The Memory Politics of Becoming
European: The East European Subalterns
and the Collective Memory of Europe
MARIA MÄLKSOO
International Centre for Defence Studies, Tallinn, and
University of Tartu, Estonia
The situation in collective memory studies that share a nexus with
the discipline of International Relations (IR) is currently reflective
of the traditionally West-centric writing of European history. This
order of things has become increasingly challenged after the eastern
enlargement of the European Union (EU). This article examines
Poland’s and the Baltics’ recent attempts to enlarge the mnemonic
vision of ‘the united Europe’ by placing their ‘subaltern pasts’ in contest
with the conventionally Western European-bent understanding of the
consequences of World War II in Europe. I argue that their endeavours
to wrench the ‘European mnemonical map’ apart in order to become
more congruent with the different historical experiences within the
enlarged EU encapsulate the curious trademark of Polish and Baltic
post-Cold War politics of becoming European: their combination of
simultaneously seeking recognition from and resisting the hegemonic
‘core European’ narrative of what ‘Europe’ is all about.
KEY WORDS ♦ Baltic states ♦ legacy of communism ♦ memory politics
♦ Poland ♦ World War II
The situation in collective memory studies that share a nexus with IR is currently
reflective of the traditionally West-centric writing of European history.
So far, the main focus of students of the relationship between collective
memory and international politics has largely been on German or the other
West European collective remembrance practices, and their implications
for international relations. While the recollection of the Holocaust has
become increasingly institutionalized and internationalized, the crimes of
European Journal of International Relations © The Author(s) 2009. Reprints and permissions:
http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav, Vol. 15(4): 653–680
[DOI: 10.1177/1354066109345049]
European Journal of International Relations 15(4)
654
the communist regimes and their traumatic repercussions for contemporary
European politics have hardly received comparable academic and political
attention. Eastern European memories of World War II are still les lieux
d’oubli rather than parts of les lieux de mémoire of the officially endorsed
collective European remembrance of the war (cf. Nora, 1995; Wood, 1999).
The realities of the war in Eastern Europe have generally been concealed in
the Western public consciousness and formed the byways rather than institutionalized
parts of the ‘European account’ of World War II. Moreover,
their analysis as on a par with Western European experiences with the
atrocities of World War II remains a topic of debate even among the critical
memory scholars.
This order of things has been progressively challenged after the eastern
enlargement of the EU, however. The ‘new Europeans’ are contesting the
memorial status of their experiences of World War II in the EU-endorsed
remembrance of this war as ultimately a ‘good war’ where the Allied Coalition
was supposedly acting on the common ground of anti-Nazism (cf.
Davies, 2006: 246). This seeming mnemonical consensus has been gradually
unravelling from multiple angles lately, as Zehfuss’s (2007) account of the
controversial memory politics of World War II in Germany and Davies’s
(2007) compelling re-examination of the conventional narrative of World
War II illuminate. We could distinguish at least four major mnemonic communities
in the European memory landscape in relation to World War II:
Atlantic-Western European, German, East-Central European and Russian.
Their remembrances of the war focus respectively on D-Day of 1944 and the
Allied Victory in Europe on 8 May 1945; manifold traumas resulting from
the experience of bombing raids and total defeat; the trials of undergoing
Nazi and Soviet occupations in succession; and the comfort drawn from
the costly victory in ‘The Great Patriotic War’ (Jarausch and Lindenberger,
2007: 4).
The Baltic states and Poland have emerged in the vanguard of the socalled
‘new European’ commemorative politics, demanding the inclusion
of their wartime experiences in the pan-European remembrance of this war.
Even a cursory look at the central themes in the Baltic and Polish postEU
accession foreign and security political debates will reveal their quite
remarkable preoccupation with the implications and ramifications of World
War II in Eastern Europe. The Latvian president’s applauding of the NATO
summit in Riga in November 2006 as a sign of the ultimate end of World
War II in the region; the Polish prime minister’s pointing to Poland’s suffering
in the war as a moral argument for giving it the voting weight of much
more populous Germany in the EU Council of Ministers in June 2007;
the Estonian government’s reordering of the World War II-related sites
of memory in the country — all this speaks of the increasing invocation of
Mälksoo: The Memory Politics of Becoming European
655
the traditionally subaltern collective remembrance practices in these East
European states’ foreign policy-making of the day.
Polish and Baltic political elites’ endeavours to wrench the ‘European
mnemonical map’ apart in order to become more congruent with the different
historical experiences within the enlarged EU, as well as to gain EU
support for influencing Russia to acknowledge its responsibility for the crimes
of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet occupation in
the Baltic states, demonstrate the curious trademark of their politics of
becoming European: a combination of simultaneously seeking recognition
from and exercising resistance to the hegemonic ‘core European’ narrative
of what ‘Europe’ is all about.
This article critically engages with the significance of memory politics
in Polish and Baltic post-Cold War processes of becoming European as a
pivotal resistance move to their traditionally liminal status in Europe. Polish
and Baltic politics of ‘becoming European’ is conceived here as a quest to be
part of the ‘true Europe’ as opposed to ‘Europe but not quite Europe’ —
a position they have been designated by Western Europeans since the
Enlightenment (cf. Wolff, 1994; Connolly, 1999). Their ‘becoming
European’ has essentially been a struggle to gain recognition of Poland’s
and the Baltics’ ‘full Europeanness’ from the authoritative social carriers of
this desired identity and the concurrent rebellion against the occurrences of
perceived misrecognition of Eastern Europe as ‘lesser European’ compared
to its Western counterpart. If we regard coming to terms with the past as
reinforcement of one’s self-consciousness (cf. Adorno, 1986: 128), Polish
and Baltic calls for equal remembrance of their pasts emerge as an essential
part of their individuation process as European, of their becoming a
European subject.
The first two sections of the article outline the different phases of
remembering and the consequently diverging narratives of World War II in
the East and West of Europe. I then turn to the case in focus used to explore
the memory-political dimension of Polish and Baltic post-EU accession
politics of becoming European. This part of the study draws on a discourse
analysis of foreign policy establishments’ speeches and interventions on the
implications of World War II and the crimes of the communist regimes in
Poland and the Baltic states against the backdrop of the commemoration
of the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in Moscow in 2005.1
I argue that Poland’s and the Baltics’ insistence on ‘setting the past record
straight’ by seeking an all-European condemnation of the crimes of Soviet
communism in Eastern Europe as equal to those of Nazism signals their
fundamental insecurity about their immediate past’s compatibility with the
Western European states’ own, and thus their persistent sense of ‘liminal
Europeanness’ in the enlarged EU. Their excessive pondering on the memory
European Journal of International Relations 15(4)
656
of the Western betrayal of Eastern Europe in World War II thus emerges as
a key indicator of their European identity-related insecurities, revealing
uncertainty about ‘whether the past really is past, over and concluded, or
whether it continues, albeit in different forms’ (see Said, 1994: 3).
