National memory

National memory is a form of collective memory defined by shared experiences and culture. It is an integral part to national identity.

It represents one specific form of cultural memory which makes an essential contribution to national group cohesion. Historically national communities have drawn upon commemorative ceremonies and monuments, myths and rituals, glorified individuals, objects, and events in their own history to produce a common narrative.

According to Lorraine Ryan, national memory is based on the public's reception of national historic narratives and the ability of people to affirm the legitimacy of these narratives.

National memory typically consists of a shared interpretation of a nation's past. Such interpretations can vary and sometimes compete. They can get challenged and augmented by a range of interest groups, fighting to have their histories acknowledged, documented and commemorated and reshape national stories. Often national memory is adjusted to offer a politicized vision of the past to make a political position appear consistent with national identity. Furthermore, it profoundly affects how historical facts are perceived and recorded and may circumvent or appropriate facts. A repertoire of discursive strategies functions to emotionalize national narrative and nationalize personal pasts.

National memory has been used calculatedly by governments for dynastic, political, religious and cultural purposes since as early as the sixteenth century.

Marketing of memory by the culture industry and its instrumentalisation for political purposes can both be seen as serious threats to the objective understanding of a nation's past.

Lorraine Ryan notes that individual memory both shapes and is shaped by national memory, and that there is a competition between the dominant and individual memories of a nation.

Hyung Park states that the nation is continuously revived, re-imagined, reconstituted, through shared memories among its citizens.

National memories may also conflict with the other nations' collective memory.

Reports that are narrated in terms of national memory characterize the past in ways that merge the past, the present and the future into "a single ongoing tale".

Pierre Nora argues that a "democratisation of history" allows for emancipatory versions of the past to surface:

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