Narrativity and intertextuality in the making of a shared European memory

Abstract

The latest wave of European integration process, cultural Europeanization, includes complex processes, such as the attempts to create a shared European memory that would transcend national interpretations of the past. The cultural Europeanization can be perceived as a narrative operation: in it the EU, Europe, and Europeanness are given meanings and made sense of through narrativization. The article investigates the EU’s attempts to create a shared European memory by analyzing the exhibition narrative of the Parlamentarium, the visitors’ center of the European Parliament. The analysis indicates how the construction of an official shared European memory is operationalized through textual and narrative devices such as intertextuality and the pending narrative structure. I argue that the EU’s memory texts are performative narratives which do not only describe a shared European memory in a particular way but also position the receivers as active agents in the story of the EU–Europe and invite them to produce it on their own initiative.

Keywords:

• European memory
• European Union
• intertextuality
• narrative
• Parlamentarium