Special Issue: Transnational Memory Politics in Europe (original) (raw)
Related papers
Linking the Local and the Transnational: Rethinking Memory Politics in Europe
Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 2015
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Europeanising memory: The European Union’s politics of memory
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.
Postnational Relations to the Past: A " European Ethics of Memory "
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.
H-Memory, 2013
Siobhan Kattago's most recent book discusses the issue of the presence of the past in contemporary Europe and the role it plays in different societies. Having published numerous works on the subjects of memory, history, and historical responsibility, focusing primarily on Estonia and Germany, she takes these two countries as representations of the two versions of the European historical narrative.[1] Kattago's previous work (Ambiguous Memory: The Nazi Past and German National Identity, 2003) has been praised for being an "informed and useful overview," but criticized for terminological chaos and not providing enough original analysis.[2] This book is not only a theoretical study of the persistence of the past but also an engaged text on the role and responsibility of public history and the tensions between history and politics.
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.
The EU Politics of Remembrance: Can Europeans Remember Together
West European Politics, 2012
Over the last few years, EU institutions have taken on the task of promoting an ‘active European remembrance’ of Europe's twentieth century totalitarian experiences. At stake in this process is the possibility of constructing an EU-wide historical narrative. However, EU-level debates on the remembrance of European history are permeated by struggles between policy actors who vie for control over the telling of Europe's past. Using insights from the agenda-setting and framing literatures, the article examines the conditions under which memory narratives are able to become prominent or, conversely, lose ground in the EU's overall discourse. It concludes that, although the constellation of actors in place was a key factor in explaining fluctuations in the EU's remembrance discourse, the weight of their arguments also depended on how well their discourse resonated with existing memory cultures at the domestic and the EU levels.
Political Studies Forum, 2024
At the end of the Cold War, the geopolitical struggle for the shaping of reunified Europe, the rise of populism, and the reemergence of neo-nationalism on both sides of the old Iron Curtain created the premises for a competition between the new master narratives associated to the two dominant paradigms of the politics of the past: the cosmopolitan / transnational and the antagonistic / national(istic) one. Against the background of the persistent crises following the transition processes in Eastern Europe, the Great Recession, the new geopolitical challenges, and the subsequent waves of neo-nationalism, the “memory games” intensified on both national and European institutional arenas. These games had a significant impact, detectable especially at the level of the institutionalized memory formats (the political and the cultural memory focused on the “founding traumas”, including the revisionist national historical politics), which encompassed the deepening of the ideological, political, and cultural cleavages within and beyond the nation states. In the same time, the mnemonic and cultural struggles over the conflicting “painful pasts” allowed the preservation of the old fault line which has divided “Europe’s Europes” during the Cold War. Against this mnemonic background, the new paradigm of the “agonistic memory” seems to offer a “decent” and “realistic” third way for dealing with the contested pasts, by means of a multiperspectivist approach which also allows the overcoming of the impasses revealed by the two other competitive memory models.
Memory and Representation in Contemporary Europe. The Persistence of the Past
2012
Memory and Representation in Contemporary Europe reflects not only on the persistence of the past as a theme linked to modernity, media and time, but also discusses the politics of memory within a changing Europe. Drawing on the theoretical work of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin and Zygmunt Bauman, Memory and Representation uses examples from both Germany and Estonia in order to address the multiple layers of Europe's totalitarian past. Through reflecting on the legacy of totalitarianism and the revolutions of 1989, it becomes clear that the issue is less of whether one should remember, but rather how to internalize the various lessons of the past for the future of Europe. Memory and Representation in Contemporary Europe thus offers the reader occasions upon which to take stock of different but overlapping contours of past and present in contemporary Europe.