Collective Memory as a Collective Right? Peoples’ Rights, Memory Politics, and the Crisis of Multilateralism in Post-Socialist Europe

The declining authority of multilateral human rights institutions has shifted how collective rights operate in practice. Instead of relying on formal legal guarantees, groups increasingly pursue recognition and political subjecthood through conflicts over historical meaning. Focusing on memory politics in post-socialist Eastern Europe, this study conceptualises these struggles as claims to ‘rights of memory’. It identifies a normative space located between cultural rights and self-determination, drawing implicitly on Article 1 of the ICCPR and ICESCR to ground demands for historical authority. The research integrates comparative case analysis with digital memory methods. Using multilingual parliamentary corpora and transnational media data, it traces how domestic memory legislation frequently provokes international diplomatic reactions and counter-memory mobilisation. The negotiated dissolution of Czechoslovakia and the post-Soviet ‘memory wars’ serve as primary comparative cases. They reveal that memory governance can either stabilise political transitions or escalate interstate conflict depending on the availability of reliable multilateral arbitration. Ultimately, the findings suggest that treating memory rights as pluralizable and non-exclusive claims provides a safer framework for managing collective grievances, supporting symbolic accommodation in a fragmented international system.