When empires and no longer legitimated states collapse, new states come into life. Former states split apart; some nations gain independence, and some of them are capable to form their own states whereas some merge with others. After collapse of empires and after independency of nations, the physical containment of cultural identities and their administrative performance often change. Sometimes changes are so many and take place so fast, that a power vacuum occurs. In such a situation administrative structures vanish and have to be re-created, either by transforming the old ones, or simply from the ground up. When they are created, the founding fathers want to give them an identity-making role and thus we see the import of narratives and representations of memory may have in building a nation’s identity.

 

Our project focus on the consequences of the imperial and state collapses after 1917 in spatial and chronological comparison, researching the changing of institutions that created narratives and representations of national memories. The effects of World War I in terms of creating or transforming institutions to keep or –re-imagining the collective memory of such states, were overwhelming. The Russian Revolution of 1917 exerted its influence all along the globe. We want to compare these processes with the post-world war II independencies and/or consolidation of post-colonial states (such as Morocco and Egypt) and with the independencies and recovery of full sovereignty after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989/91.