After All These Years,Still Divided by Memories? East Central Europe and European Union Politics of Memory Twenty Years after the Enlargement

Abstract

The article analyzes how central and eastern European members of the EU relate to the main nodes of the EU’s politics of memory, such as the first and second world wars, the Holocaust as Europe’s negative founding myth, Soviet Communism being equally as criminal as the Nazi regime, expulsions as a pan-European trauma, the legacy of colonialism, Europe as a continent of immigration, and Europe’s post-1945 success story. The author argues that mnemonic divides between the West and East in Europe remain visible despite the EU’s efforts to bridge this gap over the twenty years since the 2004 enlargement.

The collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991 and the enlargement of the European Union in 2004 and 2007 to include eight formerly Communist states in central and eastern Europe (hereafter “CEE”) constitute important watersheds in European history. The enlargement raised hopes of building a common European identity—a European “demos”—based not only on a common market and common institutions but also on a common cultural heritage and common narratives about the past. In line with this vision, in the years preceding the enlargement and in its wake, the EU intensified its efforts in the realm of politics of memory only to discover quickly the deep divisions on these issues between the old EU members and the eastern European newcomers. During the twenty years that have passed since the 2004 enlargement, a number of steps have been taken to overcome the mnemonic divides between the West and East in the EU. ¹ However, they are still visible, as the European Parliament officially admitted in its Resolution on European Historical Consciousness, adopted on 17 January 2024, a few months before the twentieth anniversary of the EU’s first enlargement to the east. ² The resolution speaks explicitly about the European Parliament’s “concern that there continues to be a latent competition and partial incompatibility between different memory frames and remembrance cultures in Europe, including between Western and Eastern Europe.” In the following essay, I will summarize and briefly discuss the main points of difference and discord. However, I want to emphasize that “West” and “East” are not homogeneous entities and that there are countries in both regions that do not wholly fit the general picture of the mnemonic divisions that will be presented here. Thus, the discussion below will not be free of generalizations and simplifications, since they are necessary for the sake of clarity in a treatment as brief as this one must be.

Disparate Views on the Role of History in Society

The 2004 enlargement of the EU took place at a time when the intellectual discourse in Europe was dominated by post-modern critics of the European Enlightenment project and post-colonial theory was making its breakthrough. In this intellectual context, the earlier ideas of building a European identity on the memory of what was perceived as Europe’s contribution to the development of civilization (e.g., antiquity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment) were criticized as Eurocentric and even imperialistic. ³ Instead, western European intellectual elites chose to focus on negative elements of the European past in order to use them as cautionary examples. The past was seen primarily as something to be overcome in order to build a better society. In CEE, however, this post-modern view is still unacceptable to the general public, including many politicians and a non-negligible number of intellectuals. In the spirit of the nineteenth century, they view history as an existential drama of heroism and sacrifice. For them, history is important and actively used to legitimize, mobilize, and awaken a sense of national pride, which runs counter to the western European call (expressed in the EU politics of memory) for a self-critical examination of the past. ⁴ In their history writing, many conservative CEE intellectuals still focus on nation, state, and tradition, while a number of post-modern historians in the West emphasize the importance of a post-national view of history and promote a cosmopolitan memory that is self-critical and centered not on their own group but on the suffering of others.

With accession to the EU, western members expected CEE countries to adopt the cosmopolitan self-critical approach to their past, to make efforts to come to terms with the dark sides of their histories and to work toward reconciliation between victims and perpetrators. The West German experience of Vergangenheitsbewältigung was proposed as a model for this process. This new approach to the past began to develop slowly in CEE, especially among the liberal and leftist intelligentsia, expressed among other ways in significantly increased attention to commemoration of the Holocaust. ⁵ However, a few years after the EU enlargement to the east, nationalist, right-wing parties in Poland and Hungary came up with sharp criticism of this cosmopolitan memory. They called for a “re-nationalizing” of memory discourses, and as soon as they came to power (2010 in Hungary and 2015 in Poland) they intervened in the newly created cosmopolitan museum exhibitions, built new (sometimes even revisionist) monuments, opened new research institutions, and changed school curricula to “renationalize” politics of memory and marginalize cosmopolitan memory. ⁶ The re-nationalizing memory discourses vilify the cosmopolitan mode of memory as harmful to the nation—a foreign import imposed on eastern Europeans either by an EU that wants to make all its members fit into a hegemonic, post-national vision of Europe or by Germans who want to diminish their responsibility for the Holocaust and the Second World War by making eastern Europeans their accomplices. ⁷

