Original scientific paper
HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS OF YOUNG PEOPLE IN EUROPE AT THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM
Nebojša Blanuša
orcid.org/0000-0002-9430-7446
; Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The paper is about the analysis of the general structure and the
coherence of the historical consciousness of young people in five
groups of European countries, using the results of the international
study Youth and History of 1995. The analysis suggests there are two
main patterns of historical thinking and the construction of historicopolitical identity that the author calls the driving force of historical progressivism and the smelting-plant of patriotism. These modernist schemes of thought, grounded in the competing perceptions of the nation, democracy and Europe, make the historical consciousness ambivalent. Regarding the coherence of historical consciousness, it is somewhat lower in the countries of Eastern Europe, which can be explained by the impact of the “neuralgic spot” of the collapse of socialism and the discontinuity in social, political and cultural aspects as expressed in the ideological cleavages of that time. In the postsocialist Central-European countries on the other hand, this coherence is the highest, the fact that the author attributes to the radical shift from the ideology of socialism and the domination of the cleavage traditionalism–Occidentalism.
Keywords
historical consciousness; disciplinary matrix; the driving force of historical progressivism; smelting plant of patriotism; ideological cleavages; Jörn Rüsen
Hrčak ID:
20947
URI
Publication date:
29.3.2006.
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