At the same time, however, the Baltics’ and Poland’s increasing emphasis
on the ‘right to memory’ also implies their escape from the restrictions
inherent in their ‘memory work’ during the EU and NATO accession processes.
In the course of this ritually liminal phase of becoming European,
certain elements of their past had to be consciously put on hold without an
opportunity to reflect on them in any deep manner before the context had
become more ‘enabling’ for such reflection and, consequently, for a more
autonomous construction of their selves. The Baltic and Polish foreign
policy-making elites’ reaffirmation of their countries’ special situation in the
context of World War II and resistance to the mnemopolitical authority of
the West in delineating the contents of post-war ‘European history’ thus also
signify Eastern Europe’s post-EU accession ideological decolonization. As
such, Poland and the Baltics challenge Western Europe’s intention to act as
the model for the whole of Europe, by which Western Europe sets the rules
of remembrance to the ‘new Europeans’ even after their formal acceptance
into the EU. The post-EU accession memory-political endeavours of Poland
and the Baltic states could thus be conceived of as an attempt to insert
a moment of radical heterogeneity into the historically largely Western
European construction of ‘Europe’ — its history, memory and identity —
and to consequently pluralize the ways of being European.
A separate question is to what extent the ‘old Europeans’ would actually
be willing to listen to the counter-narratives of the Easterners, or, moreover,
whether the multitude of immediate historical perspectives in the ‘new’
and ‘old’ Europe could actually be reconciled into a more coherent and
consensual new narrative without the silencing, subjugation or blunt
forgetting of some stories for the sake of imposing and endorsing the
dominance of others.2 After all, remembering and forgetting are by definition
contentious issues. The memorial militancy of the ‘new Europeans’ has not
always struck a resonant chord among their Western counterparts who have
attempted to form a common European identity by ‘drawing a line’ under
World War II. Yet again, the Baltic and Polish memory politics have brought
up the controversial and intensely debated comparison between Nazi and
Stalinist regimes and their respective crimes, thus contesting the uniqueness
of Nazi crimes and questioning the singularity of the Holocaust as the crime
against humanity of the 20th century. The upsurge of World War II-related
memories in the East has thus often been regarded as obstructing the progress
of the European project (cf. Bell, 2006). Against that backdrop, this article
Mälksoo: The Memory Politics of Becoming European
657
concludes with a critical discussion of the perspectives for the emergence of
a more coherent and common ‘memoryscape’ for the enlarged EU.
It is striking that the attempts of the ‘new Europeans’ to introduce their
‘counter-histories’ to ‘old Europe’ in fact reflect the very ‘core European’
quest for security through integration in order to avoid fragmentation.
Indeed, their calls for a broader European historical consciousness as a precondition
for solidarity within the enlarged European polity implicitly regard
the integration of distinct European experiences and memories as a panacea
against future conflict (Kelam, 2008; Roszkowski et al., 2008). Moreover,
the underlying assumption of the achievability of a common European
mnemonical vision is in itself reflexive of the typically Western search for
totality and universality through the creation of common structures (cf.
McLennan, 2003: 75). The curiosity of the Baltic and Polish memory
politics of becoming European therefore lies in their attempts to articulate
their distinctive historical experiences from the perspective of the signifying
position of the ‘European subalterns’ while resisting the totalization of the
‘European majority memory of World War II’, and yet assuming the real
possibility of a unified and coherent common European remembrance of the
war in the first place.
Reclaiming the ‘Right to Memory’
Orientation to the past, rather than to the future, has often been regarded
as part of some putative ‘East European syndrome’. Yet, this typically
Orientalist approach obscures the fact that memory, as well as forgetting, is
a constitutive feature of any culture or social imaginary (cf. Zehfuss, 2006).
Furthermore, the claims of a ‘special historicism’ of East European peoples,
their heightened propensity to understand the present through the past and
thus to see history as a weight restraining and enabling the choices that can
be made in the present, deny the extent to which the ‘memory boom’ has
also been a firm accompaniment in Western European societies in the late
20th and early 21st centuries. This is nevertheless not to defy the ‘historical
nature’ of postcolonial peoples as the flourishing ‘minority memories’ provide
an important resource and means for regaining the past as part of a
collectivity’s identity-formation after decolonization. Yet, the idea of ‘native
East European historicism’ has also been self-serving for the West, enabling
it to disregard its own engagement in shaping the region’s immediate past
history. The permanence of the past in the former communist societies has
not been an indication of another special ‘East European pathology’, but is
merely consistent with the pattern of identity-formation in modern nationstates
(Wydra, 2007: 238–9).
European Journal of International Relations 15(4)
658
The intensity of the presence of the past of 60 years in the current
self-reflections of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland reverberates an
archetypical outburst of suppressed memories, a delayed affirmation of the
‘right to memory’ and the consequent efforts to release them from the
burden of the officially mandated Soviet interpretations of World War II
(see Judt, 2005: 821; Müller, 2002: 9). It further demonstrates critical
attempts to break with the past by drawing lessons from it; indeed, to secure
identity by reappropriating and reaffirming one’s collective memory (see
Norton, 1993: 460). While Western European nations had the privilege
of starting anew immediately after World War II by drawing a clear line
under the horrors of the past with what Winston Churchill (1946) called a
‘blessed act of oblivion’, Eastern Europe had to wait for its chance to begin
peeling back the layers of ideological reinterpretations of its past(s) decades
later. This is not to say, however, that the post-war ‘new start’ in Western
European countries, such as in Germany and France, for instance, was in any
way immediate and unproblematic. The ‘blessed act of oblivion’ in postwar
Western European states that was thought necessary for their national
recuperation also fostered a myriad of mismemories, self-delusions and myths
about their respective roles in the war, as we know from the work of Tony
Judt (1992, 1994), among others (cf. Deák et al., 2000). Furthermore, in
the Germans’ case, it was impermissible to legitimately remember their individual
sufferings in World War II (such as the Allied bombings of German
cities, the flight and expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe and the
painful ‘liberation’ of Germany in 1945) until recently, as the immensity
of the internationally induced collective guilt overwhelmed and disabled all
other public recollections of the war (cf. Zehfuss, 2007).
Nevertheless, there has been a fundamental temporal mismatch between
phases of ‘freezing’ and ‘unfreezing’ of war memories in Western and
Eastern Europe. Eastern Europeans’ experiences of the war were ‘frozen’ for
open historical debate and critical discussion for more than 40 years over the
Cold War because of the Soviet regime’s use of ‘organized forgetting’ and
‘communicative silencing’ as a political technique of control over the subjugated
populations in the Eastern bloc (Wydra, 2007: 228). Although there
was indeed an analogous ‘glacis’ of certain parts of the World War II-related
past(s) in Western European countries in the immediate post-war years —
as succinctly captured by Henry Rousso (1991) in his analysis of France’s
‘Vichy syndrome’ of denying, misremembering and abusing the memory of
the wartime regime — this ‘freezing’ was nevertheless largely self-imposed.
Indeed, it was a conscious choice of forgetting certain traumatic parts of
one’s past in order to provide a safe interregnum in which the building of a
new identity could begin (Wydra, 2007: 226).
