The Ukraine crisis and European memory politics of the Second World War

ABSTRACT

In Europe, commemorations of the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War have reiterated the existence of different national narratives of the historical event. These narratives can be grouped into four distinct memory discourses. Each discourse is dominant in a particular European country or region: Russia, post-communist East-Central Europe, Germany and the Western European countries that fought against the Third Reich. On 8–9 May 2015, the four narratives found expression in distinct European commemorative locations: Moscow, Gdansk, Berlin and London/Paris. The paper argues that, while the four narratives have existed for several decades, the Russian narrative has recently been reformulated with a more nationalistic rhetoric and used as a conceptual framework to explain and interpret the crisis in Ukraine. Simultaneously, East-Central European narratives have been radicalised too, while nationalist discourses and highly controversial historical figures have been subsumed in a new post-Maidan official narrative in Ukraine. This further politicised the memory of the Second World War, leading to dissonance between the Russian and the German and Western European narratives and, most notably, to a radical discursive clash between the Russian and the East-Central European memory discourses.

KEYWORDS:

• Politics of memory
• identity
• Second World War
• Ukraine crisis
• Russia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Following the classification adopted by Jarausch (2010, pp. 310–311), in this article, East-Central Europe includes EU member states that were located in the Soviet sphere of influence during the Cold War (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria) or were part of the Soviet Union (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia).

2 The Russian narrative calls the Soviet war against Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945 ‘the Great Patriotic War’.

3 These attempts include the resolution of the European Parliament (2009), ‘European Conscience and Totalitarianism’, and the resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (2009), ‘Divided Europe Reunited: Promoting Human Rights and Civil Liberties in the OSCE Region in the 21^st Century’.