Since historical experience has shown how vulnerable sovereignty can be in CEE, by the end of World War II the traditionalist, nation-centered approach to the past became firmly rooted in the region and never lost its appeal among the majority of the population. Consequently, it has been very easy for the nationalist right wing to activate this model of thinking about the past and obtain support for the idea that upholding traditional historical narratives about national victimhood and sacrifice is necessary for the sustenance of national identity and the future survival of the state. ⁸ Politics of memory and history is securitized and used to mobilize forces behind the state, seen as fragile and in need of protection. The nationalist right argues that the goal of memory politics should be to promote the remembrance of one’s own nation’s “finest moments”—its sufferings and sacrifices—in order to evoke a feeling of obligation toward earlier generations and loyalty to the country. This kind of discourse falls on fertile ground among the population in CEE since it corresponds to memories of mass violence and the sufferings of the twentieth century. Although the generations that faced this tragic past are disappearing, the mnemonic narratives about it are encoded in national cultures and give rise to the “terror of history”—that is, people’s fear that history will repeat itself, bringing new sufferings. ⁹ The Alliance for the Union of Romanians, Poland’s Law and Justice Party, Fidesz in Hungary, and scores of other political parties across CEE draw on this fear for electoral gain (see Jan Kubik in this forum). Anxiety about the future is deeply embedded in the societies of this region and becomes reinforced when the region is confronted with acts of aggression, such as Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The CEE Approach to EU Politics of Memory

For the last two decades, besides promoting the cosmopolitan mode of remembering the past, the EU has prioritized several topics or nodes of remembrance, which the political scientists Claus Leggewie and Anne-Katrin Lang identify as the “seven circles of European memory.” ¹⁰ These circles are: the two world wars, the Holocaust, Soviet Communism, expulsions as a pan-European trauma, the legacy of colonialism, Europe as a continent of immigration, and Europe’s post-1945 success story. How has CEE related to these mnemonic nodes of great significance for the western members of the EU?

The memory of the First World War is important for the West, and in Great Britain and France it still has a traumatic dimension. It is mainly associated with mass slaughter in the trenches, the instability brought about by the fall of several European powers, and the eruption of nationalisms. However, in CEE, the memory of the First World War lacks the same tragic dimension, since it is mainly associated with the successful achievement of national independence due to the fall of the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian empires. The events of the First World War have also been overshadowed in CEE by the carnage of the Second World War, which claimed a much higher number of lives in the region. Compounding this fact, decades of Communist historiography and pedagogy largely erased the earlier memories from public consciousness. Thus, the CEE members of the EU have a rather lukewarm attitude to the memory of the First World War—with the exception of Hungary, which lost large parts of its territory in its aftermath. The nationalist right in Hungary has revived this memory as a national trauma and a betrayal on the part of the West, feeding in this way Euroskepticism among its citizens.

