However , the entire body of European legislative provisions to establish a common memory are coming up against national / regional resistance . National parliaments refuse to integrate the 2008 Framework Decision into their penal code . The commemorations of 23 August symbolising the double Nazi / Soviet crime are still mostly observed in Eastern European states ( primarily the Baltic states ). Conversely , the memory of the Holocaust is still predominant in Western Europe with limited presence in the East ( see for example the Museum of Genocide Victims in Riga in Lithuania that devotes only one room to the Jewish victims with the largest part of the museum presenting Soviet crimes ). The peculiarities of Western and Eastern memorials have not been obliterated with the laws and resolutions approved by MEPs over the past fifteen years .
Lastly , Europe ’ s memorialisation of the double “ Nazi / Soviet ” crime and the criminalisation of negationism by means of supranational legislative provisions have , in turn , borne effects on national parliaments . For several years now , some countries have witnessed a national reappropriation of the past that tends to dismiss these European supranational acts in the name of the defence of national sovereignty . Through the adoption of new laws , they defend a national narrative exalting patriotic pride and penalise any public reference to state or national crimes . This is illustrated by the law passed in 2014 by Russia defending the “ Great Patriotic War ” by criminalising the rendering of Stalinist crimes ( 2014 ) and that was approved in Poland in January 2018 to protect “ the reputation of the Republic of Poland and the Polish Nation ” by penalising those who deny “ Ukrainian crimes ” or those who publicly attribute the responsibility or co-responsibility for different crimes to the Polish Nation or the Polish State .
The national reaction during the 2010s thus heightened the polysemic nature of European memory laws that cannot be presented solely as vehicles of democratisation or of strengthening the rule of law around the protection of minorities . Some of them constitute acts of national sovereignty around the tribute to the motherland ’ s heroes and martyrs , which are established precisely against the supranational memory regulations prescribed by European institutions . The penalisation by law of certain statements about the past deemed to be contrary to national interests thus becomes the modus operandi of certain States that still claim to be democratic on the international scene , but which seek to legally eradicate any conflict of historical interpretation in their public space .
Such an evolution provides additional arguments to those who were fast to criticise the adoption of memory laws in different countries considering that they established official regulations pertaining to the past , claiming that it was not within the purview of politics to recount history , and that these laws limited freedom of speech and democratic debate by penalising statements contesting the existence of crimes that should instead be fought with scientific arguments .
These laws can be subject to another criticism , driven in a number of cases by a necessity to identify with Europe or recognise victims rather than historical knowledge of the past . The European resolutions of 2009 and 2019 on 23 August 1939 , interpreted as the triggering event behind the perpetration of the Nazi / Stalinist double crime of the Second World War , is a striking illustration thereof . Legislative acts on Europe ’ s past adopted over the past thirty years can rightly be considered democratic progress as they take minorities and civilian victims in the context of wars , persecution or oppression into account . But attention must also be paid to the effects of victimisation , competition and the instrumentalisation of history that these legislative provisions can produce . These laws have shaped , through norms , a common horizon for reparations for historical trauma that has focused Europe ’ s narrative identity on an endless criminalisation of its past . Either way , they challenge the identity that Europe wishes to lend itself , as well as Europeans ’ relationship with this identity .
EUROPE INSIGHT
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