The Unfinished Past

The Peace Narrative and Its Silences

When the European project was assembled from the rubble of 1945, it was built on a story: that integration would prevent another catastrophic war. This was not false. But it was selective. The "peace through common market" narrative bracketed out an enormous amount — colonialism, the crimes of empire, the history of peoples who were not invited to the founding table. EU memory politics have systematically excluded colonial and imperial legacies from official European historical consciousness, even as Holocaust remembrance became central to the supranational identity project.

This was not accidental. EU integration is fundamentally intertwined with memory politics: which pasts get institutionalised, and which get forgotten, directly reflects competing visions of what Europe is and who belongs to it. Understanding contemporary Europe means understanding that the "official" memory is always a construction — and that the battles over what gets included are never finished.

1945–1989: Two Europes, Two Memories

The continent that emerged from World War II was immediately divided — not just geographically, but mnemonically. Western Europe oriented itself around the Holocaust as foundational moral catastrophe, while states in the Soviet bloc suppressed racial persecution as a category and constructed their own narrative: that communism had defeated fascism.

This divergence ran deep. When communist regimes fell in 1989, the newly independent states of Central and Eastern Europe did not simply "join" a settled European memory culture. They arrived carrying profoundly different histories — of Soviet domination, of suppressed nationalisms, of local collaboration with Nazi occupation that was far more widespread than post-war narratives admitted. Memory politics surrounding communism and WWII remain profoundly contested in the former Soviet bloc decades after 1989. The question of how to remember — and who had the right to define official memory — immediately became political.

1989–2004: The Memory Wars Begin

After 1989, post-communist states built new institutions of memory. National Memory Institutes were created to manage archives of the communist secret police, rewrite school curricula, and establish official anti-communist narratives. These institutions became key sites for controlling which histories achieved legitimacy and which were marginalised.

At the same time, political elites across the region began a striking strategic move: appropriating Holocaust memory narratives and visual repertoires to narrate communist oppression. The Holocaust's moral weight was borrowed to describe Soviet crimes — not to confront the Holocaust itself, but to claim equivalent victimhood and to avoid confronting local collaboration. Scholars call this "feel good Holocaust appropriation": a transformation of genocide memory into a resource for national identity construction and emotional validation of exclusionary nationalism.

2004–2015: Enlargement and the Discovery of Division

When ten new members joined the EU in 2004, the Union discovered — as if for the first time — that its eastern and western members held deeply incompatible views on official memory. Eastern European political elites actively pushed the EU to establish communism as morally and historically equivalent to Nazism. Western Europe resisted. The transnational European memory space that the EU had built — centred on Holocaust remembrance — did not accommodate these demands.

Crucially, what was being contested was not just history. Memory appropriation around the Holocaust became fundamentally a battle over belonging — over who counts as European, and what kind of nation is being constructed. Politicians mobilised Holocaust memory explicitly against multiculturalism and political pluralism, using historical appropriation to voice dissent against supranational human rights norms.

2015–Present: Backsliding and the Weaponisation of History

After 2015 — shaped by the refugee crisis, Brexit, and the Russia–Ukraine conflict — the political temperature shifted decisively. Memory laws in Hungary and Poland, initially modelled on legitimate transitional justice mechanisms, were repurposed as tools for democratic backsliding. The Polish Holocaust Law — which sought to criminalise reference to Polish complicity in Nazi crimes — exemplified what scholars call "mnemonic populism": the use of historical narrative as a vehicle for authoritarian consolidation. Constitutional courts were captured to legitimise memory legislation that would previously have been struck down.

This is also the moment when the politics of victimhood nationalism reached full articulation: a political strategy that frames national trauma as the essential core of identity, denies perpetratorship or complicity entirely, and uses uncritical retellings of historical suffering as arguments for anti-pluralist governance.

Core Concepts

Memory Politics

Memory politics refers to the deliberate mobilisation of historical memory by political actors to construct identity, legitimise power, and define belonging. It is not merely disagreement about facts — it is competition over meaning. Scholarly analysis identifies four dimensions of memory contestation: which events are represented; how domestic and international contexts shape that representation; which historical discourses become dominant; and which cultural frameworks and symbolic repertoires are deployed. Across all four dimensions, the stakes are political, not academic.

Multidirectional Memory

Michael Rothberg's concept of multidirectional memory challenges the assumption that different traumatic histories compete in a zero-sum fight for recognition. Different histories of extreme violence — the Holocaust, Stalinist crimes, slavery, colonialism — interact and inform one another in public discourse. Memories of one atrocity do not simply crowd out memories of another; they can also illuminate, frame, and generate recognition across different traumatic histories.

