Collective Memory and National Membership

About This Book

"This study explores the role played by collective perceptions of the past in constructing, maintaining, and challenging views of citizenship and national identity while taking divergent visions of the past seriously. It seeks to understand how much of the disparity in the way citizenship questions are approached can be explained by the differences in visions of the past. Drawing on comparative historical analysis of two post-imperial core countries, Turkey and Austria, this volume explores how differences in perspectives on the past inform citizenship debates. It looks at the ways in which different forms of historical narratives foster certain citizenship models and create resistance against others. By doing this, it develops a conceptual framework applicable beyond the two cases when analyzing the history-identity nexus at the collective level"--