The use of "the East" as the other is a general practice in European identity formation. 
"The East" is indeed Europe’s other, and it is continuously being recycled in order 
to represent European identities. Since the “Eastern absence” is a defining trait of “European” 
identities, there is no use talking about the end of an East/West divide in European history after 
the end of the Cold War. The question is not whether the East will be used in the forging of new 
European identities but how this is being done 
(Iver B. Neumann, Uses of the Other. “The East” in European Identity Formation, Minneapolis, 
University of Minnesota Press, 1999)

This study is an open reflection on remembrance, memory, and the patterns of acknowledging the past or forgetting it within the contemporary European identity construction. However disputed might be the causal link between the history and the shape of identitarian narratives developed or emerging inside the European Union, it would defy commonsense to ignore the role of memory as a reservoir for resources in the identity making processes. And this, especially, if we take seriously into account that «the past is always the site of struggles for the definition of the present»¹. Yet, this paper is on the Europe of “today” as a moment of history in the sense dissected by Derrida in his reflections on the old but so always new continent that tries to impose the «homogeneity of a medium, of discursive norms and models»². It is also a polemic paper in the sense in which discussing memory and identity in the actual context of Europe is always polemic. Such a feature requires no apologies since it is a natural aspect of the dialogical dimension of the European culture itself.

One of the main questions that absorbs an increasing amount of energy nowadays is whose identity is in fact the European identity, assuming there is one, be it ready-made or under construction. Another question is how Europe became so quickly integrative after such a long history that found a first fragile unity only in front of common non-European threats and then a profound “unity in division” during the Cold War. Is it still true that the only unity that Europe has is a unity in diversity or is there something more – as some (i.e. Gadamer, Habermas) argue? Edgar Morin was profoundly right in describing Europe historically as a self-organizing vertigo³. But that was an outcome of his concern with complexity paradigms. This vertigo continues today but enchanted by more beautiful words of an invoked unity that historically is not fully acknowledged and culturally even more precarious. Yet hard efforts are made in this direction. An institutional approach can easily explain the EU model of framing, enlargement and integration. But still does not explain why EU is focused on such a deep search of a common identity and to what extent such an identity – if it doesn’t treat the memories of nations within seriously – integrates, includes or assimilates or even remains blind.

After the trademark of the Second World War, that painted the portrait of the forthcoming Europe as a child of catastrophy in search of a path to overcome its self-destructive skills, a new trademark emerged 45 years later: the revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe. Both moments affected dramatically the self-perception of Europe firstly as thorn apart and astonished by its own atrocities but driven by the imperative of never letting it happen again and, secondly, as re-unified Europe after the enthusiastic “return” of the Central and East European states, be it old or newly made. I’ll assert here that both after 1945 and 1989 we can observe distinguishable similar patterns in acknowledging the past through both selective remembrance and forgetting within the process of forging a European identity. If after 1945 the European identity/civilization was dramatically challenged, after the fall of Berlin Wall significant re-evaluations of the past have searched their ways into the light. Yet, as instant amnesia was often politically considered as an optimal choice after 1945, so did after 1989. European identity as an ongoing project risks therefore being built on a “memory kitsch”. Since 1945, the European identity was profoundly shaped by the divisions inflicted during the Cold War together with a «desire, common to both sides, to forget the recent past and forge a new continent»⁴. After 1989 Europe was exposed to a double re-evaluation: new memories of war and post-war were again on the table together with Western “confused sentimentality” towards the East. On the other side, Eastern European nations had now to revisit their own Second World War history and the feelings of abandonment after 1945 yet this in the circumstances of preset imperatives of integration under the domain of Eu’s acquis historique communautaire⁵ and the politics of the fait historique accompli.

Since, after 1945, Europe gradually made choices upon what to remember and what to forget in shaping a controversial European identity, this study argues that a similar choice was made or preserved within the narratives connected to the Eastern enlargement. Rather than opening ways to integrative narratives, a particular constant reference to a normative historical understanding of the European past and a recall of privileged memories led to the persistence of a East-West slope inside the European Union that continues to make use of the old modern civilizational hierarchies and cognitive mappings. The mnemonic luggage of the new members might therefore challenge in the future the nobility of the pre-existing identitarian narratives inside the EU if they are not to be carefully reconsidered in their exclusive or exclusivist features. To make use or abuse once more of the ways in which Alexander Wendt can be paraphrased, the European identity is what Europeans make of it.