This concept is important precisely because it runs against the grain of how memory politics actually operates in Europe, where Holocaust memory has frequently been appropriated to serve exclusive national agendas rather than opening recognition to other suppressed histories.

Multidirectional memory suggests that remembering one atrocity well requires attending to others — not because all traumas are equivalent, but because the frameworks through which we understand extreme violence are shared and mutually constitutive.

Transitional Justice

Transitional justice refers to legal and institutional mechanisms — lustration laws, truth commissions, memory agencies — designed to address historical wrongs when a society transitions from authoritarian to democratic governance. How nations remember their communist and Nazi pasts is not fixed: it shifts over time as new actors and pressures reshape what can be acknowledged and how.

Paradoxically, transitional justice mechanisms have become sites of intense politicisation: rather than settling memory, they have generated competing memory cultures and, in some cases, been converted into instruments of democratic backsliding.

The Democratic Deficit

The EU's structural democracy problem is real and persistent. The non-elected European Commission proposes and enforces legislation; the European Parliament — the only directly elected institution — cannot initiate legislation; voter turnout is low. This structural disconnect between decision-making authority and democratic accountability has never been fully resolved. The principle of equality of states in supranational decision-making cannot be reconciled with the principle of equality of citizens in democratic representation.

Colonial Amnesia

Colonial amnesia is not forgetting in the ordinary sense — it is structured, institutionalised, actively curated forgetting. Colonialism is repackaged as benevolence, resistance movements are erased, and the necessity for reparation is neutralised. This process operates across curricula, media, governance, and collective consciousness in former colonial powers. It explains why the EU could construct a robust Holocaust remembrance culture and simultaneously maintain near-total silence about centuries of colonial violence — colonial violence that was constitutive of European modernity itself.

Annotated Case Study: The Roma: Europe's Most Consistently Marginalised People

The Roma offer perhaps the clearest lens through which to examine how "European values" function in practice — and how their application has been chronically selective.

The forgotten Holocaust

The genocide of Roma under Nazism — the Porajmos — was systematically excluded from post-war memory, justice, and historical narratives. West German courts ruled that actions taken against Roma before 1943 were legal, blocking compensation claims. Many compensation officials held the Nazi-era view that Roma were "asocials" rather than a racial group subject to genocide. It was not until 1965 that German law officially recognised the racial nature of pre-1943 persecution — by which time many survivors had already died. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt formally recognised Roma as genocide victims only in 1982, thirty-seven years after the war's end.

Why this happened

The erasure was not accidental. It reflected the persistence of anti-Roma racism within the post-war democratic states that claimed to have learned from Nazi atrocity. It also reflected how post-war Western European memory had structured itself: around Jewish victimhood and Nazi perpetration, with other groups — Roma, gay men, Sinti, disabled people — rendered peripheral or invisible.

The transnational response

Against this erasure, Roma communities organised. The first World Romani Congress in 1971, held near London with representatives from ten nations spanning both sides of the Iron Curtain, asserted a common transnational ethnic identity independent of nation-state boundaries. Delegates established the Romani flag, the anthem "Gelem, Gelem," and adopted "Roma" as the preferred self-designation — a deliberate move toward political identity construction. This gathering was the foundation of all subsequent Roma rights activism.

The EU framework and its limits

The construction of "European values" has selectively included and excluded Roma, revealing those values as a contested narrative rather than an inevitable historical trajectory. EU Roma integration strategies have had limited capacity to address intersectional discrimination. LGBTQ Roma were not addressed by any EU policy framework until a 2021 Council Recommendation — the first time EU policy directly referenced this intersectional population. LGBTQ Roma face compounded marginalisation: anti-Roma racism from majority society (including from within LGBTQ movements), and ostracism from within their own communities for their sexual or gender identity. Many conceal both their ethnicity and their identity out of intersecting fear.

What this teaches us

The Roma case demonstrates that European historical amnesia is not a simple oversight. It is structural. The same institutional frameworks that claim to enshrine human rights can simultaneously perpetuate historical hierarchies — by deciding whose suffering counts, whose history merits acknowledgment, and whose identity deserves policy protection.

Thought Experiment: Can European Identity Be Decolonised?

Consider the following chain of propositions, each supported by the claims explored in this module:

1. European modernity was constitutively shaped by colonial violence across five centuries. This is not a peripheral fact about Europe's history — it is central to how European industrialisation, wealth, and institutions developed.

