How Can Memories of Past In-Group Crimes Be Integrated in Positive National Identity? A Study on Effects of Narratives of Italian Colonial Wars on Young Participants and of Co-Variation of These Effects with the Participants’ Level of National Identification with Being Italian

For some years now, we have being doing a study on how difficult memories of war are integrated in the overall knowledge of the past history of the in-group, by the young people who happened to be born in this same in-group long after the war’s end. We decided to study such a topic, for two main reasons. First of all, because we agree with Hannah Arendt’s (1958) idea that the very root of any remarkable historical shift lies primarily in the fact that natality brings new individuals onto the social scene, while the old ones gradually disappear. According to this line of thought, then, also processes leading, in the long run, to a sound reconciliation between former enemies rely, even before the social and psychological elaboration of these highly controversial memories, on the biological effect of natality. Another important reason for studying such a topic is because, as Paul Ricoeur (2000) convincingly argued, a lack of elaboration of these difficult memories may seriously threaten the sense of belonging of young generations to their in-group. To understand how young people develop their ownership in their communities, it is interesting to explore how memories of wars that involved their community are remembered and known by them, and how this information is narrated to them.Within this general theoretical frame, more in particular, the study that we present today deals with the current memory that young Italians have of the grave wrong-doings of the Italian army during the last century’s colonial wars.