The Politics of Forgetting and Foreign Policy
On 23 October 2024, the anniversary of the second and decisive battle of El Alamein in the Second World War, the official profile of the Italian Ministry of Defence tweeted:
“#ElAlamein #23October 1942, a place and a date that tell of valour and sacrifice, a chapter as heroic as it is tragic in our history. We honour the brave Italian soldiers who fought in the sands of North Africa. With them we remember with deference all the #Fallen soldiers who sacrificed their lives for our freedom.”
While the emphasis on valour, sacrifice and heroism was not new in official Italian memory of the battle, the post went a step further by arguing that fascist Italy’s army – which was fighting side by side with German nazi forces – had sacrificed itself “for our freedom”. What does this claim tell us about Italy’s memory politics in the third year of a far-right government led by post-fascist politician Giorgia Meloni?
Engaging with historical research, which has detailed extensively Italy’s brutal actions in the war, was certainly not the ministry’s goal. Steering public memory of the war and the fascist regime appears as a more likely motivation. Recent works have highlighted the ideological and political connections between Italy’s leadership then and now. For Meloni and her allies, it is important to revise the historical record that portrays fascist Italy as an aggressor. Instead, Meloni’s and her allies’ discourse depicts wartime Italy as a respectable and valiant belligerent that eventually became a victim of war, particularly of communist and Yugoslav crimes. To convey this message, Italian officials have resorted to several instruments from the “toolbox” of memory politics, particularly the (re)construction of historical narratives, the (ab)use of lieux de mémoire (places of remembrance) such as El Alamein and the silencing/forgetting of key historical facts, in this case, Italy’s war and colonial crimes.
The politics of remembering and forgetting
Scholarly research has highlighted several recurrent mechanisms of (ab)using historical memory, including the use of historical analogies, the construction of historical narratives, the creation of memory sites, the marginalisation and forgetting of the past and the securitisation of historical memory. In this contribution, I will focus on “forgetting” the past, which is one of the least studied, and yet most relevant aspects of memory politics. Analyses of memory politics tend to underplay mechanisms of forgetting because they focus mainly on the narratives of the past that are selected and constructed by memory agents (people with discursive power who craft such narratives) for their “usability” in the present. Less attention is paid to events that could or should logically be part of official memory but are not, and to the processes leading to their exclusion. Yet, forgetting is an intrinsic part of memory politics; it is inherent to the construction of selective memories.
The “politics of forgetting” – as I call the political strategy of omitting or marginalising key historical events in official memory – influences both domestic and foreign policy. Its effects on foreign policy are multifarious. Not remembering a historical event, or selectively forgetting parts of it, enables a certain foreign policy posture. A further issue arises when an event that is “forgotten” or marginalised in national narratives plays a major role in the political constructions of another country. This may lead to dissonant or conflicting discourses in international fora, and ultimately to confrontational foreign policies. Colonialism is a particularly pertinent example concerning memory politics in Europe. As research has shown, the leadership of European countries do not consider colonialism a “useful past” for present purposes; hence they marginalise, reinterpret or even silence it in official memory – in the EU and on the national level.
State leaders and institutions take a central role in the politics of forgetting. As Paul Ricoeur has argued, these actors may impose a canonical narrative using intimidation or seduction, stripping others of their original power to recount their actions themselves. At the same time, efforts to confine certain historical events to oblivion can only be successful if they are endorsed by a substantial part of society. They require a secret complicity by society, which makes forgetting a semi-active behaviour. Ricoeur calls this “forgetting by avoidance”, the expression of bad faith motivated by the will not to inform oneself, not to investigate the harm done to others; in short a “wanting-not-to know”.
Forgetting and international politics
Scholarly literature has identified three types of forgetting in memory politics, which are often at play simultaneously and have various effects on international relations: forgetting as denial, as fading away and forgetting through reinterpretation and adaptation. Forgetting as denial is an active process that involves the negation of events and of someone else’s memory. In international politics, forgetting by denial may cause a quick escalation of conflict with actors who believe that their memories are being erased. In the face of denial, they often escalate their activities and seek international recognition of the memories they hold dear.
Forgetting as fading away is primarily passive and involves the natural marginalisation of memories over time. However, it could also be the result of the prioritisation of other narratives, and hence of purposeful marginalisation. This type of forgetting can be branded as a threat by political actors who argue that “it will occur unless we guard against it”. This may lead them to advance a range of measures to “protect memory”, for example by constructing museums, memorials, archives and by holding commemorative ceremonies.