Second World War memory is important for the whole of the EU, but East and West have had disagreements about what should be remembered and how. Even the question of when the war ended has been controversial. In eastern Europe many argue that the German occupation of their countries was replaced in 1945 by Soviet occupation, and therefore the war ended for them only with restoration of full independence between 1989 and 1991 and the withdrawal of Russian troops from their territories by 1994. ¹¹ The presidents of Estonia, Lithuania, and Georgia refused to participate in the celebrations of the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II in Moscow, although the president of the European Commission and fifty other heads of state took part. While the West tended for a long time to remember the Soviet Union as an ally against Hitler, CEE countries since 1989 have focused on the 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, and for many years they worked for EU recognition of the Soviet Union’s co-responsibility for the outbreak of World War II. This was achieved as late as on 19 September 2019, when the European Parliament adopted the Resolution on the Importance of European Remembrance for the Future of Europe. ¹² Behind the resolution was the West’s altered view of Russia after its annexation of Crimea, its hybrid war in Ukraine, and public Russian expressions of historical revisionism, such as labeling Poland responsible for the Second World War. ¹³

Memory of the Holocaust has by far occupied the most prominent place in EU remembrance policy, mostly because Holocaust memory may be used as a warning and cautionary tale about where racism, xenophobia, and lack of democracy might lead, and it can be employed to teach respect for human rights. It is not a coincidence that the Holocaust came into prominence in EU politics of memory during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, which coincided with intensive negotiations for post-Communist states’ EU membership. Holocaust remembrance was used as a litmus test for the candidates’ dedication to democracy and other European values, such as tolerance, respect for minority rights, and the rule of law. In the framework of a remembrance model rooted in the “politics of regret,” the candidate states were expected to commemorate the Holocaust, conduct research and teach about it, and to scrutinize each titular nation’s behavior during the Holocaust and admit its complicity by acts of repentance. ¹⁴

During the early 1990s, this memory did not at first meet with any pronounced resistance, since the leading elites of the candidate countries saw EU membership as their highest priority and even a matter of security. ¹⁵ Thus, they adapted to a large extent by participating in European actions commemorating the Holocaust, financing or co-financing monuments, museums, publications, teaching, and research programs. ¹⁶ Nevertheless, the politicians in the region were less willing to recognize their titular nation’s complicity in the Holocaust, anticipating negative reactions on the part of the public. In several countries of the region, debates about this issue were initiated by civil society groups. These debates differed in intensity, scope, and timing, but they demonstrated the general resistance of CEE societies to accept complicity in the Holocaust. ¹⁷ It would have entailed the recognition that one’s own nation could also be a perpetrator, which clashed with the national self-image of being a victim. In addition, such acceptance would have strengthened requests for restitution of Jewish property, an issue that in most CEE countries has not been resolved in a way satisfactory for Jewish communities. ¹⁸ Thus, the issue awoke strong emotions and resentment that the nationalist right was able to exploit. It rejected the self-critical memory of the Holocaust as a “pedagogy of shame” and criticized the EU’s and the liberal camp’s focus on Holocaust memory for elevating Jewish victimhood above the sufferings of all other national and ethnic groups in the region. ¹⁹

In a world where human rights ideology has turned victimhood into symbolic capital (which could be transformed into moral, political, and even economic capital) CEE societies compete for that capital. ²⁰ In this process Holocaust memory has been appropriated in CEE countries to memorialize the suffering of one’s own national group. ²¹ Sometimes this memorialization comes into direct competition with Holocaust memory by emphasizing how much one’s own nation suffered at the hands of the Nazis and by implying that this suffering can be compared to the Holocaust. ²² The most common device, however, is to use the template of the Holocaust—its visual imagery and the term “genocide”—to claim that one’s own nation was also a victim of genocide. For example, Lithuanians speak about a double genocide on their nation (at the hands of Nazis and Soviet Communists) and Poles claim that the massacre of the Polish population by Ukrainian nationalists in Volhynia was a genocide. ²³