Mälksoo: The Memory Politics of Becoming European
659
The first phase of the breakout from the Soviet-enforced official
mnemonical stasis of Eastern Europe began only in the immediate aftermath
of the Cold War. The initial stage of the public defrosting of the postsocialist
countries’ memories meant engaging with former taboo subjects and
revealing the falsifications and distortions of the past imposed upon them by
the ‘mnemonical hibernation’ of the communist period (cf. Kwas´niewski,
2002). Such forced mnemonical cover-up had certainly applied to official
forms of collective remembrance during the Soviet period, not least due to
Eastern European societies being deprived of channels for their memories’
political articulation and resources for collective protest and resistance.
Forms of communicative and cultural memory, which remained largely
beyond the control of centralized power, were nevertheless maintained even
under the Soviet regime, as could be observed in instances like the revolutions
in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1980
(cf. Assmann, 1992). Moreover, opponents of communist regimes learned
to exploit the outward manifestations of conformity for their own ends, thus
allowing the curious practice of mnemonical ‘double discourse’ to flourish
(cf. Lebow, 2003: 327; Miłosz, 1953).
If memory is by definition an ‘arena of conflict’ between forgetting as
an action directed against the past, and the return of the forgotten,3 this
truism was vividly played out in Eastern Europe after the break-up of the
Soviet Union. Having been forced into a prolonged phase of mnemopolitical
liminality over the communist period, Poland and the Baltic states had a
chance to publicly evaluate their experiences of World War II only after the
collapse of their respective communist regimes (Judt, 1992: 95; Szakolczai,
2000: 223; Wydra, 2007: 227–30). Eastern Europeans’ public reassertion of
their right to give voice to their own pasts in the post-Cold War phase also
served to provide inspiration and consolation to people suddenly confronted
with radical social and political change, a general sense of uprootedness,
confusion, uncertainty and ‘the stigma of being poor, backward cousins in
the European family’ (Mostov, 1998: 376).
Poland’s and the Baltics’ more recent, post-EU accession attempts to
bring their pasts to the fore in the debates over European identity and
security reflect their growing vocal claim for an ‘equal subjectivity’ in the
European mnemopolitical field as well as demonstrating their increasing
sense of confidence about the density of their ties to the Euro-Atlantic
security community. This, in turn, enables them to remind their Western
European counterparts openly about the need to remember European
history in all its complexity as well as to discover the ‘other in oneself’.
What we witness now is hence a different kind of unfreezing of memory: the
Eastern Europeans’ casting off the restraints that the West had applied on
their ‘memory work’ during the enlargement process of the EU and NATO.
European Journal of International Relations 15(4)
660
Whereas during this explicitly liminal phase in their ‘becoming European’ the
candidate countries had to keep a low profile in reflecting on the historical
sources of their mutually antagonistic relations with Russia, they are now
all the more forcefully pushing for their ‘remembrance right’ to their own
narrative of the events and aftermath of World War II. Reminding the West
of its accountability for the Eastern European post-war security predicament
has added a further critical European dimension to the most recent round of
Polish and Baltic memory politics.
‘Our History is Your History Too’: Hegemonic and
Counter-hegemonic European Narratives of World War II
Revealing the ‘historical truth’ about the implications of World War II in
Eastern Europe, by drawing attention to and seeking a pan-European acknowledgement
of East European sufferings in the war, has become one of the
key missions of Polish and Baltic post-EU accession foreign policy. Aiming
to shake the Western European versions of the immediate European past,
Polish and Baltic foreign policy-makers have called for the ‘Europeanization’
of ‘European’ memories: the inclusion of their distinct historical experience
of World War II into the common historical consciousness of Europe.
While the experiences of East and West Europe in World War II were different,
a common frame for their interpretation should not be an impossibility,
or so their argument goes. The issue here is really not the ‘absolute’ or
‘relative weight’ of pain inflicted by the Nazi and Soviet regimes, but how
the consequences of the pain — in terms of justice rendered but also justice
attempted — are perceived in different parts of Europe (cf. Irwin-Zarecka,
1994: 78). The wounds of collective memory are arguably difficult to heal if
they go publicly unnoticed. The Baltic states and Poland are asking Western
Europe to broaden its set patterns of remembering Europe’s immediate past
by trying to step into the shoes of Eastern European countries. In order to
reach their aim, they are determined to make their voice heard, to make their
past acquire a firm presence in the pan-European historical consciousness
and interpretation of its immediate past history (e.g. Vīķe-Freiberga, 2004).
Since ‘every Pole and every Estonian’ is part of European history, as the late
president of Estonia argued, it purportedly gives an obligation to take into
account Eastern European tragic experiences, ‘our tens of Katyns of which
most are still nameless and unknown till this day, to the consciousness of
European, American and Russian democrats’ (see Meri, 1993; cf. Meri,
1999b; Kalniete, 2003).
There has indeed been a noticeable imbalance in both the remembering
and the study of immediate past in the East and West of Europe. While
Mälksoo: The Memory Politics of Becoming European
661
the atrocities of the Nazis have been analysed with remarkable rigour and
depth, reaching even the levels of meta-criticism of Holocaust memory and
representations (but cf. Lukas, 1997), the crimes of the communist regimes
in the former Soviet bloc have not received similar academic and political
attention in Europe.4 The investigators of the communist crimes have been
‘hopelessly at a disadvantage’ when compared to the investigators of the
Nazi crimes, not merely as regards access to archives and resources, but also
in terms of the moral and financial support of political and academic circles
(cf. Meri, 1999a).5 Reflecting the different experiences of the West and East
of Europe in World War II, this imbalance has largely been due to the fact
that the legacy of Nazism has simply been more immanent and the reflection
on it thus more urgent than that of communism to the traditional writers
of ‘European history’ — the Western European states. Moreover, West
Europeans’ heightened alertness towards Nazism’s monstrosities has been
all the more amplified for it having arisen in the heart of ‘civilized Europe’,
while communism could easily be shelved under the category of ‘normal
aberrations’ in the ‘Russian borderland of Europe’ (Malia, 1999: xii).
Yet, the asymmetry in the remembering and research on the respective
regimes’ criminal records could also be attributable to the simple fact that
there has never been a Soviet Nuremberg process of a sort which, after all,
made technically possible the documentation of the crimes of Nazism in the
first place. Since a similar lustration vis-a-vis communism’s legacy in Europe
has never occurred,6 the 20th-century history of Europe has arguably largely
bypassed the Eastern European component, thus leading to a ‘one-legged,
one-sided, one-eyed’ account of Europe’s immediate past (Davies, 2006:
41).
The late Estonian president Lennart Meri remarked with some irony in
the early 1990s that everybody was talking about the death of communism,
yet no one had actually seen its body. The Polish and Baltic endeavours to
seek international condemnation of the crimes of the communist regimes
in Central and Eastern Europe could be regarded as attempts to reify the
very demise of communism, or, indeed, to disinter its ‘body’.7 The impartial
reassessment of Europe’s immediate history is thus presented as an issue of
European security, for allegedly ‘the re-evaluation of the dark spots of history
builds confidence and promotes cooperation among states’ (Pabriks, 2005).
