On the Relationship between Politics of Memory and the State's Rapport with the Communist Past

Over the past twenty-five years, the debate about the communist past in Eastern Europe became largely a discussion about the debate itself. In this chapter, I will argue that, in the immediate aftermath of the events of 1989, the main concern of the public actors was not to clarify the nature of the old regime, but to assess its specific elements, to condemn and/or to forget them. Such processes were perceived to be the perquisites of embarking on the project of building a new democratic state.