European Memory: Universalising the Past?

Journal of Political Ideologies, 2020

Debates about ‘European memory’ are frequent in public and political discourse. With the fundamental challenges the European project now faces, such debates exemplify changes in what Europe means and implies politically. Drawing on a large corpus of press articles from six EU member states (France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom) and employing qualitative and quantitative methods of discourse analysis, the article questions the fields and logics of conflict about the meaning of Europe between 2004 and 2016. Intimately linked to national and post-national senses of identity, these conflicts about ‘European memory’ take four different forms and appear across different national public spheres: (1) perspectives from which ‘European memory’ underpins seemingly consensual conceptions of Europe; (2) conflictive conceptions of Europe along an East-West divide that present different attempts of setting rules; (3) memory conflicts establishing peripheries and boundaries of Europe; (4) a global framing of ‘Europe’ that understands Europe as a space of competition that mobilizes triadic patterns of conflict. The fits and misfits, and the degrees of entanglement on conflicts about ‘European memory’ help to understand the persistent and continuous struggles over the mental maps of Europe beyond the simplistic opposition of particularism and cosmopolitanism.

In M. Mälksoo (Ed.) Handbook on the Politics of Memory., 2023

This chapter provides a comprehensive, yet concise overview regarding the trajectory from a national to a European memory framework. It traces the development of the increasing involvement of the European Union in memory politics starting with the development of felt need for a European founding myth and ending with the EU’s active formulation of policies dealing with memory issues. It highlights the role the memory of the Holocaust played in creating a shared consciousness and the difficulties EU actors faced when trying to enter an area that had been considered an exclusive prerogative of the nation state. It focuses particularly on the disputes between East and Western European countries regarding memories and discusses how the EU deals with those conflictual questions. It furthermore analyses more in depth certain initiatives of the EU aimed at creating common ground for debates on history and memory as for example the House of European History or the Europe for Citizens programme.

Transform, 2020

Overview of the reclaiming of a European memory . The paper attempts to provide a definition of the different uses of European memory and sheds light on the duality between a cosmopolitan discourse and national narratives. The paper thus explores some of the political meanings attached to "Europe" and seeks to deconstruct their use during and after the Cold War.

2011

Memory has become an object of dispute in the EU. Different groups and states do not have a full convergence of views and this raises the question as to whether the EU should or should not be involved. A pluralist conception of justice would argue that the recognition of memory is not excluded as a form of justice. Adopting this view, this paper argues that the recognition of memory can be addressed at the EU level if the different components of justice are allocated to the proper spheres (recognition, retribution and recognition) and levels (national and European).

Collective memories of war and suffering have been crucial to the development of European integration since 1945. My basic thesis is that remembrance has also played an important role in the accession of new states to the organization that has come to be known as the European Union (EU). As the EU has expanded into new regions of Europe, particularly the post-dictatorial south and the post-communist east, continental institutions and existing member-states have been confronted by conflicting understandings of the past. Although the past has continued to push states towards membership in the EU, the nature of these remembered experiences has changed through the various rounds of expansion. In addition to tracing the role that memory has played in the widening of Europe, I argue that these confrontations have sparked important debates about the meaning of the past for Europe today.

This article examines European memory and memory politics. Taking as my starting point the deepening divisions between the “old” and “new” members of the European Union since the 2004 and 2007 enlargements, I investigate whether differences in official memory concerning World War II on the one hand and communism on the other should be regarded as permanent. Using examples from the development of West-European postwar memory-regimes and comparing them to the current state in postcommunist Europe I suggest that with respect to historical memory the two parts of Europe underwent similar developments, crises and debates, thus making eventual convergence and consensus possible. However, there are various factors that complicate progress in this area: postcommunist countries have to contend not only with their wartime history but also with the experience of communism, which latter colours the assessment of the former.

European Journal of Social Theory, 1989

Interventions, 2020

Since the 1990s, the European Union has started to enter a policy area that until then had been one of the exclusive prerogatives of the nation state: the public dealing with Europe’s bloody past. Within a few years the European Parliament passed several resolutions dealing particularly with the commemoration of human rights violations that took place on the territory of the EU while the European Commission made several funding instruments available aimed at using the realm of memory as a mechanism of public sphere formation. While European efforts for transnational historical remembrance have focused almost exclusively on the Holocaust and National Socialism as well as Stalinism, the EU remains curiously quiet about the memories of imperialism and colonialism. This essay analyzes the conflictual memory constellations at the European level with the aim of explaining why European memory politics are characterized by a sustained focus on specific time periods on the one hand and amnesia on the other.By closely analyzing protocols of the European Parliament (EP), the Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) Council and European Council meetings using frame analysis, the essay digs deep into the complex dynamics lying at the heart of memory contests within the EU and provides a differentiated view on the ways in which memory is continuously dislocated, via resistance,consensus-making and conflict.

Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 2015

International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 2013

In nation-building processes, the construction of a common past and references to a shared founding moment have played a well-documented role in fostering notions of a collective political actor. While notions of unreflective national collective memories no longer hold in an age of a postheroic " politics of regret " , the preferred subject of collective memories nevertheless often remains the nation, both in academic literature and in public debates. In this paper, my aim is to establish the role of collective memory in self-proclaimed " postnational " approaches—specifically in the context of European integration—and to assess in how far these approaches can claim to go beyond notions of memory handed down to us from earlier accounts of nation-building processes. I start by laying out two different approaches to a postnational collective memory as they emerge from the literature. The first approach aims at overcoming national subjectivities by focusing on a specific content: a shared, albeit negative, legacy for all Europeans. The Holocaust plays a particularly prominent role in this discourse. The second approach sees and seeks commonalities not so much on the level of memory content but rather on the level of specific memory practices (a " European ethics of memory "). While it is not aimed at dismantling the nation as a political subject per se, it also creates a European self-understanding that makes the symbolic borders of Europe look more porous: potentially everyone can employ these memory practices. However, as I will show, this approach knows its own attempts to define a postnational " essence " , most notably by tying the ethics of memory to a specifically European cultural repertoire.