A third type of forgetting occurs in the process of reinterpreting and adapting the past to current narratives. It combines forgetting and marginalising the past with the active construction of new narratives. For instance, following the rise of geopolitical tensions since the mid-2010s, it is common to hear depictions of the Cold War as a period of stability with relatively little conflict. This narrative marginalises the memory of conflicts in the Global South during the Cold War, as well as the memory of the arms race and nuclear brinkmanship. This kind of forgetting may lead to a distorted picture of the past and, for instance, to longing for a world that never really existed.
Italy’s memory politics of fascist wars and colonialism
Different mechanisms of forgetting operate simultaneously within Italian memory politics. Self-acquitting narratives that downplay Italy’s crimes in the Second World War and in its former colonies, such as the ‘myth of the good Italian’, were constructed by the Italian elites as early as the 1940s. Over the following decades, they were propagated through various media, from the printed press to cinema, and found receptive ears in large parts of the Italian public opinion, who – as theorised by Ricoeur – wanted to either forget the lost wars and colonial experiences or recast them in a positive light.
Positive reinterpretation was particularly important for those who had been involved in decision-making or other significant roles in the wars. The lack of a Nuremberg-style tribunal for Italian war criminals as well as Cold War divisions – which made confrontation with the Soviet Union a priority for the West and left territories where Italy had committed war crimes on the other side of the Iron Curtain – enabled processes of omission, selective memory and distortive reinterpretation. Moreover, former colonial functionaries retained near-exclusive control of colonial archives and purposefully used them to construct narratives and even historiography showing Italians as “good colonialists”.
Hence, state and societal structures preventing an honest confrontation with the national past have long been in place. They downplayed or negated Italian responsibilities, even while a growing body of historiography showed that Fascist Italy had committed war crimes and, arguably, genocide in its colonies. In recent years, even before Meloni came to power, high-level Italian officials had publicly denied Italy’s war crimes and enacted foreign policy decisions – such as prioritising economic extraction or supporting detention centres for migrants in Libya. These actions were ominously reminiscent of colonial practices, especially in the eyes of local actors. In 2019, then undersecretary for foreign affairs Manlio di Stefano denied Italy’s colonial past altogether to argue that, thanks to the supposed lack of a “colonial tradition”, Italy could claim a leading foreign policy role:
“Italy can and should be a protagonist of a new season of sincere and concrete multilateralism. We can be one because we have no skeletons in our closet, we don’t have a colonial tradition, we haven’t dropped bombs on anyone and we haven’t put the noose around the neck of any other economy.”
Until the Meloni government, however, Italian official memory had largely prioritised narratives of anti-fascist resistance and of Nazi crimes against Italian soldiers after 8 September 1943 (when Italy signed an armistice with the Allies and de facto switched sides in the war). Marginalising the previous alliance with the Third Reich and colonial crimes was primarily a function of foregrounding the “useful past” of Italy’s anti-nazi resistance since September 1943.
Post-fascist forgetting and rewriting
The statements of high officials in Meloni’s government exploit the “memory gaps” left by previous official narratives and take them a step further by reassessing events that took place during Italy’s alliance with Nazi Germany. The cited tweet of the Ministry of Defence should be understood in this context. Having ideological, political and sometimes even family links to fascist-time officials, Italy’s current leadership has an interest in reevaluating the actions of the regime – and little or no sympathy for anti-fascist narratives.
Mechanisms of forgetting are even more central to Meloni’s memory politics than to earlier Italian narratives. Not only are colonial and war crimes marginalised and denied (only Holocaust denial has remained a taboo for Meloni), even battles that Italy conducted together with Nazi Germany – such as El Alamein – have been rebranded as “fights for freedom”. Their nature as a war of aggression on foreign soil, against the military alliance that eventually defeated the fascist regime and paved the way for Italian democracy is omitted entirely.
The recent tweet of Italy’s defence ministry has been widely reported in the international press. Yet, it has not elicited a prompt response from the countries that fought and lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the battles against the Axis and fascist Italy. Embroiled in current geopolitics and domestic issues, they appear to tolerate the “excesses” of the Italian government, which at least has fallen in line with today’s pressing international crises, from Ukraine to the Middle East. The Meloni government has likely taken note and concluded that, after all, Western partners do not mind its deceptive reinterpretation of fascist history too much