There are several reasons why people in CEE find it difficult to accept the Holocaust’s unique position in the European culture of remembrance and its role of “founding narrative” for the entire EU. Probably the most important factor is that the eastern part of the continent experienced not only Nazi dictatorship but also the Communist one, and memories of them became entangled in the region. In general, CEE was in the last century an arena of unprecedented violence: bloody wars, genocides, slavery, deportations, and violent interethnic clashes. Perpetrators, victims, and bystanders changed places as events unfolded. Difficult moral choices had to be made in the struggle for survival, giving history a truly tragic dimension. After the Second World War, the Communist regimes suppressed a large part of these difficult memories and introduced a simple mode of remembering, focused on national resistance against Nazism and on national victimhood. It was readily accepted by the majority since it helped to cope with the complexity and burden of the past. It pushed away the question of one’s own responsibility and was in tune with the already well-rooted nineteenth-century mnemonic matrix of national heroism and sacrifice. Thus, the image of one’s own nation as a victim became deeply internalized and firmly embedded in CEE, and victimhood remains an integral part of national identities in the region.

Consequently, it was predictable, as soon as the EU enlarged to the east in 2004 and 2007, that its new CEE members would put the memory of Communist crimes on the agenda and begin working toward turning this memory into a common European memory, next to the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes. The initiative to call upon the EU to condemn Communist crimes in the same way as the crimes of Nazism came originally from liberal circles (the 2008 Prague Declaration), who saw it as an important act of recognition and respect for the difficult past of the CEE EU members. ²⁴ However, when it came to debates in the European Parliament, the question became heavily politicized by the Left in the western part of Europe and by the Right in its eastern part. The Left (with its legacy of sympathy for the Communist project) demanded that the EU should condemn the crimes of all authoritarian regimes without foregrounding Communist regimes. The Right pressed instead for the explicit equating of Nazi and Communist crimes, to the extent that they asked to turn the “‘approval, denial, or belittling of Communist crimes’ into a criminal offense in the EU.” ²⁵ Such demands met with resistance, since most western European MEPs perceived them as an attempt to relativize and diminish the importance of Holocaust remembrance and to avoid questions about CEE complicity in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, it can be concluded that the lobbying of MEPs from CEE countries was crowned with success in terms of “memory adjustment ” between old and new members. ²⁶ On 2 April 2009, the European Parliament declared 23 August (the day the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact was signed) as the “European Day of Remembrance for Victims of All Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes,” and it adopted the Resolution on European Conscience and Totalitarianism. ²⁷ This resolution was followed by two others in 2019 and 2024, and all three condemn “totalitarian Communist regimes.” ²⁸ Thus, the CEE members achieved symbolic recognition of Communist dictatorship as a legacy to remember for the whole of Europe.

The next thematic circle of European memory that has caused controversies between western and eastern European members of the EU is the issue of the mass expulsions that took place in Europe during and after the wars of the twentieth century. Millions of people lost their homes and were forcefully resettled, often to other countries. ²⁹ Memories of these events are important for eastern Europeans, who constituted a majority of the victims of the expulsions. However, the issue became sensitive when Germans expellees and their descendants, shortly before and after the enlargement of 2004, intensified their politics of memory in relation to the expulsions. ³⁰ About 14 million Germans living in CEE before the Second World War were forced to leave their homes after 1945 due to changed borders and to the belief that coexistence with non-Germans was impossible after the bloody rampage of Nazi Germany. Their desire to gain recognition as victims of these expulsions meets with great suspicion in CEE, especially in Poland and the Czech Republic. It is seen as an attempt to decontextualize the expulsions, to cut the historical link between cause (Germany’s war crimes) and effect (forced resettlements), to blame eastern Europeans, and, by extension, perhaps even to demand compensation from the nations that were victims of Nazism. ³¹