Yet again, reifying the end of communism has been more problematic than
that of Nazism, not least for the lack of a clear historical rupture with the
former unlike the one that occurred with ‘burying’ the latter at the end of
World War II. While the circumstances of the end of Nazism made it possible
to actually isolate its ‘body’ by blaming its ‘carriers’ and the perpetrators of
the regime’s crimes for everything evil that had occurred in World War II
European Journal of International Relations 15(4)
662
in Western Europe, the fortune of the largely peaceful end of communism
in 1989–91 has, if somewhat paradoxically, also been part of the problem
with doing away with communism’s problematic legacy in Eastern European
states. The Polish and Baltic foreign policy-making elites’ vigorous attempts
to externalize their experiences of communism have also been remarkably
uncritical and self-delusional at times, essentially camouflaging the extent to
which the communist system and practices were actually internalized by the
very people who lived for decades under this regime.
Nevertheless, against the backdrop of the search for the ‘body of communism’,
the Polish and Baltic post-EU accession politics of memory emerges
as a self-appointed mission to remind Europe about the complexities of its
own past (e.g. Ilves, 2003). After all, as the Latvian president Vaira VīķeFreiberga
emphasizes, while the end of World War II meant liberation for
the West, it meant ‘slavery, occupation, subjugation and Stalinist terror’ for
the East (2005a, 2005b). The criticism of the Allies’ compliance with the
demands of the Stalinist Soviet Union at Yalta and the consequent Western
moral co-responsibility for the closing off of Eastern Europe behind the
Iron Curtain during the Cold War thus runs as a red thread through the
mnemopolitical discourse of Poland and the Baltic states. Although proudly
emphasizing that the Western bringing of Eastern Europe into its fold should
not happen ‘just for the sake of historical justice or because of their assumed
feelings of guilt’, these two principles were nevertheless the main sword in
the hands of Eastern Europeans in their post-Cold War endeavours to join
the Euro-Atlantic structures. At the end of the day, the dual enlargement
was framed entirely as the undoing of historic injustice towards Eastern
European states; indeed, as a decomposition of the ‘Yalta order’, both by the
‘demand’- and ‘supply’-side of the process.
Yet, while making up for the old Yalta ‘betrayal’ was a psychologically
purifying fact, much remains to be purged from the understandings of the
immediate past in the now common European house. Emphasizing the duty
of the European collective memory to do justice to the victims of communism
and Nazism together, Poland and the Baltic Three insist that forgetting the
meaning of the communist legacy in Eastern Europe would amount to a
loss of Europe’s moral compass. Europe is argued to have an obligation to
remember the events of 60 years ago as European identity cannot supposedly
stand apart from the responsibility for the past of the whole of Europe (e.g.
Kristovskis, 2008). Polish and Baltic Members of the European Parliament
(MEPs) have been particularly vigorous in criticizing the imbalance of the
EU’s historical approach that grants the victims of communism a ‘secondclass
status’, calling for a common European effort to urge Russia to assess
its own history and to apologize for the crimes of Soviet totalitarianism (e.g.
Kelam, 2008).8
Mälksoo: The Memory Politics of Becoming European
663
Combining discourses of redemption, suffering and unjust treatment,
Polish and Baltic memory politics occasionally falls prey to so-called ‘comparative
martyrology’ on the question of who has suffered the most (cf.
Donskis, 1999: 478). As Eastern Europe arguably suffered in World War II
for the sake of Western Europe’s relative security and well-being, recognition
and legitimation from Western Europe is sought for its very special moral
worth. For the old members of the EU, the Polish and the Baltic representatives’
constant appellations about Eastern Europe’s historical suffering
are awkward and occasionally irritating as their self-attributed martyrdom
reminds the West of its co-responsibility for the complexity of the region’s
immediate past, and thus about ‘the other in themselves’ as well. Since victimhood
gives the right to complain, to protest and make demands, Western
Europe is placed in the uncomfortable position of owing a debt to Eastern
Europe (cf. Todorov, 2003: 142–3).
Yet, remembrance of one’s own woes tends to generally overrun the ability
to perceive the suffering of others as if empathizing with the suffering of the
others would reduce one’s own relative suffering (cf. Courtois, 1999: 21).
All collective recollections of World War II are accordingly inevitably partial, as
the absorption of one’s own post-war predicament (especially in the immediate
aftermath of the war) awarded only a very low priority to remembering
the tragedies of others, of those who were more peripheral to one’s own
respective national existence (Dower, 2004: 226; Lagrou, 2004: 411).
Western European countries that had experienced the trauma of defeat
and occupation in World War II (i.e. France, Belgium, the Netherlands) felt
a deep need for patriotic memories and renewed national epics, although this
did not leave much space for their immediate post-war commemoration of
the destruction of European Jews, as the memory of the genocide was not
of particularly constructive value for their respective patriotic memories.9
Similarly, the memory of the Western failure to keep Eastern European
states from falling behind the Iron Curtain had a remarkably low benefit for
Western Europeans’ image of their own national martyrdom (cf. Lagrou,
2004: 411; Lebow, 2006: 29–32). Nonetheless, since the international celebrations
of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II in 1995, there
have been continuous attempts to transform the fragmented West European
memories of Nazi aggression and occupation into a more ‘shared and selfcritical
memory of an era of European human-rights abuses that unites
former victims, perpetrators, and bystanders, and lends legitimacy to the
European Union’ (Kansteiner, 2006: 120–30). This construction has further
enabled the retroactive inclusion of Germany in the renewed European
remembrance of World War II, with Schröder’s declaration of the Allied
campaign as a victory for Europe as well as for Germany (2005; cf. Zehfuss,
2007: 203–8; Olick, 1999).
European Journal of International Relations 15(4)
664
The Politics of World War II Commemoration in Moscow
The ‘interpretation war’ over the meaning of the end of World War II for
different European countries reached its peak during the debates around the
commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the end of the war in Moscow.
The questions of what precisely to commemorate, whether or not Moscow
was the appropriate place for this commemoration in the first place, and
when the end of World War II should be commemorated were all brought
to the surface in the battles between competing historical narratives of the
Baltic states and Poland, Russia and the former Western allies. The clash
of narratives about the meaning and ramifications of World War II led to
mutual insinuations about attempts to rewrite history between Russia and
the Baltic states, in particular, as they struggled to win Western sympathy
and support for their contradictory stories of their immediate past. The
commemoration controversy of 2005 epitomized the complex interaction
between three different levels of Polish and Baltic memory politics over the
implications of World War II, namely, the domestic, bilateral and European
planes of debating the filtering of historical facts through particular cultural
lenses (see Onken, 2007).
