Tunne Kelam MEP (EPP Group,
Estonia) speaking in the commemora-
tion of the Baltic deportations at the
European Parliament in Strasbourg |
EPP Group
the former Eastern bloc set out to renegotiate the boundaries of the
legitimate European historical narrative by seeking equal treatment for
Nazi and communist crimes in terms of historical reckoning, collective
remembrance, and legal accountability. In debates at European level
their interpretation of ‘Nazism and communism as equally evil’
started to compete with the Western European narrative that had made
Auschwitz the standard of persecution and asserted the unique nature of
the Holocaust (Littoz-Monnet, 2012).
In the literature, these mobilisations have been analysed as
‘claims for recognition’ (Closa Montero 2010) or attempts to set a
‘Gulag memory’ against a ‘Shoah memory’ (Droit 2007). Despite the
indisputable ‘politics of recognition’ involved in these demands, these
interpretations may suggest a binary opposition between ‘Western’ and
‘Eastern’ readings of the past. This would obscure both the ideological
dimension of the conflicting assessments of socialist legacies across
the continent and also the fact that the condemnation of communism
provides conservatives with a strong symbolic advantage over the Left
not only in Eastern Europe but in Western Europe as well. In addition,
a detailed analysis of European-level debates on communism shows
that they were not just the natural extension of the ‘memory boom’
that has affected Western countries since the 1980s, but the result of
the combined action of a variety of memory entrepreneurs, who made
specific claims in the national political arena as well as in European
institutions (Neumayer, 2018).
EUROPE INSIGHT
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