notably genocidal, and demanded equal treatment 2005, when the combination of low electoral
for the victims of Nazism and of communism. This turnout at European elections, the prospect of an
interpretation was mainly advanced by Central unprecedented enlargement and the rejection of the
European representatives of the conservative Constitution project were understood as signs of
Europe’s People Party and the liberal Alliance of the failure of earlier policies in the fields of culture
Liberals and Democrats in Europe, joined by some and citizenship. The drafting of the programme
Green representatives. The group brought together ‘Europe for citizens’ by the European Commission
former dissidents and younger representatives provided a window of opportunity for Central
who had entered politics since the transition to European representatives eager to challenge the EU’s
democracy. Its members placed particular emphasis Holocaust-dominated official narrative by calling
on the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, under which for the programme’s remembrance strand to cover
the two dictatorships had shared out Central and not only Nazism but also Stalinism. After intense
Baltic Europe between them. From their perspective, negotiations in different segments of the European
this alliance placed Stalinism and Nazism in a league institutions, the new public policy, designed to foster
of their own among twentieth-century dictatorships ‘active European remembrance’, began to address
and made their crimes equivalent. this previously ignored painful past.
This analysis of communism, loosely based on
This handling of the communist crimes at
the totalitarian paradigm, became hegemonic in both a symbolic rather than at a legal level prevailed
the PACE and the EP, which adopted several official because the commemoration of victims of mass
parliamentary resolutions centred on the equivalence violence was invested with different purposes by the
of Stalinism and Nazism. The most important of actors involved. Whilst the European Commission
these texts are the PACE’s resolution of 2006 on the and the EU Council saw it as an instrument
‘need for international condemnation of the crimes supporting the development of democratic European
of totalitarian communist regimes’ and the EP’s citizenship, the EP considered it as a tool to build
resolution of 2009 on ‘European conscience and a common identity. For the anti-communist
totalitarianism’. In addition, the EP declared a new memory entrepreneurs, the extension of the scope
day of remembrance: 23 August, the date on which of a pan-European historical memory was the
the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed in 1939,
became the ‘Day of remembrance for the victims of
totalitarian and authoritarian regimes’ in 2009. The
requests to use criminal law to penalise the denial of
‘communist crimes’ and to establish an international
court based in the EU to judge those responsible
for these crimes were not met. But remembrance
served as a substitute for the legal treatment of
socialist mass violence with the creation, in 2007, of
a new policy consisting in sponsoring projects that
maintained ‘the main sites and archives associated
with deportations as well as the commemorating of
victims of Nazism and Stalinism’.
Before its expansion to the East, the EU’s main
response to the legacy of dictatorships had been
as part of heritage protection, via the provision
of financial support for the conservation of Nazi
death camps. A critical juncture came in 2004-
EUROPE INSIGHT
Entrance of the Katyn Museum in Warsaw (Poland), opened in 2015 to
recognize the victims of the massacre perpetrated by the NKVD in 1940 |
EUROM
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