Two additional mnemonic areas mentioned above as central to the EU memory landscape are the legacy of colonialism and Europe as a continent of immigration. These two are often linked in western public discourse, since immigration-friendly politicians and intellectuals seek to legitimize openness and generosity toward migration flows from Africa and Asia by referring to “Europe’s” debt to its former colonies. This link is perceived as completely alien to eastern European EU members. In discussions about migration quotas and the like, they argue not only that they never had any colonies (and therefore have no debt to pay), but that they also had a de facto colonial status themselves by functioning as a backward periphery that supplied cheap labor and raw materials to the West. ³² In addition, inspired by western discussions about colonialism, they began to apply post-colonial theory to their national histories, inquiring to what extent they were the victims of semi-colonial oppression before they freed themselves from the imperial rule of Russia, Prussia, the Habsburg Monarchy, the Ottoman Empire, and, last but not least, from the Soviet Union. The legacy of colonialism is thus interpreted very differently across the EU. While its western part struggles today to overcome its long amnesia with regard to its colonial past and moves toward politics of atonement, the eastern part focuses on its own victimhood and is unwilling to discuss the region’s implication in colonialism. ³³

Until recently, CEE members were also moderately interested in remembering Europe as a continent of immigration. Since the early 1950s, western Europe has continuously received waves of immigrants both from Europe and from outside Europe. ³⁴ Thus, memory of immigration is important to integration and for fighting against xenophobia and racism. In contrast, the CEE countries, while behind the Iron Curtain, received very few immigrants, and after the fall of Communism and the EU enlargement their biggest challenge became not immigration but the emigration of their citizens to countries in the west. Thus, paradoxically, during the last two decades, western Europe has seen the emergence of many museums, books, and films dealing with immigration, while eastern Europe has witnessed a similar development but instead focusing on emigration. ³⁵ However, the gap between the west and the east of the EU on this issue seems to be closing now, due to the large waves of Ukrainian refugees coming to both parts of Europe and the pressure of non-European immigrants not only on the Union’s southern but also its eastern borders.

The last mnemonic node in European memory that should be mentioned here is the remembrance of post-1945 Europe as a story of steady progress toward prosperity and peaceful relations, crowned with the creation of the EU and its enlargement as a grand peace project. This mnemonic circle stands out since, in contrast to the six others, described above, it is hopeful and reassuring. However, mnemonic incompatibilities between East and West can be discerned even on this topic.

Firstly, the decades following the end of the war in 1945 are remembered in the west as a time of postwar recovery, modernization, and growing prosperity, not least due to the creation of the common market (the European Economic Community) in 1957. The CEE countries do not share this memory, since during the same period they were bereft of their sovereignty, ruled by authoritarian regimes, and struggled with an economy of shortages. The real breakthrough that changed the life of people in CEE came in 1989–1991 with the peaceful revolutions and the collapse of the Communist system. Thus, the commemoration of these events is important for CEE societies. They observe their anniversaries and organize celebrations both on national and local levels despite the fact that the actual meaning of what happened in 1989 and thereafter is the subject of continuous political struggle in these countries, especially in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Romania. ³⁶ The nationalist populists in these countries exploit peoples’ grievances caused by the downsides of the neoliberal economy as well as incomplete processes of transitional justice (lustration, reparations, retribution) and a perception of incomplete democratization, as measured against the ideals of 1989–1990. ³⁷ They argue that the people’s revolution of 1989 was stolen. According to this narrative, former Communists made deals with liberals, who allowed them to be included in a new economic left-liberal elite that did not care about the interests of the nation. However, as evidenced, for example, by the commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary in Poland in 2019, the memory of 1989 has proved resistant to the negative revaluations proposed by the nationalist Right. ³⁸ The celebrations of the 35th anniversary in 2024 even saw a grassroots initiative behind a petition to the Polish Parliament to declare 4 June (the day of the semi-free elections to the Polish Parliament in 1989 that brought the first non-Communist government to power) a national, public holiday. ³⁹