In methodological terms, the present study accommodates within the wide area of European enlargement studies with a constructivist emphasis on the European identity formation and its role in shaping a particular European polity. The existence of a polity determines or extracts its legitimacy through a projected European demos. Inherent to such a logic, a legitimate European policy requires some degree of identification in order to be sustainable⁶. While acknowledging the EU’s democratic deficit issue when it’s about the accountability for policy choices taken in Brussels, the identitarian endeavors are rather emanations of axiological narratives existing within the “demos” itself or resulted from particular policies. In this context, this study intends to approach critically – in the sense that Tzvetan Todorov expressed that critical thinking is a typical European value⁷ – specific features of the European identity narrative and to follow some traces that indicate its “othering” manifestations resulting from the stereotypes in dealing with the past. Yet, by doing so, I agree with Merje Kuus that to criticize such a narrative is not to contest the overall need for policy harmonization among EU member states but to problematize the implicit hierarchy and its axiological implications since, inertial within the process of enlargement, this hierarchy proliferates differences in terms of essential core features of places that are constitutive to EU’s identity making and its inherent tendency to disregard specific national or historical circumstances⁸. As Jan Werner Muller expressed it, «the point of stressing memory is not to deny that interests shape policy, but, with Max Weber, to examine the historically and ideologically conditioned construction of these interests»⁹. Since memory and remembrance are more about identity than about the outcomes of institutional politics or realist history this study is an inquiry about some perceived gaps in the so called European identity and discontinuities involved in approaching the past in the “reunified” Europe. The departure point is the explicit assumption that identities are dynamic social constructs rather than substantive ontological pre-givens though identitarian reifications often involve ontologizations of contingency. If a European imaginary is shaping a European community, in Anderson’s understanding of “imagined communities”¹⁰, than multiple identifications should be possible in an inclusive logic. Yet, inside recent Europe, a logic of appropriation functions in conjunction with an exclusivist/exclusive/marginalizing logic. As Ole Wæver insisted, a paradoxical political identity gradually puts emphasis on the fragility of European integration¹¹ in a mechanic of memory that strikingly resembles the strategies of politics of the past after 1945. The recent European enlargements determined the increase of narratives mediating social relations by putting together people with different memories and understandings or misunderstandings of the past. This lead to the formation of multiple non-congruent networks of social relations that generated a profound diversity of identity building patterns and challenged the already precarious self-perception of Europe.

Frank Schimmelfennig has convincingly shown that EU takes the features of a rather exclusive club when it’s about to pay the price for its collective identity in terms of facilitating a beneficial integration to new members¹². Since a common market is not a way of living together, diverse nations of Europe pass within the transnational identity making through self-othering stages while a significant number of new-members are saluted alterities in the enlarged Europe. European identity – as Thomas Eriksen showed – takes shape through an internal dynamic of dichotomization and complementarization¹³. It asserts the core/periphery nexus by absorbing the desirable as commonality and marginalizing the different as unaligned. While an identity based explanation is better able to account for the enlargement decision itself than conventional theories of integration¹⁴ we can infer more about the substance of the European identity only if we get to know more about the Europe’s and European others¹⁵. In the context of this analysis, the EU membership status is viewed as essential in that it influences the very way in which diverse actors inside European Union see themselves and are seen by other as social beings. Acknowledging the existence or the making of internal “others” is crucial since it indicates the context-dependent formation of a European identity. By confronting the narratives taking shape inside the EU, we can non-conflictually limit the reifying tendencies of essentialist or primordialist understandings of the European identity. This is because identitarian narratives not only describe but also produce identities¹⁶ as collective rationalizations of social relations¹⁷. Anna Triandafyllidou has extensively showed how national identities are reconsidered and the ways in which the images of Self and Other are transformed in the emerging new Europe¹⁸. These transformations are to be seriously taken into account in providing a more appropriate understanding of Europeaness as a processual formation that requires the acknowledgement of its plural sources rather than stubbornly staying linked with an exclusivist “grand narrative”.

