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Abstract
The European Parliament (EP) adopted, between 2004 and 2009, a series of resolutions calling for recognition of Communist crimes and commemoration of their victims. This article focuses on an overlooked aspect of anti-Communist activism, the awareness-raising activities carried out by some Central European Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to perpetuate the cause through networks that enable them to exchange institutional credibility, scientific legitimacy, and policy-oriented knowledge with Institutes of National Memory, parts of academia, and victims associations. Although they use the techniques of expertise and scandalization that are often effective in European institutions, these memory entrepreneurs have largely failed to further their claims in the European Union (EU) after 2009. In line with the turn toward “practice” in EU studies and the increased attention paid to agency in memory politics, this article contends that the conditions of production of their narrative of indictment of Communism accounts for this relative lack of success. Because their demands produced a strong polarization inside the EP while colliding with established Western patterns of remembrance, these MEPs’ reach remains limited to their Conservative peers from the former Eastern bloc. This weak national and ideological representativeness hinders their capacity to impose their vision of the socialist period in the European political space.
Notes
1. This interpretation of Communism, centered on its criminal nature and its structural proximity to Nazism, has been heavily criticized since the 1960s for its incapacity to fully grasp the social and political mechanisms that explain the diversity and the longevity of socialist regimes. After the Cold War, The Black Book of Communism. Crimes, Terror, Repression (Courtois et al. Citation199Citation7) sparked hefty debates on totalitarianism and the assessment of Communism, both as an ideology and as the matrix of a distinct type of dictatorial regimes (Dreyfus et al. Citation2000; Rousso Citation2004).
2. This generic term refers to the state-sponsored institutions established in post-Communist states to manage the archives of the socialist security apparatuses. Though their names and scopes of competence vary, they all conduct research and educational projects, which build official narratives of Communism (Behr Citation2015; Mink Citation2017).
3. Due to space limitations, the debates on Communism held at PACE cannot be analyzed here, although they played a crucial role in strengthening the claims made in the EU.
4. PACE adopted three important resolutions on “Measures to Dismantle the Heritage of Former Communist Regimes” (PACE Citation1996), on the “Need for International Condemnation of Crimes of Totalitarian Communist Regimes” (PACE Citation2006), and on “Commemorating the Victims of the Great Famine (Holodomor) in the former USSR” (PACE Citation2010). In the EP, three documents gradually crafted a narrative of indictment of Communism: the resolution on “The Sixtieth Anniversary of the End of Second World War in Europe on 8 May 1945” (EP Citation2005), the declaration on “the Proclamation of 23 August as European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism” (EP Citation2008) and the resolution on “European Conscience and Totalitarianism” (EP Citation2009).
5. Some papers mention the creation of anti-Communist networks (Mälksoo Citation2014; Welsh Citation2015) without, however, providing a detailed analysis of their activities.
6. The empirical data used in this article have been collected with a qualitative method combining documentary study, semi-structured interviews, and ethnographic observation. Eighteen members of PACE and the EP, 17 of which represented states of the former Eastern bloc, were identified as memory entrepreneurs because of their participation in all the debates on Communism, their involvement in initiating official texts condemning socialist crimes, and their contribution to awareness-raising actions since the early 1990s. Thirty-six semi-structured interviews were conducted by the author with those representatives and with administrators of the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, the EP, and PACE involved in remembrance policy.
7. This notion was coined by Medvetz to depict American think-tanks as embedded in “a semi-structured network of organizations that traverses, links, and overlaps the more established spheres of academics, political, business and media production” (Medvetz Citation2012, 25).
8. The American academic Dovid Katz, for instance, wages a campaign against “Holocaust obfuscation,” (http://defendinghistory.com/), while the Simon Wiesenthal Center reacted strongly to the adoption of the Resolution on European Conscience and Communism (http://www.wiesenthal.com/site/apps/s/content.asp?c=lsKWLbPJLnF&b=4442915&ct=7548759#.VHXAFc90zIU).
9. The choice of these terms is politically significant. Although none of the MEPs in this study deny Stalinist crimes, some establish a distinction between, on the one hand, Stalinism, a historical period during which mass violence was committed in the Eastern bloc, and, on the other hand, Communism, an ideology having produced extremely diverse political practices, which cannot be reduced to the concept of crime (Dreyfus et al. Citation2000).
10. MEPs Sandra Kalniete, Tunne Kelam, Vytautas Landsbergis, Gunnar Hökmark, and György Schöpflin; the historians Alfred Erich Senn (University of Wisconsin), Richard Overy (University of Exter), and Françoise Thom (University Paris 4); and Sergei Kovalev, the president of the Russian NGO Memorial.