Thus, although the breakthrough of 1989 is a politically contested lieu de mémoire, it is still important to commemorate it in CEE countries, and the events of 1989–1990 are largely remembered as moments of empowerment and mobilization against the Communist regime. However, the western members of the EU have not yet discovered the potential of this memory to unite Europeans behind the idea of continuous peaceful struggle for democracy and freedom. This mnemonic asymmetry between west and east with regard to 1989 makes itself visible in Germany, where the western part of the country celebrates 1989—inaccurately—as the year of Germany’s unification and largely disregards the eastern part’s commemorations of the peaceful democratic protests against the Communist regime that preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall and unification. ⁴⁰ Neither have EU institutions created any kind of official remembrance of the events of 1989. They are sometimes referred to in debates and EU policy documents, but there is no regular, institutionalized remembrance of 1989 at European level. ⁴¹ This omission may be explained by the “neoliberal interpretation” of 1989 in the West—that is, that the revolutions of 1989 were primarily driven by economic desires that could not be met in the Communist economy of permanent shortages of consumer goods. ⁴²

This reductionist view of peoples’ motivations seems largely also to permeate the EU approach to commemorating the 2004 enlargement. Both the tenth and the twentieth anniversaries were celebrated by EU institutions, but at both occasions the focus was on the economic achievements of the enlargement. Significantly, the main brochure published by the EU on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary presents the enlargement as a success story almost entirely in economic terms. It focuses on growth, jobs, innovations, industries, investments, and quality of life, and just at the end it mentions solidarity in times of crisis and the role of the EU as a global player. The issues of democracy, freedom, and rule of law are conspicuous by their absence. ⁴³

Nevertheless, the divergences between the western and eastern parts of the EU are relatively small in the way enlargement has been commemorated. A quick look at the media coverage of the twentieth anniversary of the enlargement in some CEE countries suggests that politicians in their speeches also dedicated much attention to the economic gains brought by the enlargement. ⁴⁴ However, they also emphasized the importance of the EU for security and peace. ⁴⁵ In general, the accession to the EU has been commemorated as “an economic and civilizational milestone” and the only choice possible in order to leave “the East.” ⁴⁶ At the same time, ideological differences are clearly visible. While liberals and the Left generally in CEE countries support the narrative of the EU as a success story, nationalist populists come with warnings about the EU’s federalist temptations and its threat to national sovereignty. These Euroskeptic voices made themselves heard in connection to the anniversary, but they differed in strength even between the countries ruled by nationalist populists: Slovakia and Hungary. While Slovakia under the leadership of Prime Minster Robert Fico solemnly celebrated the anniversary in a rather positive spirit, the Hungarian government did not organize any official celebrations. ⁴⁷ Moreover, State Secretary Csaba Dömötör in a video shared on Facebook summed up Hungary’s twenty years of EU membership by saying, “this is not the kind of European Union we dreamt about.” ⁴⁸ It is worth noting that this Europskepticim contrasts with the results of a Eurobarometer survey from 2024, in which the majority of Hungarians, just as the majority of citizens in all states that joined the EU in 2004, agreed with the statement that their country has benefited from EU membership. ⁴⁹

Coda

The above discussion of the mnemonic divisions between east and west does not render the complexity of Europe’s mnemonic landscape, and readers rightfully might raise the objection that there are exceptions to this general picture. However, despite the obvious potential for criticism, it is important to cast light on these issues since they constitute a challenge for European integration. The European Parliament’s Resolution on European Historical Consciousness from 2024, mentioned at the beginning, gives evidence that the EU is determined to bridge these divides. The resolution also indicates how memory politics will be conducted. The hitherto top-down politics of memory, concerned with defining what Europeans should remember, is to be largely abandoned. It is to be replaced by “a bottom-up and citizens-driven ‘culture of remembering’ based on common European principles and values.” ⁵⁰ The general idea is not to designate specific topics for common remembrance but to promote dialogue among Europeans about their different historical experiences and encourage them to interpret them within the frames of European values such as democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. This resolution, like the previous two that dealt with memory, is primarily declaratory in nature. It calls on the Commission and the member states to work in line with these ideas and invest in innovative history education, training of teachers, heritage institutions, and European programs of mobility for students and teachers to favor the exchange of ideas and promote intercultural understanding. It remains to be seen whether this proposed politics of memory will be able to close the mnemonic gap between the different parts of the EU.