After 1945 many nations had a lot to be silent about. However what they talked about mattered and it gradually came out that what they didn’t talked about mattered as well. Both memory and amnesia are now attached to a certain image that European nations and Europe as a union have on themselves. After 1989 things started looking as more of the same: civilized silence seemed more sustainable in the process of evaluating Europeaness for the newcomers. For Tony Judt, the unnatural and fundamentally “false” European identity is the result of «the deliberate and sudden unconcern with the immediate European past and its replacement by “Euro-cant” in its various forms»¹⁹. By analyzing the EU institutional narratives, Fabrice Larat showed that within the texts of the European treaties we can already find visible attempts to unify the historical roots of integration in forms that promote an “official” historiography through which «some aspects of the European legacy are accepted and some are definitively rejected»²⁰. To such a historiography Judt reacts when he writes that «the ways in which the official versions of the war and post-war era have unraveled in recent years are indicative of unresolved problems for both western and eastern Europe»²¹. In the period after 1945, as Judt argues, it was not only the division of Europe that constituted the post-war trademark but it was also «the period during which Europe’s post-war memory was molded»²². The wartime memory/amnesia nexus currency was constituted by the simple but cynic logic of a self-indulging projection of the guilt and blame toward the Germans. By using the logic of “They did it!” it naturally followed “We’re innocent”. An instant amnesia comfortably installed while the memories of complicity during the atrocious war all over Europe were soon to be marginal for a continent engaged now in two radically different versions of reconstruction that will remain as a scarf over two types of modernity: the Eastern and Western ones. It was the myth of resistance that emerged instantly all over Europe to strengthen the selective qualities of memory and thus «to be innocent a nation had to have resisted and to have done so in its overwhelming majority, a claim that was perforce made and pedagogically enforced all over Europe, from Italy to Poland, from the Netherlands to Romania»²³. The widespread of such “official” normative narratives as mnemonic loci were considered strategies to reinstall legitimacy and to channel energies towards reconstruction. While there is nothing wrong in selective memory, the objectification of a particular view of the past based on mnemonic choices never remained unchallenged. This is a thing that the history itself taught us as well.

After 1989 the Central and Eastern European countries followed a similar strategy while Western Europe greeted them with the happy aura of the now self-discovered status of a Cold War victor. Despite not being so keen as America on using and enjoying the statement “We won the Cold War”, Europe has chosen amnesia once more: “it was the Soviet Union’s fault ergo we are once again innocent”. This amnesia however created some strong but confused feelings after 1989 of some sort of unity that will soon come to be covered through the rational-choice messianism of conditionality as marking the functional and equal opportunity driven integration in the European community of axiological choices. In identitarian terms, the individuals from the post-communist countries were invited into a generous void: a ready shaped would be European identity with no real interest but some very limited exotic curiosity for their past and an emancipatory narrative that exposed them to the pedagogical task of learning now the other face of modernity: to adapt to the future by forgetting the laggardness of their past. Amnesia became a prerequisite of integration and a requirement for Europeaness. However, the inexplicit victor’s approach on the end of the Cold War does nothing but pushes forward the Cold War logic itself. The division of Europe rather persisted through the narrative reflexes of taking the post-Cold War as a return to normalcy of the East which now no longer represents a threat for Europe but a laggard that has to be taught afresh how to adjust to presumably universalistic desirability incarnated by the West. This move was nothing else than the return to the original reflexes of the Enlightenment that invented Eastern Europe in evaluative terms in the first place²⁴. As Larry Wolff showed in his fascinating book on Inventing Eastern Europe, we can trace the Western view on Europe as a division in two distinct civilizational entities back in the intellectual agenda of the 18^th century. Eastern Europe is thus, in Wolff’s account, a cultural construction invented by the Enlightenment intelligentsia out of ideological self-interests and self-promotion. This construction inflicted however long-lasting mental mappings that continue to configure prejudicial quasi-ontological views of the West towards the East. To quote Larry Wolff extensively:

 

