The Interplay of the European Commission, Researcher and Educator Networks and Transnational Agencies in the Promotion of a Pan-European Holocaust Memory

Abstract

The article scrutinizes the structural conditions under which the European Commission works to implement the political aim of constructing a pan-European path to commemorating the mass crimes of the twentieth century. The pivotal obstacle to attaining a common European way of remembering the ‘negative history’ of the continent (or to at least opening up room for discussion about it) lies in the debate between those who stress the singularity of the Holocaust and those who demand that the atrocities of both the National Socialist and the Communist regimes should equally be recognized. Bearing this in mind, the article analyses how the Commission makes use of existing networks of experts in research, memorialization and education and how the specific interrelatedness of these networks affects the Europeanization effort. In particular, it examines the role of networking conferences, highlights two exemplary fields of antecedent interrelations between the memory actors who were convened by the Commission and points to the implications of the fact that the networks and actors involved do not necessarily share a pan-European agenda.

Keywords::

• Holocaust research
• Holocaust education
• European memory
• Nazism
• Communism
• Stalinism
• European Commission
• researcher and educator networks
• institutionalization
• FRA
• IHRA

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ The European Commission and Parliament decided to both broaden the thematic specter and give remembrance projects a higher significance in the new 2014–2020, ‘Remembrance and European Citizens’ action (EC 2013, 10; Prutsch 2013, 15–17).

² Littoz-Monnet bases her calculation on the 2009 data; a look at the projects funded in 2012 and 2013 supports her assessment (52/70 Nazism focus, 8/70 Communism focus, 10/70 Totalitarianism or general foci).

³ Terezín (2010: 10 initiatives), Amsterdam (2011: 8), Copenhagen (2012: 10), Erfurt (2013: 22) and Prague (2014: 19). The overall number of individual participants from the funded projects is higher because they were often represented by more than one person; furthermore, some projects were carried through by more than one institutional actor.

⁴ For an overview, see http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/international_projects/.