For Russians, 9 May 1945 is the date of the Soviet Union’s final victory
over Nazi Germany, signifying the end of a war in which they suffered
massive losses. Indeed, it was on 9 May 1945 that the war ended for the
Soviet Union as the defenders of Berlin finally surrendered.10 It is therefore
a ‘sacred day’ for Russia; ‘one of the most memorable and important dates’
in the history of the Russian people, the ‘closest, sincerest and most truly
national holiday’ that marks ‘a victory of civilisation over barbarism in the
form of fascism’ (see Putin, 2005b, 2005c). The commemorative ceremonies
of Victory Day, as it is called in Russia, are thus one of the main reservoirs
of the modern Russian collective memory, sustaining the progress-glorifying
messianism that communist Russia tried to embody in the course of the 20th
century and perhaps even retaining an age-old Russian general messianism
that pre-dates communism. Altogether, the victory of World War II is the
only victory of the Russian people that is celebrated throughout the world
today; indeed, the last event in which modern Russia can proudly claim
something universal in its specificity (cf. Minaudier, 2007). As such, 9
May also harbours considerable potential for Russia’s self-affirmation as a
‘normal’ European country, not as permanently erring from the ‘normal’
course of development associated with the West (see Wydra, 2007: 238).
The declaration of 8 and 9 May as Days of Remembrance and Reconciliation
by the United Nations in 2004 is therefore proudly presented as a special
success for Russia and the other Commonwealth of Independent States’
diplomacy.
Mälksoo: The Memory Politics of Becoming European
665
For the Western Allies, World War II ended in Europe on 8 May 1945
when the capitulation act of the German army was signed in Reims in
France,11 and 9 May has a different meaning in the EU: it is celebrated as
Europe Day in order to commemorate Robert Schuman’s call in 1950 for
recognition of the fact that European cooperation sprang from the need
to reconcile different European nations with each other. For the Eastern
European states, there are further ‘multiple endings of World War II’. The
restoration of their independence in the early 1990s, the withdrawal of the
remnants of the Soviet army from the Baltic states, their inclusion in the EU
and NATO, and, most recently, even the hosting of a NATO summit in Riga
in November 2006 have all been applauded as a sign of the ultimate end of
World War II in the region. The date 9 May has thus no single meaning
that is univocally shared throughout Europe: the liberation from the Nazi
scourge for Western Europe and the Soviet Union was only half a liberation
for Eastern Europeans as the day, when according to Putin ‘great justice was
done’ (2005b), marked the beginning of an era of new injustice for them by
their subjection to Soviet rule.
The commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the end of World War
II as a major celebration of the victory and reconciliation in Moscow on 9
May 2005 was therefore bound to be controversial. The Russian president
Vladimir Putin had invited over 50 world leaders to attend a military parade
on Red Square in order to celebrate ‘the victory of good over evil and of
freedom over tyranny’, the ‘peace and triumph of justice’ (Putin, 2005b,
2005c); indeed, ‘the Victory of Life over Death’ (Lavrov, 2005). The
Victory Day commemorations in Moscow were thus meant to remind the
international community of the decisive role Russia played in winning World
War II as well as to celebrate the master narrative of Russian identity against
the backdrop of the war according to which Russia was the heroic liberator
of Europe from the Nazi curse. The aim of the celebrations was therefore
not merely ‘upholding the historical truth about the war’, but also ‘fixing
firmly in public consciousness a correct understanding of its lessons from the
viewpoint of contemporary world development’ (Lavrov, 2005).
The very attempt to fix ‘a correct understanding of the past’, noticeably
devoid of self-criticism, touched the crux of the problem for the Baltic states
and Poland which do not share the Russian interpretation of the outcomes
of World War II. Referring to their unwillingness to celebrate the glory of
the Soviet victory on the day that symbolizes the beginning of a new era of
oppression for the Baltic states, and emphasizing the need to distinguish
between commemorating the victims of the war from the attempts to
eulogize the ideological inheritance of the Soviet totalitarian regime, the
presidents of Lithuania and Estonia — Valdas Adamkus and Arnold Rüütel —
therefore declined Putin’s invitation, after much debate in their respective
European Journal of International Relations 15(4)
666
countries. The presidents of Latvia and Poland, however, decided to attend
the commemorative events in Moscow for the very same reason: to draw
international attention to the complexity of the outcomes of World War II
in Poland and the Baltic states by showing how the Allied victory over Nazi
Germany was ‘only a partial victory’ as the Western democracies ‘accepted
without protest the renewed subjugation of over a dozen countries in
Central and Eastern Europe by the totalitarian communism of the Soviet
empire and its satellites’ (Vīķe-Freiberga, 2005d). Moreover, while the
official Russian narrative tends to equate the beginning of World War II
for Russia with the beginning of their Great Patriotic War when the Nazis
invaded the Soviet Union (i.e. 22 June 1941), the Baltic states and Poland
emphasize that the seeds of the conflagration, not to mention the invasion
of Poland and the Baltics, were sown already with the Nazi–Soviet pact of
1939. Arguably then, had Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union not agreed
to secretly divide the territories of Eastern Europe among themselves, World
War II might not have occurred. Since it is both Hitler and Stalin who ‘bear
the brunt of the blame’ for the war, these ‘two totalitarian tyrants’ should be
mentioned by name, as well as commemorating the crimes against humanity
of both; lest the responsibility they bear for beginning that war be forgotten
(Vīķe-Freiberga, 2005d).
Hence, the Baltic states and Poland on the one side and Russia on the
other have clashingly contradictory narratives of World War II. What was
glory for Russia, was humiliation for the Baltic states and Poland; what Russia
as the legal successor of the Soviet Union celebrates as its victory in World
War II, the Baltic Three and Poland execrate as a loss of independence,
identity and thus their meaningful existence. The collective memories of
World War II in Russia and Poland and the Baltic Three have thus proved
to be incommensurable to date, and the end of the war is an event still seen
in completely different lights.
Paraphrasing Tzvetan Todorov, we could thus say that the Russian
commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II constituted
an attempt to adapt the past to the needs of the present by claiming
credit for the decisive significance of the Soviet army in the course of World
War II and thus emphasizing the role of Russia in the constitution of modern
Europe. The focus of the respective memory-political moves of the Baltics
and Poland has, however, rather been on the rememoration of the end of
the war in order to try to explain the complex outcomes of it for different
European nations; or, indeed, to grasp the ‘truth of the past’ (2003: 133).
After all, for the Western democracies which had never actually fought the
USSR, the ‘evilness’ of Stalin could not quite compete with that of Hitler in
their popular consciousness, thus leaving the Baltic states and Poland with
Mälksoo: The Memory Politics of Becoming European
667
quite a bit of ‘revelatory work’ to do on the ‘Western front’ (cf. Davies,
2006: 242–3).12
The Latvian president Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, in particular, launched a
vigorous initiative to introduce the dubious outcome of World War II in
the Baltic states to the international community, receiving thus an acknowledgement
as the Lady der Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the German
press. In order to avoid the reefs of belittling the significance of the victory
over Nazism while condemning the crimes of Soviet totalitarianism, VīķeFreiberga
chose to draw a clear distinction between the meanings of 8 May
and 9 May, thus distancing the Latvian, or Baltic, understanding of the
end of World War II from the Russian interpretation and emphasizing the
significance of 9 May as Europe Day instead. Vīķe-Freiberga’s statements
regarding the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the end of World
War II in Moscow in 2005 were explicitly intent on revealing the ‘other side’
of the Soviet participation in the war, as well as calling for Western support
to encourage Russia to express its regret over the post-war subjugation of
Eastern Europe as a direct ramification of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
(MRP).