The revolution of 1989 in Eastern Europe has largely invalidated the perspective of half of century, compelling the reconsideration of Europe as a whole. The maps on the wall have always showed a continent of many colors, the puzzle pieces of many states; the dark line of the iron curtain, supplying the light and shadow in front and behind, was drawn on the maps in the mind. Those maps must be adjusted, adapted, reconceived, but their structures are deeply rooted and powerfully compelling. In the 1990s Italians are worriedly deporting Albanian refugees: Albanesi, no grazie! (Albanian people, no thanks!) reads the graffiti on the wall. Germans are greeting visitors from Poland with thuggish violence and neo-Nazi demonstrations, while tourists from Eastern Europe are being arbitrarily stopped and searched in Paris shops, under the suspicion of shoplifting. Statesmen, who once enthusiastically anticipated the unity of Europe, are looking away from the siege of Sarajevo, wishing perhaps that it were happening on some other continent. Alienation is in part a matter of economic disparity, the wealth of Western Europe facing the poverty of Eastern Europe, but such disparity is inevitably clothed in the complex windings of cultural prejudice. The iron curtain is gone, and yet the shadow persists. ²⁵

 

This is not to say that Western Europe was not messianic enough after 1989 but that it was not prepared nor willing to treat the Eastern part of Europe as its equal partner. This unpreparedness did nothing but perpetuate the deficit of memory to be soon a conditional requirement for integration. As Timothy Garton Ash has put it, the only fact that seemed to matter anymore about communism was and still is in the present the fact that it is over²⁶. It is surprising the indifference that EU showed and continues to show for the need/moral requirement of Central and Eastern European countries to engage seriously with their own past. In Central and Eastern Europe after 1989 it was rather a ferocious competition that took shape over claiming Western cultural genes as a return ticket to the “old family”. The borders of Eastness started moving again on the premise that forgetting the recent past faster might make place for remembering sooner the deeper and more profound identitarian layer that stands for Westerness and ensures the nobility of convergence. That’s how particular memories started to become sources of identitarian reinvention. The European enlargement process can be seen once again as an ad-hoc requirement for a pre-defined Europeanization than as an effective identity-sensitive integration. Although is institutionally integrative, EU has no assertive position towards acknowledging the past of new post-communist members but rather chooses to develop in parallel a European identitarian emphasis and a process of “othering”. The terms of discussing European identity are mainly configured by the post-Second World War standards and narratives which are not always inclusive towards historical trajectories of the new members. The Second World War and Cold War memories of post-communist nations are most of the time considered to be marginal or too complicated for the integrative identitarian project financed by the EU. They might also bring into discussion things that the “core” Europe might prefer not to deal with for now. Though a tremendous literature on post-communism was written, just rarely it is attached to the emancipating project of European identity building other than as an independent variable for its underdevelopment. If during the Cold War the efforts in understanding Eastern European Countries were «mere footnotes to Sovietology»²⁷ the risk runs that they will become again footnotes to a “grand narrative” safeguarding the EU. Must the past of these new members be acknowledged in the EU identitarian project or must the terms of compliance shape also the imaginary of the people from these countries? Does the EU develop conditionality requirements for historical amnesia? Is European identity inclusive or club based exclusive? These are important questions since, as Tony Judt says, «the communist experience did not come from nowhere, did not disappear without leaving a certain record, and cannot be written out of the local past, as it had earlier sought to extrude from that past those elements prejudicial to its own projects»²⁸.

European Union required compliance and got it. However, when it’s about identitarian integration is rather a move from alignment of the less Europeans to the “core” Europe while the East/West slope tends to persist within the EU with visible features. The persistence of the slope does not come from engagement in acknowledging the tragic experiences in the East but rather from the perception that the East will be truly European when it will be “more of the same/more of the West” while for the moment being acknowledged as less. According to the EU logic of the fait historique accompli, Eastern Europe should gradually disappear as a distinct category inside the EU as a result or a sign of the so called convergence induced through conditionality. However, the identitarian narrative that evaluates in terms of Europeaness or les-Europeaness nations inside the EU will not fade away very soon.