2. EU integration narratives have systematically excluded colonial memory, constructing a bounded European identity that omits non-European colonial subjects and their historical experiences.

3. Decolonising European memory cultures — the project of undoing institutional protocols that inscribe racialised hierarchies and colonial relations — is unfinished and ongoing.

4. Postcolonial reparations require more than acknowledgment. Effective reparations must address ongoing structural inequalities — economic dependency, political domination, cultural subordination — not just historical wrongs.

5. All major emancipatory discourses — liberalism, socialism, neoliberalism — originate from and reproduce European ideas. Even the frameworks through which postcolonial critique is mounted carry European intellectual genealogies.

Now the thought experiment: What would it actually mean to decolonise European identity?

Not just to add colonial history to the curriculum. Not just to rename streets. But to genuinely restructure the institutional, epistemological, and economic frameworks through which "Europe" understands itself and its relationship to the rest of the world.

Some questions to sit with:

• If the EU's peace narrative is built on bracketing out colonial history, can the EU reform itself without dismantling its founding story?
• If even emancipatory frameworks reproduce European assumptions, is there a genuinely non-Eurocentric vantage point from which to critique European identity — or does the critique always remain internal?
• Decolonization between 1945 and 1975 created approximately 195 nation-states and reshaped the former colonial powers themselves. But did it change how Europe sees itself? If not, what would it take?

There is no correct answer to these questions. But notice that your answer depends heavily on whether you think the problem is primarily about memory (acknowledging history) or structure (transforming ongoing institutions and relationships). Those are different diagnoses — and they lead to different proposals.

Common Misconceptions

"European identity has a natural cultural core." It does not. A coherent continental identity is structurally impossible: unlike nations, Europe lacks a stable external opposition against which to define itself. Theorist Gerard Delanty argues that "Europe could never constitute a coherent identity because there is 'no external opposition' to it." What presents itself as natural European culture is always already a construction — selecting some histories, excluding others, freezing what is inherently dynamic.

"The Holocaust is the central lesson Europe has learned from its past." Holocaust remembrance did become institutionalised at the centre of post-war European identity — but this institutionalisation was uneven and came with systematic blind spots. Roma genocide was excluded from post-war justice and memory. Colonial violence was entirely absent from EU integration narratives. The very centrality of Holocaust memory has sometimes been appropriated — stripped of its specific meaning and deployed to serve other agendas — rather than acting as a universal moral compass.

"Eastern Europe is simply 'behind' Western Europe on democratic and historical reckoning." This framing — widespread in Western European media — reproduces a colonial hierarchy. EU enlargement positioned Eastern Europe as less developed and requiring Europeanisation, a "civilisational racialization" process. Eastern European countries have their own complex relationships with the past, including experiences of Soviet domination that scholars have analysed using postcolonial frameworks — as a form of colonialism systematically overlooked by postcolonial scholarship focused on the Global South. The memory conflicts in the region reflect real historical complexity, not simply failure to catch up.

"Euroscepticism is a right-wing phenomenon." Euroscepticism takes distinct left and right forms. Right-wing Euroscepticism emphasises sovereignty loss and opposition to immigration; left-wing Euroscepticism criticises neoliberal austerity and the prioritisation of capital over labour. Both respond to real structural features of the EU. The Eurozone was designed as a currency union without compensating fiscal mechanisms, and the structural constraints this created — forcing austerity during crises — generated genuine political grievances that cannot be dismissed as simply nationalist irrationality.

"1989 settled the memory questions about communism." It opened them. The interpretation of 1989 itself became contested, with competing narratives emphasising triumph, betrayal, or incompleteness depending on political positioning. Widespread nostalgia for communist-era economic stability emerged by the 1990s: surveys found more than 50% of Eastern European adults gave positive assessments of the socialist economic system, with Ukraine and Belarus reaching 78–90%. This nostalgia was not sentimentality about authoritarianism; it was a language for critiquing the failures of post-communist neoliberal transformation.

"LGBTQ history in Eastern Europe only begins after 1989." This is a convenient myth that serves multiple political agendas. LGBTQ activism and an underground gay and lesbian milieu existed across the Eastern Bloc in the 1980s. Queer activists in the region actively participated in transnational construction of homosexual identity despite communist repression. Treating 1989 as a complete rupture erases this earlier history and presents Western Europe as the origin point of LGBTQ recognition — reproducing the same centre-periphery dynamic that distorts so many other aspects of European historical memory.