How Can Memories of Past In-Group Crimes Be Integrated in Positive National Identity?

We asked a sample of Italian university students (number: 103; average age: 21,17) to fill in two questionnaires on their opinions, knowledge and emotions regarding Italian colonial wars, before and after reading a historical text conveying crimes of the Italian army during a colonial war in Ethiopia either in factual or in elusive language. Results showed that all participants, as well as most Italian adults (del Boca, 2005), simply did not know about their country’s colonial wars. In this social climate of amnesia (Pivato, 2007), participants reading a detailed narrative of in-group war crimes showed a significant heightening of their negative emotions, when compared with participants reading an elusive narrative. Also, willingness to help the group of former victims became significantly higher only when participants were exposed to clear, factual knowledge. Instead, no significant change in the feeling of being ‘guilty by association’ (Doosje, Branscombe, Spears and Manstead, 1998) was shown in participants exposed to either kind of narrative. Items on identification with the in-group were not related to these emotional changes, except for a diminishing degree of the feeling of being proud and glad to be part of one’s own national group when reading an elusive story. Results suggest that the positive role of negative emotions due to a detailed narrative of past in-group crimes, when referring to new members of a group of former perpetrators, should be explored further.