Thimothy Snyder argued that the differences encompassed within the historical memory in Eastern and Western Europe go seriously beyond the experience of the Cold War. The Cold War itself despite being a “common” experience generated rather diverse perspectives. One of the facts that Snyder notes as being rarely acknowledged in recent accounts of remembrance in the West is the particularity of the historical memory that emanates in Eastern Europe from a double occupation both by Germans and Soviets. In some sense it is harder to integrate the Eastern experience in a wider European historical account precisely because «almost all of the worst acts of political violence in Europe in the twentieth century took place in lands that fell behind the Iron Curtain»²⁹. The particular nature of the Cold War as not being “hot” produced no significant individual experiences, mourning and memorialization in Western Europe but mental divisions that tend to persist. Eastern Europe was exposed to a temporal decalage in dealing with its own memories of the Second World War, Holocaust and the Soviet atrocities that when available to be put on an open floor were to be confronted with the prioritizations resulted from the views of the present and future. That’s how some collaborators of the Nazis could have been refurbished as heroes in some post-communist states due to their opposition to the Soviets that became now a virtuous currency. In terms of this temporal desynchronization in accessing the historical memory, Eastern Europe is described by Benoît Challand as in a state of allochronism that results from its different positioning in time in relation with Western Europe’s referent in dealing with memory. The preference of Eastern Europeans to prioritize memories of Nazi and Soviet occupations and the atrocities derived from them over the memory of Holocaust is taken as an example of allochronism. Allochronism becomes, for Challand, a sign that different positionings in times of memorialization create distances among various groups. Specific axiological attributes are attached to the reference point setter and the desynchronized: active/passive, advanced/laggard, modern/traditional. The allochron group is thus disempowered and projected into a state heteronomy. Heterochrony is thus a terminological combination between allochronism and heteronomy that is seen by Challand as optimal for describing the difference within the collective representation of Eastern Europe in Western Europe. In his words, heterochrony expresses «the situation in which a given group does not have the capacity to choose the cognitive means to perceive itself as a consequence of being put in a different time location»³⁰. By trying to avoid the bias of Western-centrism in explaining the differences in dealing with the past, Challand explicitates also the asymmetrical nature of cognitive perceptions on the “proper way” to deal with the past in the two socially constructed sides of Europe. In this sense, «a division along the East-West line is still an object of reproduction and reification»³¹. This division might persist at least until EU will truly become an “ever closer union among the peoples of Europe”. And this moment doesn’t look to be fastly approaching as some would like to think. On one side, from a Western Europeans perspective, if I am to use the East-West slope stereotypes, the last 20 years are a pretext for not cozy commemoration of unclear circumstances in 1989 that have anyway to be integrated as European in their victory and non-European in their past. On the other side, from an Eastern European perspective, emerges an embarrassing confusion on a multitude of not yet clear events that leads to discursive avoidance of remembrance (sometimes politically correct sometimes not: see Timothy Garton Ash³²) in favor of simply commemorative discourses joined by an exotic feeling of being somehow different and particular in the actual context of Europe.

The European Union “produced” new Europeans and for simplicity tried to greet them with pre-shaped identity. By doing so it also produced two categories of the other: the external and the internal. The external ones are complex and geopolitical: the unilateral hegemonic American, the falsely mythologized undesirable Russian, the concerning Turkish, the troubling post-colonial, the post-Yugoslav, the strange and efficient Chinese, Pakistani or Indian, the fast spreading Muslim, etc. The internal ones are even more troubling since they can be integrated in an imagined form of unity and in an historical inheritance but in the meantime escapes it. This internal one is both familiar and foreign but brings a luggage of commonality with him at all time: it’s the same as another. Even if Europe is about free mobility and movement this new inside “other” remains still a significant alterity.

Attila Melegh wrote a convincing book on the complexities of the processes of “othering” inside Europe and especially with regard to Central and Eastern Europe. He sees an East-West slope connected with a liberal utopia that links the frame of the process of “othering” in colonial and post-colonial Western discourse with a process of “othering” produced inside the EU concomitantly with the enlargement towards the East. The East-West civilizational slope is, for Melegh, historically established and has been biopolitically visible since 18^th century. The EU enlargement is just another form of “othering” Central and Eastern Europe both from the West but as well coming from the East as an internal reaction towards the Western patronizing attitude. For Melegh this is a sociologically visible phenomenon that does not have to be transformed in normative statements but more profoundly analyzed since this slope shows significant tendencies to resist in the forthcoming times³³. The engagement for EU integration was centripetal. Central and Eastern European nations had to pursue the goal of emancipation extremely fast as if it were a school task. Transition and democratization studies regarding post-communist societies scholarly show tremendous enthusiasm in pursuing such aims as there were causal chains to be followed. Yet, a simple insertion inside the post-communist realm will show otherwise. A deficit of history, memory, disclosure, and of understanding of past are in place and affirm resistance to fast aimed targeted goals of EU identitarian integration. On the other side, Western superficiality in addressing recent history of these countries exposed the EU to policy confusions and sometimes it seemed that the EU has serious troubles in dealing with its new citizens. These troubles generate the path of creating “the other”, “the alterity” inside the EU.

