Agency of internal transnationalism in social memory

The article examines the limitations of methodological nationalism in the studies of social memory through a case study of memory of Stalinist repression in Belarus. It analyses how various social agencies - national and local activists, religious organisations, and international foundations - use the memory of repression for constructing post-Soviet Belarusian identity by embedding their national representations in larger transnational frameworks. Drawing on the concept of 'internal globalisation', this article develops the idea of 'internal transnationalism' that suggests the importance of wider transnational configurations for the definition of nation. Internalized transnationalism does not make a national memory concept less nation-centred, but it affects the choice of its cultural, political and civilizational framing. In contrast to methodological cosmopolitanism that implies rediscovering of the national as an internalized global, methodological transnationalism emphasizes the multiplicity of co-existing transnational networks that can be invoked by social actors in their national mnemonic agenda. Using the case of the Kurapaty memorial site the article analyses how multiple framings of memory representations - the Belarusian national memory, liberal anti-communist memory, contesting memories, such as Polish, Baltic and Jewish - compete and juxtapose in the space of social memory of political repression.