Vīķe-Freiberga thus made a conscious attempt to enlarge the semiotic
field of connotations of World War II in the Western public imaginary by
emphasizing that while the Allied victory over Nazi Germany was indeed
a ‘victory of democratic values over totalitarianism and tyranny’ (2005c),
it was nevertheless a victory that failed to bring freedom to ‘the other half
of Europe’ (2006). Therefore, as ‘no wound can truly heal if it is festering
beneath the surface’, Russia should follow the example of Germany who has
repeatedly apologized for its Nazi past, ‘by expressing its genuine regret for
the crimes of the Soviet regime’, in particular for its occupation of the Baltic
states for 50 years, or ‘it will continue to be haunted by the ghosts of its past,
and its relations with its immediate neighbours will remain uneasy at best’
(2005c, 2005d, 2006). Similar calls were made by her Estonian, Lithuanian
and Polish counterparts.
Russia’s reaction has, however, been all but apologetic: the official Russian
line denies the equivalence of Stalin with Hitler. Russia’s critical selfreflection
against the backdrop of World War II has been hamstrung by the
fact that for Russians, perhaps more than for any other nation, the crimes
and acts of heroism in the war are embedded in the very same historical
moment. Russia’s difficulties in critically engaging with its communist legacy
are all the more problematic because the Soviet era marked a period of
unprecedented international power for the country, and a critical assessment
of this period is therefore seen as a potential challenge to its position in the
international arena at the time. Against that backdrop, Stalin’s role tends to
be viewed in Russia first and foremost as a saviour from the ‘Nazi curse’ and
European Journal of International Relations 15(4)
668
not repudiated for his regime’s mass repressions, either in Russia itself or in
the former Soviet Union as a whole.
Putin demonstrates the cunning pick-and-choose approach to history that
Russia so frequently entertains while engaging with its communist legacy:
when useful to today’s Russia, the country’s direct legal succession from the
Soviet Union is emphasized; when harmful, however, such as in the case
of admitting to the criminal acts of the previous regime, Russia’s direct
succession from the USSR is refuted.13 After all, admitting responsibility for
an act through an apology commits one to some form of reparation. Putin
therefore argues that a Russian apology to the Baltic states for the repressions
of the Soviet regime ‘would be fairly logical only if these peoples had been at
any time citizens of the Russian Federation’ — which they, of course, never
were (2005a). Nevertheless, Putin’s speeches do not actually contain traces
of the widely accepted idea in Russia that the annexation of the Baltic states
was legitimate since it was allegedly based on legitimate referenda. Putin
has even expressed regret for the Baltic states’ historical usage as a ‘token’
in world politics, describing the MRP as a ‘tragedy’. Yet, any questioning
of Eastern Europe’s ‘liberation’ by the Soviet Union has met his immediate
rebuttal. In order to disperse Russian responsibility for the fate of the Baltics
after World War II, he further argues that the West could not lay any blame
on the USSR for annexing the Baltic states in particular since ‘these were the
realities of those times, just as colonial policies were the realities of quite a
large number of European countries’. Hence, just as the Allies ‘divided up
the spheres of influence’, the Soviet Union simply ‘established its policies
with its close neighbours and its allies … in its own image’ (Vīķe-Freiberga,
2005a). Putin’s and his regime’s resistance to use the notion of occupation
for describing the Soviet takeover of the Baltic states in the course of
World War II exemplifies how using a word cannot be reduced to the mere
application of a label: insofar as invoking a term calls up a range of further
acts that should follow, the use of a particular word(ing) is essentially an act
(see Fierke, 2002).
Russia’s selective remembrance of World War II exemplifies vividly how
present concerns determine which past is remembered and how. For Russia,
that is resolutely seeking to re-establish its international position amongst
the ‘great powers’ today, the role of the MRP in sowing the seeds of World
War II as well as leading to the ultimate subjugation of Eastern Europe
under the Soviet yoke is largely irrelevant for it conflicts with Russia’s ‘usable
remembrance’ of the war. Focusing instead on the Soviet Union’s hugely
costly victory over Nazism enables Putin’s regime to position Russia firmly
among the ‘normal’ European countries. The attempts to institutionally
monopolize and fix certain meanings of the past further demonstrate that
the ‘interpretation wars’ over past events are substantially struggles over
Mälksoo: The Memory Politics of Becoming European
669
power — as the control over the narratives of the past facilitates control
over the construction of further narratives for an imagined future. Hence,
the Russian political elites’ maintenance of the narrative of the Baltic states’
voluntary joining with the Soviet Union consequently allows it to shed its
responsibility for the communist crimes in the region as well as to demand
full citizenship and political rights for the Russians living there since the
Soviet period. The culpability of the official Russian stance vis-à-vis the
record of World War II does not then really lie in selecting those parts of
the past that it wishes to preserve (which is, after all, human, all too human),
but in granting itself a ‘natural’ right to decide what would be available to
others (i.e. the victims of the Soviet regime). In a manner characteristic of a
great power, the Soviet Union used a method of organized forgetting in the
Baltic states and Poland over the communist period in order to try to deprive
them of their national consciousnesses. In a similar fashion, as we will see
below, when Russia encounters interpretations of history that diverge from
its own, the propaganda war for getting across its own version of the past
events usually follows.
Nevertheless, the vigorous memory-political offensive by Vīķe-Freiberga
found considerable support and understanding among the Baltics’ and
Poland’s Euro-Atlantic partners. In his letter to the Latvian president, US
president George W. Bush, for example, reminded her that while ‘in Western
Europe, the end of WWII meant liberation’, in Central and Eastern Europe,
‘the war also marked the Soviet occupation and annexation of Estonia, Latvia
and Lithuania and the imposition of communism’ (2005a). Bush’s ‘pit-stop’
in Riga a few days before his attendance at the Moscow commemorations to
mark the anniversary of World War II was also read as a signal of sympathy
to the Baltic states as well as an attempt to balance the Russian self-glorifying
emphasis on Nazi Germany’s defeat with a condemnation of the subsequent
Soviet subjugation of Eastern Europe. Bush even acknowledged that the
US bore some blame for the ‘division of Europe into armed camps’, vowing
never again to trade freedom for stability, thus arguably also providing
a model for Putin to renounce the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states
(2005b). The US Congress, in turn, passed a resolution on 22 July 2005 in
support of the Baltic case, arguing that ‘the truth is a powerful weapon for
healing, forgiving and reconciliation, but its absence breeds distrust, fear,
and hostility’ (Congress of the United States of America, 2005), thus seeking
an acknowledgement and condemnation by the Russian Federation of the
Soviet Union’s occupation of the Baltic states.
