in tribute to victims by punishing their denial as public order offences. This change is linked to a turning point in the narrative in democratic societies that goes from a collective indebtedness to the victorious heroes and fighters who ensured the continuation of the nation-state, to indebtedness towards the civilian victims who, for their part, guaranteed a rule of law, both for human rights and those of national minorities. The law’ s memorialisation of crimes and victims is therefore seen as an essential tool for the pacification of societies, the assertion of nation-states’ democratic identity, and the education in tolerance and human rights of their citizens.
Another key feature of these memory laws is their supranational European expansion in a context in which memory has become, like in national spaces, a category of political action in its own right to symbolically build a European identity. However, the laws or resolutions pertaining to the past have been seen by the actors of European institutions as effective instruments to efficiently share a common narrative in Europe. These laws thus participated in a process of Europeanising national memories against the backdrop of Eastern Europe countries’ accession to the European Union, and the pursuit of a common European memory. The matrix function of Second World War crimes in the building of the post- Soviet European narrative identity has formalised in these supranational legislative provisions that have evolved over the past thirty years.
Initially, memory laws demonstrated a division of the continent between East and West. On the one hand, a memory of the West was structured around the recognition of the genocide of the Jews that was led by European institutions( the Council of Europe, the European Court of Human Rights and the European Parliament) as an identity marker( see the Resolution of 3 July 1995 voted by the European Parliament calling on Member States to establish a“ European Holocaust Remembrance Day”). On the other hand, a memory of the East has focused on the recent communist past and the crimes committed by the USSR against civilian populations during the Second World War. When many Eastern
European countries joined the EU in 2004( Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovak Republic and Slovenia), these states had already approved, within the framework of a democratisation process, numerous memory laws that primarily concerned their communist past and the crimes perpetrated by the USSR against their populations. The European Parliament then asserted itself as a major player in the memory policies of East-West reconciliation, through
5. Memorial ceremony at the Raoul Wallenberg square with Holocaust survivors, 27 January 2013, | Frankie Fouganthin, Wikimedia Commons
6. August 23, 2009. Candles symbolically marked the 20 years of the Baltic Way | J. šeduikis, CC bY-Sa 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
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