1.1 Problematising Betrayal and Treachery in the Context of Twentieth-century Transformations in Europe
This book does not seek to examine proofs of betrayal or the legal base of accusations of disloyalty throughout history. Instead, it is geared to demonstrate how certain âformulas of betrayalâ were formed, imposed, and exploited for the purpose of achieving specific political, moral, and ideological goals in twentieth-century Europe. It contends that accusations of betrayal, acquittal, and withdrawal of the charges, and sometimes even complete reversal of meaning of the act theretofore considered treachery, are not invented at random. The comparative approach applied within the volume makes it possible to observe how certain patterns of betrayal emerge in a multitude of cultural and political contexts across Europe. Although âEuropeanâ in its scope, the volume nevertheless lays a special emphasis on experiences of central, eastern, and south-eastern parts of the continent, a permanent civilisational borderland that is proverbial owing to its great cultural diversity and political instability. In the past century, these societies lived through the Nazi and Soviet occupations, which made the mass experience of symbolical and physical boundary-crossingâand, consequently, acts of confirmed or alleged betrayalâespecially striking. The collected cases demonstrate that, far from being an archetypal transhistorical scheme transposable in different historical circumstances, betrayal is rather a flexible construction underpinned by thinking about (im)possible strategies of boundary transgression. Hence the phrase âformulas of betrayalâ in the volumeâs title intends to convey the idea of simultaneous pre-determination, mutability and convertibility of betrayal as a meaningful socio-political act. We propose to examine these transformations of meaning aiming to achieve certain instrumental goals from the standpoint of the politics of memory, understood as efforts of political control or exploitation of collective memories and the consequent regulation of what should be âforgottenâ and what has to be âremembered.â
A wave of history revisions gained momentum with the end of the cold war in Europe (see MĂŒller 2002; Lebow et al. 2006; Pakier and StrĂ„th 2010; Mink and Neumayer 2013; Sierp 2014). Various national and regional actors were able to draw leverage from European institutions to initiate their projects of reckoning with the totalitarian past, as large-scale reassessments of historical narratives formulated under bankrupt political regimes and objectionable moral frameworks were both awaited and unavoidable (Cohen 1999; Gledhill 2011: 482; Neumayer 2015). A broad audience has been increasingly provided with reinterpretations of the existing national narratives on the historical events associated with ideologically motivated enmity, immense suffering, and enormous losses of human life such as wars, revolutions, colonial exploitation, genocides, and expulsions. Against the background of the pan-European processes of settling accounts with legacies of these tragic events, there occurred a major shift of focus, from the national historical narratives disseminated from the top to a polyphony of collective memories formulated from below.
Attributions of heroism, victimhood, and culpability introduced in the twentieth century became obvious targets of revisions. Claims of these moral positions and their ascriptions in public discourse have been addressed in a mass of academic literature (for example, Miller 1999; Marples 2007; Jangfeldt 2013; Eltscher 2013; Basic 2015; Crownshaw 2010; van Liempt 2005; Gross 2001; Yoshida 2006). However, there exists a complex theme closely connected to these discourses that, while being âboth emotive and topicalâ (Hirschfeld and Marsh 1989: vii), still remains an âunderstudied [and] slightly neglected areaâ (Davies 2004: 5) in the academic domain. This is the infected topic of betrayal, collaboration, and disloyalty, and the figure of the betrayer in its widest meaningâfrom rank-and-file deserters and officers who changed sides, to civilians who actively or passively cooperated with the enemy. Various public actors and opinion-makers present as rightful and justified the shift of focus from unconditional condemnation imposed by the dominantâprimarily nation-centredâideological discourses to compassion and respect for the personal choices of those who, through their independent action, positioned themselves against politically oppressive systems or collective pressure. Hence, the mechanisms and implications of these inversions deserve a closer look.
In a most general sense, betrayal is a violation of trust and loyalty that endangers societal cohesion (Ben-Yehuda 2001). Usually, acts of betrayal are complex events that include attributions of betrayal by others as well as consequent waves of revisions of the denouncements. They involve thorny negotiations that aim to restore subjectively, institutionally or philosophically defined justice and, in a broader perspective, to reinstall a moral balance. Notwithstanding whether betrayal is something that actually happened or is only alleged, it is by and large impossible to make any deeper sense of it without learning more about its prehistory and after-effects (Davies 2004: 31).
The reasons for the interest in the topic of treachery, treason, and betrayal are manifold. One of the most obvious is the widespread perception of violations of loyalty and trust as morally and legally exceptional acts. For ages, betrayal was shrouded in an aura of mysticism and sacral horror. Violation of oaths and indisputable allegiances has been almost universally classified as the moral nadir, and an unforgivable crime deserving the most severe punishment, exemplified by the frozen traitors to their lords and benefactors in the ninth circle of Danteâs Inferno. While some cases of betrayal may be explained by conscious choices of individuals searching for vengeance or profit, or driven by deep resentment, there have always been some puzzling cases when the agency of the involved actors and the nature of treachery defied clear categorisations. The paradoxical logic of these situations may be compared with the âunbelievable geometryâ of the Möbius strip that makes possible a return to the same point, but on the other side of the stripâs surface, without crossing any perceivable borderline. Being constitutive both of the evolutionary change of old laws and the rapid birth of new orders, betrayal has always teased popular imagination and tantalised with the sensation of a boundary experienceâbaffling, intense, and uncanny. Nevertheless, since time immemorial it has also existed as a âbanalâ and taken-for-granted political tool. The concept of betrayal acquired a particular political salience in the modern era, especially during transition from the age of empires to the age of nations.