The official declaration of the European Commission issued on Europe
Day was much more lukewarm in its tone, promising euphemistically to
remember also ‘the many millions for whom the end of the Second World
War was not the end of dictatorship, and for whom true freedom was only
European Journal of International Relations 15(4)
670
to come with the fall of the Berlin Wall’ (2005). The respective resolution
of the European Parliament (EP), entitled ‘The Future of Europe Sixty
Years after the Second World War’, pointed more directly to the ‘renewed
tyranny inflicted by the Stalinist Soviet Union’ on East European nations
after the end of World War II, and acknowledged the ‘magnitude of the
suffering, injustice and long-term social, political and economic degradation
endured by the captive nations located on the eastern side of what was to
become the Iron Curtain’ (2005). The resolution explicitly highlighted the
significance of keeping the memories of the past alive, ‘because there cannot
be reconciliation without truth and remembrance’. Further, it confirmed
the EP’s united stand against ‘all totalitarian rule of whatever ideological
persuasion’; welcomed ‘the fact that the Central and Eastern European
states and peoples can now also enjoy freedom and the right to determine
their destiny after so many decades under Soviet domination or occupation
or other communist dictatorships’, and called on all countries to open their
archives pertaining to World War II (European Parliament, 2005).
Yet again, however, very different treatments of Europe’s immediate past
clashed during the preparations that preceded the adoption of the final
version of the document. There were MEPs who regarded the resolution as
‘a repellent exercise in revisionism and historical distortion’, as a ‘dreadful
falsification of history’ aiming to ‘wipe out the key contribution made by the
Soviet Union and its people’s glorious struggle to destroy the brutal killing
machine of the Nazi Fascist armies and regimes’; moreover, as an attempt to
‘silence and defame the glorious and heroic role played by the communists
in the anti-fascist struggle’ (Guerreiro, 2005). Refuting thus the attempts
to compare the crimes of communism with those of Nazism, these voices
argued vigorously against ‘indistinctly muddling 8 May 1945 with the crimes
of Stalinism’ (Catania, 2005; cf. Wurtz, 2005).14
The Baltic and Polish endeavours to seek international condemnation of
the crimes of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe bore more fruit
with the adoption of the relevant resolution by the Parliamentary Assembly
of the Council of Europe (PACE) on 25 January 2006, which explicitly
condemned the crimes committed by totalitarian communist regimes. This
resolution acknowledges that the fall of totalitarian communist regimes
in Central and Eastern Europe has not been followed in all cases by an
international investigation of the crimes committed by them, nor have
the perpetrators of these crimes been brought to trial by the international
community in a similar fashion to the way in which Nazi crimes were
once addressed in Nuremberg. Consequently, the resolution points to the
fact that public awareness of crimes committed by totalitarian communist
regimes is ‘very poor’. Acknowledging that the awareness of history is one
of the preconditions for avoiding similar crimes in the future, the resolution
Mälksoo: The Memory Politics of Becoming European
671
regards the moral assessment and condemnation of the communist crimes
as playing an important role in the education of the younger generations
and thus preventing history from repeating itself. Condemning the massive
human rights violations committed by the totalitarian communist regimes,
the resolution also expresses sympathy to the victims of these crimes, thus
calling for extending moral restitution for their sufferings.15 Furthermore,
the resolution calls on all communist or post-communist parties in its
member states to reassess the history of communism and their own past in
case they had not done it already, to ‘clearly distance themselves from the
crimes committed by totalitarian communist regimes and condemn them
without any ambiguity’ (PACE, 2006; cf. OSCE PA, 2009).
Yet, PACE’s draft recommendation calling on European governments to
adopt a similar declaration on the international condemnation of crimes of
totalitarian communist regimes, to carry out legal investigations of individuals
engaged in such crimes and create the prerequisites for the ‘memory work’
of the European nations that had suffered under the communist regimes (i.e.
open up the archives, build monuments and museums commemorating the
victims, revise the textbooks, or introduce national commemoration days)
did not receive the necessary two-thirds majority of the votes cast. Notably
also, the final text of the resolution did not even mention the Soviet Union,
not least as a result of the successive Russian mobilization of the European
ultra-leftists and communists to oppose the resolution as such, or at least
to disperse, erase and reword several paragraphs of the resolution’s initial
project.16
The debates over the condemnation of the crimes of communism in different
European fora as well as the ‘crisis of May 2005’ brought forward the
special case status of Poland and the Baltic states, in particular, in European
history and politics while simultaneously making a case against their different
treatment in the collective remembering of World War II in Europe. The
political controversies around the 60th anniversary of World War II could be
regarded as a turning point in European memory politics. The intense public
debates and the unprecedented international attention given to the Baltic
cause in particular helped to illuminate and clarify the diverging perceptions
of the past, thus raising the general awareness about diverse historical
legacies of the war and their direct impact on today’s politics in different
parts of Europe (cf. Onken, 2007: 43–4).
‘East is East, and West is West, and Never the Twain Shall Meet?’17
Yet, it is difficult but to agree with Duncan Bell who predicts that conflict
rather than harmony determines the contours of future mnemonic politics of
Europe (2006: 16). For the Baltic states and Poland, the subjugation to the
European Journal of International Relations 15(4)
672
Soviet rule and the eventual end of the Cold War emerge as the constitutive
events of the past 50 years. For Western Europeans, the German–French
reconciliation tends to figure as a central landmark in the post-World War II
collective historical consciousness.
As the terrain of memory of the ‘united Europe’ remains as contested as
ever, there does not seem to be much space for any great optimism about
the early emergence of a common European self-conceptualization. It is
questionable whether producing a single and definitive collective ‘version of
the past’ that is commonly shared by the public within a given community is
at all possible or even desirable. There is thus also some hope in this scarcity
of an all-European mnemonical consensus, for the struggle over memory
is nevertheless preferable to the prospect of a politically institutionalized
collective memory as an infinitely closed book (à la George Orwell) which
would inevitably subordinate some sets of victims and ideals to the overarching
narratives of the others.
Calls for a common historical memory for Europe have therefore inevitably
revealed certain sore points that have traditionally been put under cover for
the sake of the ‘united Europe’ myth. Apparently, Europe’s history has been
written as that of the sum of national histories that have been considered
to be more important, thus leading to the ‘marginalisation or complete
exclusion of smaller or “peripheral” states and alternative topics’ (see
Fulbrook, 1993: 2). There has been a noticeable bias in favour of Western
and Southern Europe to the detriment of Northern and Eastern Europe in
writing the history of ‘Europe’. Moreover, according to Davies, ‘automatic
priority is given to positive and uplifting aspects of the past, whilst negative
or disturbing subjects are systematically avoided’, leading him to conclude
that Western civilization is a ‘power cult’ indeed (2006: 49–50). Rebelling
against the Western European rendering of their own mnemonic culture
as obligatory for all others, the Polish and Baltic reappropriation of their
pasts and their attempts to bring these ‘minority pasts’ into the common
European historical consciousness challenge the long-term tendency of the
old Western core of the EU to act as a model for the whole of Europe.