An interesting and abrupt division between the self-perception of Europe and of the “inner other” was inserted in 2003 by the Habermas/Derrida intellectual statement in their attempt to respond to Donald Rumsfeld³⁴. Acknowledging in 2003 the support of the “new Europe” for the war in Iraq, Rumsfeld opposed it to the “old” Europe as a counterbalance of Western European opposition for the war. This led Habermas in a quick reply to refer in essentialist terms to the “core” Europe that should define the European moral perspective on war. For Habermas it is France and Germany or the “Old Europe”/“Core Europe” that are supposed to define the counterbalance to the US unilateralism while the “non-core” Europe should follow. Nevertheless, despite the international politics statement, both Rumsfeld and Habermas managed to make explicit a cleavage that usually is kept hidden. Yet Habermas was quite specific in approaching the shape of Europe: when it’s about the political identity of the EU, it is the “core” that should matter as a reflection of a European attitude and not the “new Europe”. One of the many answers to such statements is that of the famous Hungarian writer Peter Esterhazy:

 

Once I was an Eastern European; then I was promoted to the rank of Central European […]. Then a few months ago, I became a New European. But before I had the chance to get used to this status – even before I could have refused it – I have now become a non-core European. […] And while I see no serious reason for not translating this new division (core/non-core) with the terms “first class” and “second-class”, still, I’d rather not speak in that habitual Eastern European, forever insulted way³⁵.

 

The former French President Jacques Chirac deepened Rumsfeld’s claims by stating that EU candidate states are in a position to choose between Brussels and Washington when they take positions on foreign policy matters. Such events – showed Christopher J. Bickerton - augured badly, suggesting that once the EU’s membership had grown, «it would be impossible for the continent to achieve any geopolitical unity»³⁶. In a book about What Holds Europe Together? aimed at answering Romano Prodi’ request for finding the roots of solidarity that can strengthen Europe in the future, Janos Matyas Kovacs, referring to the narratives of enlargement states that «scattered references to the overambitious demands of the Easterners, as well as to their poor performance and bad habits remained an indispensable component of even the friendliest Western narratives»³⁷. Merje Kuus sees also, despite the rhetorical claimed unity, a geopolitical continuity and reproduction of the division between East and West. The narrative of the insecure Eastern Europe – both for inside Europe and for external challenges – persists after the end of the Cold War. «The double enlargement is not undermining but working in tandem with the notion of a multitiered Europe in which Europeaness declines as one moves east»³⁸. Originated in the 18^th century, the East/West slope was profoundly different from the ancient-long otherness of the Orient: Eastern Europe became an entity of negative connotations inside Europe as an internal alterity. This figure of Eastern Europe – Kuss argued – has undergone a number of transformations since its emergence, but «its premise of otherness has persisted»³⁹. The post-Cold War understanding of Eastern Europe is, for Kuus, nothing else but a continuation of the established model by the area studies and Sovietology during the Cold War that treated Russia, the Soviet republics and satellite states as a bloc. In 1997, Adam Burgess was already showing that «the sense of profound difference between East and West has, if anything, intensified with the end of the political division of Europe between communist and capitalist blocs»⁴⁰.

The East/West slope does not operate in clear geographical terms but rather in valorized terms of degrees of Europeaness, Eastness, developed-not yet developed, mature-immature, secure-less secure, etc. More, this axiological scheme is broken by divisions inside Eastern Europe itself where the geometrically variable concept of Central Europe became indeed close-hearted to Western Europe and provided some pain in the Eastern excluded part. Still this achieved nothing but making the scale of Europeaness even more elaborate. Eastness is still European identity “under construction” but not quite a domain for colonization. I therefore subscribe to Cerutti’s statement that «whatever may happen now, the emergence of a European self-identification process depends on future political developments much more than on cultural pre-givens»⁴¹. The problematic dimension in framing an European identity – as a practical tool for cohesion, solidarity and would-be policies – is if its formation is dialogical or will consist purely in submission of the other. Though a illustration of a historically contingent idea of the self, the European citizen is anchored in a very discursive but yet not elaborated identity. One of the things ignored in approaches of European identity is that individual or collective, historical or ad-hoc identity always requires a subject. Of course now the question would be if there is a real subject for an European identity? Though the “otherness” or alterity of the EU members, of Russia, or of “Orients” in their cultural or geographic understandings is perceived as a periphery problem in the emancipator dominant narrative inside the EU, I believe that it will strongly shake its foundations in the upcoming future and will ask for a re-negotiation that will bring EU to one of its most initial statuses: the one of a conflict resolution tool.

