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The dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the enlargement of the European Union, the “Ukraine Crisis” and the war in Donbas were interpreted and legitimized with historical arguments. The notions of “Central Europe” and the “Russian world” were based on historical claims. Why did and does history still play such an important role as a mobilizing and legitimizing force? Why and how did historical interpretations manage to replace or put into question international law or economic considerations? Why and how exactly is history used outside of the “conflict areas” to explain, interpret and contextualize the conflicts, and what is the role of academic historians?

History constantly appears at the center of public debate and power struggles: via the concepts of newly created museums and school textbooks, via “memorial legislation”, “history codification” and state institutions of “historical memory”, and in political proclamations of certain historical events as “genocides”. Our conference aims at analyzing those phenomena from a transregional perspective using the Ukrainian case as a focus to be studied in a comparative and entangled frame. It also faces the fundamental question of the historian’s professional position in times of political instability, the rise of xenophobic and nationalistic tendencies, and the revival of “national narratives”.

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