favoured by Western governments (Olick, 2007), policy and the segmentation of the European political
which amounted to admitting past wrongs and space devalued the parliamentary resolutions
asking for the victims’ forgiveness. The will to outside the PACE and the EP, thus diminishing
impose a single narrative as a historical truth the national political benefits and the legal and
across the whole continent collided with the ‘multi- judicial implications of the anti-communist
perspective’ history promoted by the European discourse endorsed by these assemblies. European
organisations, which admitted the plurality of remembrance policies drawn up by the EU and the
points of view on the past as long as they were Council of Europe in the 1990s had left member
founded on an objectively established factual basis. states free to manage their painful pasts by means
Moreover, including historical episodes other than of law, without imposing any legal instruments
World War II among the relevant pasts of Europe regarding the fight against denial or the prosecution
questioned the significance of the Holocaust as of perpetrators. Besides this lack of a legally binding
the founding event of the continent’s history. The legislation, anti-communist mobilisations were
memory entrepreneurs’ vision of socialist crimes further hindered by the fragmented nature of the
was structured by a ‘mimetic rivalry’ with the European political arena. Their attempts to extend
Judeocide (Laignel-Lavastine, 1999). Denunciation the effects of anti-communist parliamentary
of the ‘amnesia’ and the ‘amnesty’ regarded as resolutions to national political contexts and to
surrounding communist crimes called into question convert them into European-level public policy and
the unique character of the Nazis’ attempts to legal action were only partially successful.
exterminate the Jews, which allegedly obscured
the full comprehension of other mass violence. As
a result, anti-communist memory entrepreneurs
were regularly accused by their political competitors
The fading of European-level
anti-communism?
and by militants of the Jewish cause of trivialising
Nazism and of minimising the complicity of Eastern
In 2006, the Committee of Ministers of the
European societies in the Holocaust. Last but not Council of Europe refused to give any specific
least, their mobilisations also prompted calls for content to the PACE’s condemnation of communist
the recognition of the acts of other non-democratic crimes. This prompted the memory entrepreneurs to
regimes, such as Francoism in Spain and other intensify their involvement in the EP, which picked
southern European military dictatorships. up the anti-communist discourse developed at the
To comply with these many constraints, anti-
PACE and called on the EU to give it the support the
communist memory entrepreneurs adjusted their Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe
cause to the human-rights paradigm that structures had denied. Several unsuccessful attempts were
the politics of memory at European level. They called made, between 2008 and 2010, to have the PACE and
on European institutions to assess socialist legacies the EP label the Ukrainian Great Famine of 1932-
with the same criteria as those applied to other 1933 as ‘genocide’. But the anti-communist cause
dictatorships, which would entail denouncing the undoubtedly lost its prominence, even in the EP,
crimes against humanity that were perpetrated and after the adoption of the Resolution on European
commemorating their victims. However, moving to conscience and totalitarianism in April 2009.
this level of generality to some extent diluted the
No parliamentary resolutions have been
anti-communist cause into a blanket condemnation adopted since then. In 2013, the report on ‘Historical
of ‘all forms of totalitarianism’ that had existed memory in culture and education in the EU’ tabled
on the European continent, thereby tempering the by the Polish representative Marek Migalski was
communism-Nazism equivalence. rejected by the EP Committee on Culture and
Third, the existing European remembrance
50
Observing Memories
ISSUE 3
Education even before it could be discussed in the