The European identity issue, in a cost-benefits analysis of most of scholarly work, could be easily abandoned with no real significant consequences. Ruth Wittlinger explained that «the lack of a European identity does not necessarily have to be seen as a severe flaw»⁴². However if it is still believed that there is some normative pressure on supporting open debates on the topic, then today’s dominant approach from the top to the bottom should be abandoned, and a more critical and realist approach should as well introduce the “others” and the reshaping of memory and remembrance that they bring with them. An approach of European identity should be complemented today with public debates on national histories of the new members, with reconciliation, restitution, disclosure and awareness rather than indifferent arrogance of the old towards the new learners that need just time to disciplinate and adjust. Europe should escape the “spell of Plato”. The new member states that are too busy now to comply should find the energy – and the EU should support this – to affirm their understanding of Europeanity of their past, present and future beyond institutional rhetoric and widespread troubled attitudes. Serious discussion, research and activism should therefore be professed inside the new EU nations, and – agreeing with Timothy Garton Ash⁴³ – I believe that historians should exercise now an important role in revealing the “lessons of history” in these “other” nations, in clarifying the role of the past in shaping perceptions of Europe as union, if not as a locus for a common identity.

Therefore, «it is not so much that memory is the independent variable determining political culture and ultimately policies, but that memory to some extent is political culture»⁴⁴. Europe, Europeanism, Europeanization shall be complemented now with cerebral understanding from Russia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Poland, etc. “The others” should write their own stories about being European and these stories should become integral parts of the European self-understanding and shape the EU policies in the future. The explicit integration of these stories will lighten again the dialogical nature of Europe and will provide a potential exit from the embarrassing not imagined but imaginary European identity and open the path for a true integration. Such histories can also have the benefit of constructively including what is perceived for now as ignorable or undesirable: path dependencies in post-communist democratization, accomplishments in the modernizing communist projects, complicities of the West with the East, memories of abandonment and also support and cohesion, exclusion, tragic destinies, remembrance instead of instant amnesia, retributions and recognition, perceptions, processes of specific elite and intellectual configuration, dissidents and diasporas, national narratives, cultural affinities, dynamic integrative dimensions of post-communist culture that actively complement the passivity of compliance. Remembrance can take European countries out of sloganisms and give meaning and value to both national self-valorization and active integration. As Thimoty Snyder expressed it:

 

Europeans must find a way to rewrite the larger narrative so as to include both East and West. This requires a confrontation with two basic matters of the recent European past: that the center of the suffering Second World War was in the East rather than the West, and that East Europeans had to experience communist subjugation for four decades rather than European integration. It should be simple, one might think, to accept the full historical force of Nazi and Soviet terror. The European Union, after all, is built upon the premise that totalitarianism must never return. Yet in practice this requires some humility. One often hears the argument, nowadays, that Americans can learn about total war and political terror from Europeans, because they experienced the horrors of twentieth century. This is true. By the same token, West Europeans have much to learn from East Europeans⁴⁵.

 

45 Timothy Snyder, United Europe Divided History, in Krzysztof Michalski (ed.), What Holds Europe Together?, op. cit., pp. 185-188 and p. 188.

The article was translated into English by the author.

How to cite: Emanuel Crudu, Shaping the Europe identity: convergent patterns of memory and amnesia after 1945/1989 trademakers, in N. Mattucci, C. Santoni, Esclusione, identità e differenza, Bologna, 2010, also in Before and Beyond Auschwitz Project - Digital Brochure, 
http://www.odg-isrec.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=163%3Ashaping-the-europe-identity-convergent-patterns-of-memory-and-amnesia-after-19451989-trademakers&catid=21%3 Aesclusione-identita-e-differenza-whole-essays&Itemid=43〈=it

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