Anthropological Journal of European Cultures

This article deals with the author’s personal narratives and expectations vis-à-vis world-changing events between 1989 and 1991. It illustrates the ways in which the Cold War and its end, as well as the Soviet Union and its end, represent powerful psychological factors in personal narratives of growing up and giving meaning to the world. In an autoethnographic manner, it approaches research and writing from the perspective of the researcher’s experience in order to produce new layers of understanding about the world. It builds on the assumption that big events on the world stage are composed of micro-stories that both nourish them and are nourished by them, and in so doing it makes the micro and the macro two inseparable, interwoven approaches to cultural experience and change. A conversation is forged between past and present, expectations and delusions, life of author and life of Europe, personal new beginnings and continental cul-de-sacs.

With the rise of populism, European solidarity risks being eroded by a clash of solidarities based on nation and religion. Ranging from hospitality to hostility, ‘refugees welcome’ to ‘close the borders’, asylum seekers from Syria and other war-torn countries test the very ideas upon which the EU was founded: human rights, tolerance and the free movement of people. European solidarity is not only rooted in philosophical ideas of equality and freedom but also in the memory of nationalism, war and violence. The response to refugees seeking asylum into Europe cannot only be resolved by appealing to emotions, moral sentiments and a politics of pity. Disenchantment with government, fear of terrorism and resentment towards foreigners weaken European solidarity at a time when it is needed most.

In June 2016, the United Kingdom’s electorate voted in a referendum to leave the European Union. This article examines ‘Brexit’ from the perspective of British, or English, exceptionalism. It argues that the Leave vote was caused by a number of factors: underlying myths and exceptionalism about the U.K. and its relationship with ‘Europe’; the fallout from the 2007–2008 financial crisis; the austerity policies undertaken in the U.K. since 2010; and the increased migration into the U.K. after the financial crisis, in particular from other EU Member States. The article concludes by arguing that Brexit should serve as an important lesson to listen to all people who feel abandoned by the EU, austerity and globalisation, to hear their stories and perspectives. Only then can we start to think about whether there are shared values and principles which could form the basis for a European politics of the future.

This article discusses the fluctuation of Russian attitudes towards Europe during the last twenty-five years. ‘Europeanness’ is connected to EU efforts of ‘Europeanisation’ and ‘normalisation’ of Russia on EU terms. At the same time, the EU has tried to monopolise the notion of ‘Europe’ and pretends to fulfil all its ideals and values. The continued expansion of the EU towards Russia’s former partners, and conflicts in contested neighbourhoods, has ushered in the feeling among Russians of being ‘different’ (‘Europeans’, yet with a desire to be great, strong and feared). Russia once again plays the role of a revisionist power, thus undermining the EU claim to represent the whole of Europe. Russia may be excluded from formal European organisations, but it cannot be excluded from an ‘imaginable’ community of Europe as a cultural phenomenon to which many Russians still attribute personal and collective meaning.

This article discusses different processes of appropriation of history in three former Soviet Republics. It provides a context for the recent historical retrofitting by taking the re-monumentalisation of the past in Estonia, the popularity of pseudo-history in Russia, and the current state of the Stalin museum in Georgia as symptomatic of wider social processes. New forms of convergence are shown between the historical and the political by the replacement, emptying of meaning, and remixability of past symbols. The author concludes that the Soviet world has been put to political and communicative uses as a familiar context to refer to; also that the process of retrofitting historical narratives is not over yet in any of these societies.