EU Memory Politics and Europe’s Forgotten Colonial Past

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.</p

Between debate and dialogue : the European Union as a memory mediator

El presente artículo analiza el contexto más amplio del conflicto político en torno a la memoria pública de los acontecimientos de 1989. A tal fin, se recurre al concepto de lieux de mémoire para intentar explicar por qué se eligió el 23 de agosto de 1939 como “Día Europeo de Conmemoración”, en lugar del 9 de noviembre de 1989. Al investigar con detenimiento el papel que los diferentes actores de la memoria desempeñaron en los debates a nivel europeo, se plantea la idea de que el aniversario del Pacto Mólotov-Ribbentrop tuvo más éxito a la hora de hacerse un hueco en el calendario conmemorativo europeo por permitir la promoción de un relato unificador del pasado del viejo continente.This article analyzes the broader context of the political conflict around the public memory of the events in 1989. To this end, the concept of lieux de mémoire is used to explain why August 23, 1939 was chosen as “European Day of Remembrance”, instead of November 9, 1989. By carefully investigating the role played by different memory actors in debates at European level, it is suggested that the anniversary of the Mólotov-Ribbentrop Pact had more success making a hole in the European commemorative calendar for allowing the promotion of a unifying story of the old continent past

Nostalgia for Times Past. On the Uses and Abuses of the Ostalgie Phenomenon in Eastern Germany

This paper will investigate the way collective and individual memory of the experience of Communism has been framed by the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) in the Eastern German federal states. It explores possible reasons for the ‘Ostalgie’ (nostalgia) phenomenon in Eastern Germany and analyses to what extent the PDS, being the successor party of the former GDR state party SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany), uses or abuses this phenomenon in order to secure itself a stable electoral basis in the Eastern German federal states. Th e analysis is mainly based on the fi rst fi fteen years after re-unifi cation, paying tribute to the fact that the PDS has undergone major transformations since 2005