Regions of Memory by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030937058
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The European Union

The same politics played out in European Union institutions. The “double genocide” thesis was popularized by East European political leaders and intellectuals in the “Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism” in 2008, and then given official recognition a year later in a European Parliament resolution on “European Conscience and Totalitarianism” that condemned “totalitarian crimes” (Neumayer 2019). The resolution is an outright challenge to the Western European belief in the uniqueness of the Holocaust, represented by an earlier declaration, the Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, signed by 46 governments in 2000. The Stockholm Declaration became the founding document of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which is committed to promoting Holocaust memory as the foundation of a common European memory culture. As “unprecedented,” declares the IHRA, the Holocaust “fundamentally challenged the foundations of civilization” and “will always hold universal meaning.” Accordingly, “it must be forever seared in our collective memory” as a warning against “genocide, ethnic cleansing, racism, antisemitism and xenophobia” (IHRA). In this mode, Holocaust memory stands at the core of anti-racist education and genocide prevention. Passed 55 years after the liberation of the death camps, the Stockholm Declaration was regarded by EU elites as compensating for decades of official silence about the Holocaust. Already in 1995, they had debated making 27 January—the day in 1945 that Soviet troops entered Auschwitz—an official day in memory of the victims of the Holocaust, an idea taken up ten years later by the United Nations. In the place of failed efforts to provide an integrative EU memory based on common heritage, the Holocaust would now serve as Europe’s foundation myth, the negation of its stated values (Diner 2004; Littoz-Monnet 2012).

This is not how East European states that emerged from communist rule saw matters. When ten of them joined the European Union in 2004, the opportunity arose to influence the continental memory regime. Conservative anticommunist governments among them could not regard 1945 and the liberation of the death camps as the European foundation moment because that year also marked the reimposition or commencement of nearly fifty years of Soviet domination. During 2008, conservative East European members of the European Parliament organised a conference and working group on “United Europe-United History” that led to the foundation of the “Reconciliation of European Histories Group,” an informal all-party group of the European Parliament dominated by anti-communist East Europeans politicians. By reconciliation, it meant establishing a common approach to Nazi and Soviet crimes that sought equal treatment of all victims of totalitarian violence. As might be expected given its orientation, the group opposed a proposed EU ban on the Nazi swastika because not also banning Soviet symbols would represent a double standard. In the same year, the European Commission, then chaired by a conservative Slovenian government, held public hearings on “Crimes Committed by Totalitarian Regimes,” and published a report coupling Nazi, fascist, and Stalinist crimes (Toth 2010, 8–10).

With supportive signals from the European Commission, which now sought to forge common European

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