Building Trust: Managing Common Past and Symbolic Public Spaces in Divided Societies

Abstract

State- and nation-building historical policies clash with the perspectives of minorities. Negative group stereotypes affect the trust required for multicultural societies to function. How do groups mediate differences and cope with hate-prone interpretations of history? Linking the often separate literature on social capital, identity, ethnic conflicts and resolution, and on symbolic politics and historical reconciliation, this article develops a framework for intercommunity trust-building research. Observing controversies surrounding collective memories and memorials in Eastern Europe, it argues that integrative processes occur ‘from below’: when groups build mutual horizontal trust through common management of their shared past and landscapes; when the state participates, and does not impose.

Notes

I am enumerating here conflicts that have been largely mediated; see, for example, Euro Topics (www.eurotopics.net) and Eurozine (www.eurozine.com).

Studied in detail by Evans (2006), the corresponding Latvian ‘Museum of Nazi and Soviet Occupations’ tries, on the contrary, to show both as enemies and at the same time to explain the context of Latvian citizens joining either the Nazis or the Red Army. By rejecting the whole Soviet experience, however, the ‘Museum says little positive about either the Russian speaking minority or the experience of pro-communist Latvians who lived and built their careers in the system’ (Evans, 2006, p. 321).

Collective memory literature has been included in trust-building by Rothstein (2000), although the memory of past events is integrated here into vertical relations of trust granted by citizens to institutions (trustworthiness of institutions based on their past performance).

Note that for Ukrainians this period is instead associated with expansionist Poles.

Following the 2002 census, minorities represent 3.26% of Poland's population; among them there are 153,000 ethnic Germans, 31,000 Ukrainians and 1,133 Jews (GUS 2002, National Statistics' Office, http://www.stat.gov.pl/gus/6647_4520_PLK_HTML.htm).

In 2005, a memorial was erected in Wrocław to commemorate the beginning of this process.