Leonidas Donskis
Member of European Parliament
Dissonances of Memory: Talking Past Each Other in Europe

To be or to flee? To regret or to forget? These are the questions that make it possible to talk about the duty to remember. If we decide that we have nothing to do with what our ancestors or predecessors did, we destroy the world of belonging. Memory is about connectedness and belonging, whereas forgetting is a treacherous denial of the world of belonging, offering, instead merely a moral void accompanied by the moral fragmentation of the individual and the soulless segmentation of society.

Ultimately, forgetting is a silent betrayal of that primary ethical impulse, which is even prior to the theoretical and metaphysical grasp of reality, and which enables us to assume responsibility for the Other, as Emmanuel Lévinas, the greatest ethicist of the twentieth century, would have it. We assume – intuitively and without giving it much theoretical consideration – responsibility for the world in the face of another human being. Memory is a mode of facing humanity, its wounds and its injuries. By remembering, we face humanity refracted through ourselves. Memory appears as an irresistible force when we find ourselves at the crossroads of history and politics. Memory is a cognitive response to ethical challenges, without which we would abandon the humanity within us.

As Milan Kundera depicts the painful dilemmas of Tomas and Teresa in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, they are summed up by the characters’ inability to accept their destructive fate. Both escape from a Prague full of Soviet tanks and troops in 1968, and both find themselves seemingly serene and happy in tranquil Switzerland, only for it to be revealed that the destruction of Prague and its velvet revolution, and the dream of creating socialism with a human face, are old news.

Teresa’s photographs capturing the brutality of the Soviet military and the fearlessness of the young people of Prague turn out to be out-dated and of little market value in the eyes of a Swiss women’s magazine. Having realised the futility of her situation, she chooses to return to Prague, even though she knows that she does that at the expense of safety, security, and happiness. This choice is more about her inability to resist her own memories and her duty to remember, than Tomas’ adultery with his mistress Sabina and his other, briefer, flings.

Nothing has dramatically changed as yet in Europe after 1968. Memory politics, as well as opposing memory regimes, still divide Europe.

Leonidas Donskis M.E.P ALDE (2009–2014) Hon. DLitt.,
is a philosopher, political theorist, historian of ideas, social analyst, and political commentator. As a public figure in Lithuania, he also acts as a defender of human rights and civil liberties.

His scholarly interests lie in philosophy of history, philosophy of culture, philosophy of literature, philosophy of the social sciences, civilisation theory, political theory, history of ideas, and studies in Central and East European thought.

He has researched and lectured in the USA, Great Britain, and Europe. Among many other prestigious posts, he has been an IREX-International Research and Exchanges Board Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar, and a Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, USA; a Swedish Institute Guest Researcher at the University of Gothenburg and a Guest Professor of East European Studies at the University of Uppsala, Sweden.

Until 7 June 2009 he acted as Professor of Political Science at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania. From 2005 to 2009, he served as Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Political Science and Diplomacy at Vytautas Magnus University. In addition, he still acts as a foreign Docent in the Department of Economic and Political Studies at the University of Helsinki, and as an Extraordinary Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Theory at Tallinn University, Estonia.

He has been published widely in international journals, and is the author or publisher of over thirty books.

Alex Novosseloff, Frank Neisse

Walls Between People and
Fair Borders for Conflict Resolution?

(photo exhibit/roundtable discussion)

Walls Between People

After a two-year journey around the world that led them from Tijuana to Belfast and from Jerusalem to Seoul and Laayoune, Alexandra Novosseloff and Frank Neisse met people that are living by those walls to better understand their lives. In the short term, a wall fulfills the functions of protection and safeguarding. But alone it cannot guarantee effective protection. It must itself be guarded. In fact, it protects less than it separates. Beyond security and protection, the objective is separation from one’s neighbor.

This original and unusual photographical reportage concerns eight different walls and situations, current scars of our open and globalized world: the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, the green line that divides the Island of Cyprus, the peace lines in Northern Ireland, the Berm, a wall of sand that crosses the Western Sahara from north to south, the barrier built between the United States and Mexico, the barbed wired fence around the Spanish enclaves of Melilla and of Ceuta in Morocco, the electrified fence along the control line between Pakistan and India and the separation wall between Israelis and Palestinians.

Fair Borders for Conflict Resolution?

This roundtable discussion will critique and discuss the fairness of borders and the role they play in conflict resolution.

Participants:
Alexandra Novosseloff (Senior expert at the UN peace and security section and research associate at the Centre Thucydide, University of Paris-Panthéon-Assas)
Aernout van Lynden (former war journalist)
Dan Saxon (former ICTY prosecutor)
Moderator: Daniela Vicherat-Mattar (LUC assistant professor)