EUROPE INSIGHT
Debating communism
at the European
institutions
Laure Neumayer
University Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne
Since their inception, European organisations such as the Council of Europe and the
European Union (EU) have celebrated the common past of their member states in order to
provide a historical grounding for the European project and thus consolidate its legitimacy.
After the Cold War, Europe’s ‘dark past’ was included in this heritage, and the Holocaust
became the ‘negative founding myth’ (Leggewie, 2008) of the Council of Europe and the
EU. Both organisations imposed a ‘mnemonic accession criterion’ on their future member
states, which were required to critically evaluate their own complicity in this genocide and
to give greater visibility to the commemoration of its victims. Meanwhile, in the former
Eastern bloc, a historical narrative centred on the equivalence of Nazi and communist
crimes was gaining ground. From the mid-1990s onwards, numerous anti-communist
circles criticised the ‘incomplete’ character of the regime change which, they claimed,
had allowed former communist leaders to evade justice and to maintain comfortable
positions in society. In line with the paradigm of totalitarianism, a variety of politicians,
academics and activists made crime the essence of the communist ideology. They portrayed
the communist regimes as tyrannies kept in power by constant terror and devoid of any
popular support, across all national contexts and historical periods.
Against this background, European organisations became venues where bilateral
and domestic disputes over the past could be continued or amplified. One of the most
conflictive issues was the retrospective assessment of communism, which sparked heated
discussions in both the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) and the
European Parliament (EP). Although the legacies of communism had been debated as early
as 1992 at the PACE with respect to policies of lustration, the enlargement of the EU to
include ten post-communist countries in 2004-2007 created new institutional venues in
which to extract memory issues from their national frameworks. Representatives from
44
Observing Memories
ISSUE 3