Narrating a ‘new Europe’: From ‘bitter past’ to self-righteousness?

Abstract

The 1990s and 2000s saw a memory and remembrance boom at both the national and supra-/transnational level. Crucially, many of these emerging memory frames were not simply about a glorious and heroic past, as in, for example, traditional nationalist narratives. Rather, groups started to narrate their symbolic boundaries in a more inclusive way by admitting past wrongdoings. In this article, we look at a corpus of so-called ‘speculative speeches’ by leading politicians in the European Union and, against the aforementioned historical background, analyse their representations of Europe’s past, present and future. By utilising the discourse-historical approach in critical discourse analysis, narrative theory and elements of Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), we illustrate how, first, a ‘new Europe’, based on admitting failure, is narrated. However, second, we also show that such a self-critical narration of a ‘bitter past’ is, paradoxically, transformed into a self-righteous attitude towards Europe’s ‘others’.