12. Girts Valdis Kristovskis and Wojciech Roszkowski.
15. During the seventh EP term, the estimated number of intergroups was 80, out of which 27 only were officially recognized. At the beginning of the eighth EP term, 28 intergroups were officially recognized.
16. As illustrated by the parliamentary activities mentioned on each MEP's webpage: membership in commissions, drafting of reports, questions, declarations, and motions for resolution, cf. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/search.html.
18. Hans-Gert Pöttering, from Germany, and Jerzy Buzek, from Poland, were presidents of the European Parliament for the EPP, respectively, in 2007–2009 and 2009–2012.
19. http://eureconciliation.wordpress.com/about/ (last accessed February 27, 2017).
20. Former diplomat, MEP for the European Democratic Party (2004–2009), who had close ties with the Czech authorities during the Czech EU Presidency. Hybášková initiated, with Tunne Kelam and the Hungarian MEP József Szájer, the process that led to the adoption of the Resolution on European Memory and Conscience by the EP in April 2009 (Neumayer Citation2015).
21. An organization founded in June 2000 by the Visegrad Group countries – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia – to promote regional cooperation, cf. http://visegradfund.org/about/.
22. The ISTR was excluded from the Platform in 2014 after an acrimonious change of leadership, but the Platform's headquarter remained in Prague. Since 2014, its main financial support has come from the Hungarian government.
23. Thirteen EU Member States (Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria), Ukraine, Moldova, Iceland, Canada, and the US.
24. http://www.memoryandconscience.eu/about-the-platfor/about-the-platform/ (last accessed February 27, 2017).
25. Such as the numbers of victims of Communist crimes or the analysis of complex historical episodes (e.g. 1945 in Eastern Europe as “liberation from Nazism,” “domination by the USSR,” or both).
26. The main competitor of the Platform is the Warsaw-based NGO “European Network for Remembrance and Solidarity,” dedicated to scientific, educational, and promotional projects related to the study and documentation of experiences under dictatorships in twentieth-century Europe (Büttner and Delius Citation2015). In its commemorations of mass violence, the European Commission also relies on older networks that uphold the thesis of the singularity of the Holocaust (Plessow Citation2015).
27. Slovenia in 2008, the Czech Republic in 2009, Hungary and Poland in 2011, Lithuania in 2013, and Slovakia in 2016.
28. Born in 1952, economist, former Minister of Environment, Vice-Mayor of Riga and president of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Latvian Parliament. MEP since 2004, for the UEN (2004–2009) and the EPP (2009–).
29. Compare to “Written Question to the Commission by Inese Vaidere. Object: Crimes of the totalitarian communist regime,” 6 February 2008, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+WQ+E-2008-0591+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN&language=en; “Written Question to the Council by Inese Vaidere. Object: Crimes of the totalitarian communist regime,” 12 February 2008, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+WQ+E-2008-0591+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN&language=en.
30. This film accused Latvian citizens of committing crimes against humanity during World War II and established a direct link between those crimes and the difficulties experienced by Russian-speaking minorities in Latvia after 1991, cf. http://www.3rim.ru/projects/2005/nacizm-po_pribaltijski (last accessed January 11, 2016).
31. Cf. www.sovietstory.com (last accessed January 11, 2016).
32. Françoise Thom (University Paris 4), Norman Davies (University of Oxford), Nicolas Werth (CNRS, France), Pierre Rigoulot (CNRS, France), George Watson (University of Cambridge), Boris Sokolov (Russian State University of Social Science), and Natalia Lebedeva (Russia Academy of Sciences).
33. Inese Vaidere, Wojciech Roszkowski, Ari Vatanen (FIN, EPP), Christopher Beazley (UK, EPP), André Brie (DE, GUE), and Michael Gahler (DE, EPP).
34. Cf. www.sovietstory.com (last accessed January 11, 2016).
35. Cf. http://www.memoryandconscience.eu/2013/11/17/presentations-of-the-international-travelling-exhibition-totalitarianism-in-europe/ (last accessed February 27, 2017).
36. The former GDR, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Poland, Romania.
37. Underlined by the author.
40. Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and the Czech Republic.
41. Ernst Nolte initiated the Historikerstreit, which opposed liberal and conservative German historians about the significance of Nazism in German history in the late 1980s and raised the issue of the uniqueness of the Holocaust versus its comparison with the crimes of Communism (Knowlton and Cates Citation1993).
42. According to Courtois, this lack of balance results from the role of the Red Army in the victory against Nazi Germany and the “myth” of the liberation of Central and Eastern Europe in 1944–1945, but also from the strength of the French and Italian Communist parties. Their propaganda allegedly created a “hypermnesia of antifascism that the Communists claimed a monopoly of, and an amnesia of the Soviet-Nazi alliance, and more broadly of the totalitarian dimension of Communist regimes” (Platform Citation2013b, 13).