Another reason for a closer look at historical cases of betrayal and their contemporary revisions is the significance of this topic for understanding the anatomy of large-scale societal transformations. In situations of revolutionary systemic changes, wars, resettlements, and disappearance of states and empiresâas was the case of Europe throughout the twentieth centuryâalleged and actual betrayal became endemic characteristics of individual biographies and destinies of whole population groups. In many European societies, political crises and large-scale conflicts in the beginning of the twentieth century generated an all-penetrating atmosphere of uncertainty and mistrust. Preoccupation with treason and betrayal became a daily issue to the extent that, as one Russian official concluded in 1915, âThere is no one layer of society that can be guaranteed free of spies and traitorsâ (Fuller 2006: 264). Metastases of this pervasive belief spread into the following decades and became âthe embryo of the future Stalinist mind, in which left- and right-wing conceptions of treason fused, and which was intoxicated by visions of both disloyal nationalities and omnipresent treasonâ (ibid.: 264). Thus, the focus of the suggested volume on the twentieth century finds its additional justification in the fact that at that time âbetrayalâ was transformed into a major concept for making sense of political changes affecting nation-states and national communities. Analysis of revisions, demystifications and re-evaluations of narratives on betrayal originating from the political climate of twentieth-century Europe might also help us to tackle changes of memory regimes on the cusp of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
A topic that looms large in the background of academic discussions on betrayal is conditions of belonging to politically defined groups and categories and, in particular, the nature of loyalty to the nation. In general terms, â[l]oyalty is a quality crucial to the construction and survival of the nation, but also important in the evolution of various forms of political mobilisation such as nationalist and national liberation movements across the globeâ (Guibernau 2013: 123â124). However, in the same manner as formation of the nation is a âdaily plebisciteâ (Renan 1882/1990: 19), individual loyalty to the nation is not something given once and for all time. As historical examples reveal, so-called loyalty by choice may give place to other types. Strong authoritarian loyalty arises from coercion and manipulation that paralyze free will of individualsâ while instrumental loyalty is assumed voluntary, but does not result in long-term commitment (Guibernau 2013: 122, 124). In times of crises and large-scale transformations, boundaries between different types of loyalty may be subjected to radical redrawings, much as borders between states, classes, cultures and religions. In the aftermath of calamity, an obvious strategy for restoring (b)orders and washing up accusations of betrayal is redefinition of the initial type of loyalty. If someone was initially forced to demonstrate loyalty to a regime, ruler, nation or state, then changing oneâs side when the opportunity is given might become a matter of restoring justice and dignity. The same is true when a person or group initially subscribed to superficial âinstrumental loyaltyâ and then opted for a more advantageous object of loyalty in changing circumstances. Breaking bonds of loyalty may be thus presented as less outrageous and quite justified. Meanwhile, as examples of post-totalitarian societies demonstrate, authoritarian loyalty may, in many cases, be internalised and persist despite efforts to foster democratic outlooks among the citizens. Another complicating issue is that boundaries between different types of loyalty can sometimes be much more easily distinguished from some external positions, while the historical actors finding themselves caught in the storm might view situations involving crucial moral choices in a very different light.
As a crime and a sin, treacherous behaviour evokes spatial metaphors of âfalling away fromâ, âgoing over the fenceâ, âchanging sidesâ, âturning coatâ, and âcrossing a lineâ. Indeed, the whole mechanism of real and alleged betrayal is about transgression of (moral) limitsâ (political) borders and (symbolic) boundaries. In Europe, the readdressing past betrayals and, contrariwise, critical revisions of heroic biographies correlates with contemporary cross-border processes such as debordering and rebordering of nations and cultures, testing various forms of supranational governance, and experimenting with transnational historical frameworks. Confinement to national silos gradually gives place to interest in entangled histories (Feindt et al. 2014), translocal commemorations, transnational memories and cross-border cultural processes. In tandem with the dissolution of old symbolic-political boundaries and formation of new ones in the wake of the massive EU expansion in 2004, came consolidated efforts to frame authoritarian communist regimes as equally criminal as Nazi ones (Neumayer 2015; Gledhill 2011). As a consequence, the redrawn boundary separating âthe authoritarian pastâ from âthe democratic pastâ in Europe changed the landscape of public commemorations and triggered further revisions of the past. Denunciations of the previous heroes (e.g., bringing to light the rapes and atrocities committed during the march of the Soviet Army in Europe in 1944â1945, exposing the truth about victims of partisan movements and the ambiguity of resistance activities during WWII etc.) paved the way for restoring good reputations and sometimes the obvious whitewashing of those previously accused of various political crimes, including treason.
The flipside of the above-mentioned processes of boundary-making and boundary-breaking is the issue of agency. When trying to explain the reasons and motivations behind detrimental violations of loyalty and trust, one unavoidab...