open up new perspectives and provide essential tools for working out individual and collective traumatic historical experiences. Its main question is how different communities were able to process their collective traumatic historical experiences, and what can be learned from the outcomes of these processes. The project will compare the common and different characteristics of the various regimes of memory and patterns of consolidation.