Whatever happened to Hungarian freedom fighters? Collective memory, collective forgetting, and dissociative collective identity

As the war in Ukraine unfolds, the Hungarian government seems less enthusiastic about the idea of state sovereignty than one might have anticipated given Hungary’s historic past. Moreover, there is a surge of pro-Russian sentiment among government supporters. This is counterintuitive in light of prevailing mnemonic practices which put heavy emphasis on Hungary’s struggle for freedom and independence. The new developments suggest that the role of collective memory in collective identity formation needs to be reconsidered, especially concerning the apparent inhibition of otherwise persistent and widely shared memories. The article discusses the problem in the context of socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting and social identity complexity theory. It puts forward two complementary arguments: (1) this Janus-faced public behaviour might be accounted for by selective commemorative practices of the government and (2) how memories of historical events sustain a shared sense of belonging and continuity is not only contingent on group membership but also on the ever-changing group interest.