This chapter traces the rise of moral remembrance. It deals with the gradual emergence of memorialisation standards and policy-oriented attempts to engage transitional societies in developing and adopting specific normative forms of remembrance. This perspective of ‘globalised and standardised cultures of memory’ has been heavily embedded and dispersed through an accumulative process – the institutionalisation and ideologisation of human rights. Gaining their power and legitimacy from the world polity level, moral concerns are promoted through a ‘facing the past’, ‘duty to remember’ and ‘justice for victims’ agenda that is supposed to prevent a recurrence of violent conflicts. Following on from the transitional justice paradigm that brought to the fore primarily legal mechanisms to deal with past human rights abuses, since 2000 memorialisation has been seen as central to the processes of democratisation and regional integration. In practice, this has brought a tremendous change in how memorialisation processes are understood, moving the paradigm from a ‘duty to remember’ to specific, policy-oriented ‘memorialisation standards’. Standardisation of memory has further enabled the production of a human rights memorialisation toolkit that has come to be understood as a panacea for post-conflict peacebuilding efforts and the enforcement of human rights around the globe.

In the mid-nineteenth century, it was the Habsburg Empire rather than any of the Germanic states that set the pattern for patent regulation in central Europe. Its statute for patent privileges in 1852 involved a strict definitions of novelty and explicit documentary demands for patent specifications across its territories. However, as the evolving German patent system became the dominant external reference point in later decades, leading figures in Austro-Hungary began to question its imperial patent system and looked increasingly to Berlin for their frameworks, although not excluding reference to Roman, French, and Anglo-American law. Thus a variety of legal traditions and intra-imperial debate wrought changes across the Austro-Hungarian territories that culminated in distinctive national systems once the Empire had dissolved in 1918. This chapter traces both the formal devolution from imperial to national patent systems in Austria, Hungary, Poland, and Czech regions as well as the persistent legal and technocratic imperatives that ultimately drew these legacy systems closer to each other again.

Aiming to develop its nascent industrial economy, in 1896 Imperial Russia adopted a new patent system that borrowed substantially from the German precedent. Yet this system was never embraced with enthusiasm by Russians since in legal, economic, and social terms Russian inventors faced many difficulties casting inventive activity in terms of Patent Office regulations. A series of Imperial and then Soviet patent laws were thus not effective in economic development. Eventually the Soviets would hold up “worker inventiveness” as the vital quality that would thrive under new production relations so thoroughly just and rational as to render patents superfluous. While the 1924 patent law would be a pragmatic concession to European industrial politics, the 1931 statute would reassert the primacy of state enterprises over patent holders, but even this truly Soviet law continued to pay lip service to the durable concern for inventors’ creative authorship.