Political identity and national memory: The conflict of contemporary political narratives

Abstract

The article examines the place and the role of political narratives of national memory in the processes of political identification of modern political communities. The authors prioritize contemporary socio-cultural research strategies of political phenomena, which interpret political identification processes in the methodological context of the dynamics of national memory’s symbolic structures. The proliferation of such communicative practices as storytelling, political performance, post-factual politics and political imaginary complicates the problem of political identification and its narrative design in modern society and gives rise to multiple nationalist, populist, and ethno-political discourses. In this context, the significance of the theoretical understanding of national codes of communal political identification and an ability to forecast the symbolic contours of a new, more stable narrative of national identity based on codes of solidarity and civic patriotism increases. The study of the impact of symbolic configurations of legitimating profiles of national memory on specifics of everyday political narratives and the discourses of civic patriotism as the semantic core of national identity is particularly important in the study of contemporary political identification. The description of the profiles of the national memory legitimation necessitates a study of the conflict dynamics of the symbolic contours of the national memory, which includes competing semantic components (images of the past, political characteristics of elites, typology of the heroic, priority strategies and practices of fighting “enemies”). In turn, these processes determine the nature of the emergence and multiplication of identity conflicts. Using methodological premises of the cultural and sociological analysis of the dynamics of modern political cultures as symbolic forms of national memory, the authors propose new theoretical approaches to the study of the political identification processes and conflicts among basic political narratives in the realities of contemporary political communicative practices.