Commemoration in the Civilizing Process: Reconciliation, Melancholy and Abstraction in Contemporary Memorialising John O’Brien Absract Norbert Elias has become a key inspiration for many of the most important researchers of collective memory and commemorative practices, broadly because his work points to a way beyond the reification of collective memory that is a feature of traditional Durkheimian approaches, and an overly static perspective in Bourdieuian approaches, which have the additional liability of a dominant-dominated class perspective. This paper seeks to indicate trends that have transformed the character of commemoration, which the social theory of Elias are very productive in explaining. Commemorations are marked by a trend from chauvinism and towards reconciliation, from naivety to strategy, from clear messages to abstraction and blandness, and trends towards increasing control by ‘memory elites’ and individualization. Elias’ thought can provide a powerful account of the reasons for these trends, by relating them to the transformation in the nature of interdependencies over the course of a civilizing process. However, the paper concludes by noting the limitations of his thinking, and the need to supplement it with other models. Though the manner in which changes in social competition has driven changes in commemorative practices, commemorations as a practice that seeks explanations for suffering and anxiety cannot be explained well, nor can contingency. At the heart of the lacuna is the absence of a language to discuss in-betweenness, as commemorations are out-of-the-ordinary moments that reflect on, and summon to memory, extraordinary events. Keywords: Norbert Elias, commemoration, social competition, liminality Introduction The first act of Alexis Tsipras after being elected Prime Minister of Greece was to lay flowers at the National Resistance Memorial, where hundreds of communist fighters in the resistance against the German occupation were executed. As a social performance, it demonstrated how power struggles between states and social groups are expressed in these ritual acts, with the past a form of symbolic resource that is struggled over, to legitimize political projects and movements in the present. This paper deals with the work of Norbert Elias, and posits that his theory of civilizing processes can provide a partial model for understanding commemorations, specifically in explaining that portion of commemorations that can be explained as an expression of social competition. Commemorations are not entirely conditioned by how contemporary social struggles shape how the past is remembered, as they are also ‘path dependent’, meaning that social groups and societies as a whole have specific historical experiences, based on the nature and outcome of power struggles between different social groups, such as the royal court, the aristocracy, gentry, bourgeoisie, working class, and peasantry, that condition a national habitus, shaping the customs and emotional tone of social life. The work of Elias that is particularly useful for this is ‘The Germans’ (Elias: 1996), in showing how the reconstruction of the German past in the late 19th and 20th Century, was based on emotional needs, that had been shaped by events and long-term processes that were centuries old. For instance, the preoccupation of Hitler with staging events, re-