After all, remembering certain events does not only define the content of a
collective memory but also the extent of the remembering community (Eder,
2006: 267). Any remembrance is inevitably already marked by forgetting and
the complex question of Western co-responsibility for Eastern Europeans’
post-war submission under communist rule only made the intentional
‘forgetting’ of certain aspects of World War II more attractive for them (cf.
Zehfuss, 2006, 2007).
What is really needed, then, is a critical history of the politics of ‘common
European memory’ of World War II that would expose the dense ambiguity
and complexity of the past as well as show the genealogical ‘becoming’ of
Mälksoo: The Memory Politics of Becoming European
673
certain institutionalized versions of it. As any politically endorsed collective
memory is essentially the product of specific power relations, it is important
to explore how and why it has emerged in a particular form as well as the
processes of inclusion and exclusion that have underpinned it. Who has been,
at the end of the day, the ‘we’ doing the remembering of World War II in
the EU? Poland’s and the Baltics’ desire to be heard in Europe hence also
implies their commitment to making history of this mnemonical community
(cf. de Certeau, 1997: 32).
Yet, the project of a united Europe will probably require the readjustment
of historical narratives from all sides to allow for a more heterocentric
European mnemonical vision to emerge. It is also fair to assume that just
as European national identities are influenced, but not replaced, by a ‘common
European identity’, national memories are likewise transfigured by a
transnational European collective memory under the impact of Europeanization,
yet not substituted for it (cf. Spohn, 2005: 3–4). Furthermore, the
accumulation of different ‘subaltern European pasts’ does not automatically
produce new knowledge and understandings of European history, as besides
factual authenticity it arguably matters a great deal through what structural
access and under what socio-historical conditions people come to an awareness
of these pasts (see Yoneyama, 2004: 456).
At the end of the day, it would be a categorical mistake to predict the
imminent emergence of the common European historical vision in the first
place. The question remains whether it would really be viable to produce a
better representational account of Europe’s problematic history in a singular
pan-European narrative which would not merely incite a further proliferation
of different histories. As the attempts to invent a shared past only tend to
provoke more or less violent expressions of difference, it seems advisable for
the EU not to focus on ‘settling its memory problem’, but to try to allow
space for competing narratives, and find peaceful, if agonizing, ways to
express and provoke different versions of the past instead. The conflicting
claims made by various national and subnational representatives of ‘old’ and
‘new’ Europeans should be given consideration, highlighting how and why
certain historical events have acquired particular significance for different
communities in the East and West of Europe.
Notes
1. The subtlety of subnational mnemonical cleavages that was most recently
exposed in Estonia during the ‘Bronze Soldier’ controversy in the spring of 2007
remains out of the scope of this article. On this, see further Mälksoo (2009). For
a thorough study of remembrance practices that might challenge state power and
encourage radical political change, see Edkins (2003).
European Journal of International Relations 15(4)
674
2. For a perceptive discussion about the unlikelihood of a fully harmonized
European memory on World War II, see Bell (2006). Yet, he argues that to
entirely rule out the possibility of future transformation would also be unwise,
which only makes the study of the transnational dissemination of memory across
various contexts more important.
3. Cf. de Certeau (1986).
4. With the remarkable exception of Courtois et al. (1999). Cf. Solzhenitsyn
(1974) and Applebaum (2003).
5. This has not been quite the case with the academic and political attention
dedicated to the crimes of communism in the United States (US) where during
the Cold War considerable resources were put into the research and publicity
of these issues. Yet, much of the early US research on the topic also had clearly
propagandistic aims. Characteristically against this backdrop, the monument to
the victims of communism has also been raised in the US, not in Europe.
6. Although the emergence of ‘Eurocommunism’ in the mid-1970s, as a result of
Western European left-wing intelligentsia’s gradual awakening to the Stalinist
crimes and the adjacent heated debates, nevertheless cleared some of the air in
that regard.
7. Cf. Meri (2000). Calls to establish an international museum in the US dedicated
to the commemoration and research of the crimes of communism by the example
of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, constitute a paradigmatic quest
in that context. Cf. Luik (2008).
8. For an elaboration on this theme, see Mälksoo (2006: 283–6).
9. In a curious resemblance, Eastern European nations’ post-Cold War ‘mnemopolitical
unfreezing’ has been as slow and recalcitrant towards recognizing the
‘other in oneself’ — their own participation in massive abuses of human rights
in the course of World War II not merely as victims but also as perpetrators.
Consider, for instance, the Polish collaboration in the 1941 Jedwabne massacre
of hundreds of Jews, or general sensitivity towards acknowledging the sufferings
of the German refugees and expellees from Eastern Europe.
10. Also, the Red Army fought in Prague till 9 May 1945. Technically, however,
World War II did not end for the Soviet Union before the surrender of Japan in
late August since the USSR had joined the Allies’ war against Japan on 8 August
1945, just about a week before the latter’s ultimate capitulation.
11. However, while the end of the war was already celebrated in Europe, the fighting
in Asia carried on.
12. Again, Nazism’s status as ‘absolute evil’ has been more nuanced in the postWorld
War II US where Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia became merged under
the catchphrase of ‘Red Fascism’ in the American image of totalitarianism.
13. Accordingly, Russia has denied access to documents regarding the assassination
of Polish reserve officers in the Katyn Forest in the spring of 1940 by the Soviet
security police.
14. It was only on 30 March 2009 when the EP unequivocally condemned the
crimes of the totalitarian communist regimes.
Mälksoo: The Memory Politics of Becoming European
675
15. According to Courtois et al. (1999), approximately 20 million people fell victim
to Soviet mass crimes from the 1920s to the 1950s; the Soviet occupation and de
facto control in Central and Eastern Europe, in turn, resulted in approximately
one million victims.
16. The practice-oriented initiative of members of the EP from former communist
countries (spearheaded by Jószef Szájer from Hungary and Vytautas Landsbergis
from Lithuania) to urge the EU ban of the communist symbols (i.e. sickle and
hammer) alongside the swastika, proved ultimately unsuccessful as well.
17. The subtitle is a quotation from Rudyard Kipling’s The Ballad of East and West
(1895).
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MARIA MÄLKSOO is a Researcher at the International Centre for Defence
Studies, Tallinn, and a Lecturer at the Institute of Government and Politics
at the University of Tartu, Estonia. She gained her Ph.D. in International
Studies at the University of Cambridge in 2008 after studies of sociology,
political science and international relations at the Universities of Tartu,
Montana and Cambridge. Her first monograph The Politics of Becoming
European: A Study of Polish and Baltic Post-Cold War Security Imaginaries
will appear in Routledge New International Relations Series in 2009.
She has previously published in Security Dialogue, Cambridge Review
of International Affairs, as well as in several edited books and Estonian
academic journals.