The uses of victimhood as a hegemonic meta-narrative in eastern Europe

ABSTRACT

Narratives of wartime suffering, communist evils, and maltreatment by the ‘West’ have started featuring prominently in the political discourse across eastern Europe in the past decade and half. Permeating the public sphere, such narratives imply complex victimhood and often gain a hegemonic status. Why have such victimhood narratives become so pervasive? And what has been their purpose across eastern Europe? This interdisciplinary article provides a conceptual and empirical explanation of how hegemonic narratives of victimhood have been used to enhance ontological security and as an instrument of power-seeking political leaders, especially (but not exclusively) right-wing populists. It shows that although the local attachment to memory and history is often portrayed as irrational, victimhood as a narrative has clear benefits regarding national ontological security as the self-understanding of a state and a tool to justify policies. Using concrete examples, the articles identify three main sub-narratives of direct, historical and structural victimhood linked to World War II, communism and the precarious relationship with the ‘West’, arguing that the combination of historical traumas and the post-1989 transformations explain the pan-regional proliferation of victimhood.

KEYWORDS:

• Victimhood
• hegemony
• narratives
• ontological security
• eastern Europe
• war
• communism

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Jasna Dragović-Soso, Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, Kateřina Králová, Johana Wyss, Dirk Moses, David Mwambari and Aleksandra Marković for their useful comments on earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to thank Chad Bryant and the participants of the 21^st Annual Czech and Slovak Studies Workshop at UNC Chapel Hill.

Disclosure statement

There is no known conflict of interest.

Notes

1. Tony Judt noted that by December 1967, Party members constituted 16.9% of the Czechoslovak population, highest in any postcommunist state (Judt 2005, 441 (ft 11)).

2. Data by the Czech polling agency STEM show a relative constant negative evaluation of the communist regime, around 60%. See here: https://www.stem.cz/page/9/?s=re%C5%BEim

3. Similar arguments were also put forward for some West European countries (Lagrou 1997).

4. Following social psychology scholarship, I use the term ‘victimization’ to denote the original act of violence, harm and oppression while ‘victimhood’ denotes the narrative of the experience and its understanding (cf. Vollhardt 2020).

5. Myth is a popular term that often assumes a hegemonic power (Bell 2003, 75). Assman defines it as ‘a story one tells to give direction to oneself and the world – a reality of higher order, which not only rings true but also sets normative standards and possesses a formative power’ (Assmann 2011, 59–60).

6. Also international affairs can be ‘hegemonized’ by intellectuals (Persaud 2022).

7. According to Pew Research compared to western Europe, many more East Europeans believe that birth and ancestry is important for national identification: ranging from the lowest among Slovaks (56%) to the highest in Romania (88%), Bulgaria (85%), Hungary (83%), Poland (82%) and the Czech Republic (78%) (Pew 2016).

8. The Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes opened in 2007, tasked with studying crimes of Nazism and communism, to some degree mimicking other regional institutes of memory in Poland (1998), Hungary (2002) and Slovakia (2003).

9. However, there are still some pockets of counter-narrative defiance, such as in the work of the Museum of the History of Jewish Poles and among important public intellectuals and historians.

10. Anti-Muslim sentiment is prevalent across the region: only 17% of Czechs, 25% of Estonians and 33% of Poles would accept Muslim neighbours (Pew 2016).

11. On the wider trends see Vachudova (2020) and Enyedi (2020).

12. CHES data when compared to electoral results confirms this trend (Bakker et al. 2019, 2020).

13. There is a paucity of comparative polling data on narratives in the region; however European Social Values Surveys and domestic polls offer some insights into the salience of narratives.

14. Mitzen (2006) explains the alleged irrationality of ‘intractable conflicts’ when physical security is compromised for ontological security.

Additional information

Funding

This article has been possible thanks to funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101019884.