CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Lleshi, Sokol |
|---|---|
| Title | Inescapable Past: Institutions, Legacies, and Strategies of Regime Formation: A comparative study of Albania, Czech Republic and Romania |
| Summary | It appears that the establishment of these specific institutions is entangled in political struggle and competition. The establishment of these institutes do not come about out of necessity. The institutes do emerge as part of the ideological and political projects of political parties and their constituencies. This practice is generally understood as symbolic politics. The reasons given by institutional entrepreneurs or political representatives that have endorsed and defended such projects in parliament, or in public, are various. Yet, certain reasons appear to be more cogent. The prime movers of such projects are representatives of the center right in almost all the cases. Using the typology devised by Kubik and Bernhard (2014) on the types of agents involved in cultural politics with legitimating repercussions for the emergent democratic regime, most of the institutional entrepreneurs fall within the category of memory warriors, considering their perception of the past regime as the one deserving to be dominant in comparison with other representations. Yet these institutions do not confine themselves to producing or making official one particular narrative on the past regime. The involvement of these particular institutions in politics of memory battles to my consideration does not lead to a thorough or extensive understanding of the phenomenon, which is related to an extensive strategy of regime formation as an outcome of the conjunction of institutionalization variable and legacy variable under conditions of anti-communist recurring ideological framework. There exist certain conditions in which, the institutional effect and institutional practices are closer to the politics of memory pole, rather than regime replacement pole, which is related to the intention of political actors and institutional entrepreneurs to complete an unfinished revolution. Breaking with the state socialist regime's legacies by effacing its inheritance and completing a rupture so that the 'old structures' are no longer lingering in the new democratic regime appears to be a shared reason given by center right representatives and institutional founders for embarking in this political project of establishing the so-called Institutes of Memory. |
| Supervisor | Bozóki, András |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/lleshi_sokol.pdf |
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