International Histories of National Self-Determination: Experience, Representation and Memory
The idea of national self-determination – the right of a group of people to determine their own political status and future development – was a concept that acquired an unexpected relevance in the first decades of the 20th century.
The common wisdom that the future belongs to ever larger and ever more powerful empires had, by the turn of the century, been crucially undermined by processes of modernisation and democratisation, which made possible Norway’s successful regaining of independence from Sweden in 1905. The demise of European empires was subsequently – and dramatically – accelerated by the First World War, which ended up materially and politically weakening empires on both the losing and the winning sides. The Republic of Estonia and the other independent Baltic states emerged out of the defeat of the Russian Empire in 1917–1918, while the Republic of Ireland gained independence from the victorious British Empire in the aftermath of the war.
The increasingly widespread recognition of the right of national self-determination in the early 20th century was a backdrop to the story of how concrete opportunities for its enaction and implementation were sought – sometimes successfully and sometimes not – by actors on the ground. This process, which in many cases continues today, has produced multifaceted representations of public sentiment, cultural identity and political struggle that have entered our collective repertoire of historical memory.
In this Kumu event, we are bringing together art historians and historians from Ireland, Norway and Estonia, to reflect on the significance of the processes of national self-determination in our national memories, and to look for transnational parallels and connections.
The event is headlined by Seán Kissane’s keynote lecture “Common Threads: Art and the Fabric of Shared Histories in Nation-Building” and is followed by a round-table discussion.
Participants:
Annie Fletcher (Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art)
Seán Kissane (Curator at the Irish Museum of Modern Art)
Ruth Hemstad(Associate Research Professor at the National Library of Norway and Researcher at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo)
Eva Piirimäe (Professor of Political Theory at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu)
Mart Kuldkepp (Professor of Estonian and Nordic History at University College London)