Transforming Memory and the European Project

Abstract

Ideas about the future of Europe have been articulated from the late 1940s in tandem with ideas about the European past and the need to overcome its violence. This has led to the gradual emergence of a master-narrative that found expression in the Nobel Peace Prize of 2012 as well as in the planning of a "European House of History" in Brussels, which sees the European Union as the outcome of an ability to overcome the divisions of the past. Despite the availability of such a master-narrative, however, policy-makers continue to express their concern about the failure of citizens to identify with the European project. This article builds on recent developments in cultural memory studies to engage critically with these ongoing public debates. While sharing their underlying premise that collective memory is a key resource in promoting present and future solidarity, it challenges the prevailing concept of memory, modeled on nineteenth-century nationalism, that sees it as a common legacy exclusively inherited by a pregiven group. It proposes instead a dynamic, performative, and affiliative model of memory production based on its capacity to renegotiate the borders of communities rather than merely express and enshrine old ones. This transformative view of memory is more appropriate when conceiving of new forms of citizenship within a rapidly changing European Union than the ethnic-nationalist models inherited from the nineteenth century.

Transnational Memories

“…One way to adopt a more realistic perspective is to follow Ann Rigney’s observation that there is a ‘striking lack of attention to Europe’ in most of these studies. Her point is that Europe stands for a different form of the transnational that ‘represents neither the national nor the global’ which makes this case ‘theoretically so fascinating’ 5 …”

“…Her concept of ‘traveling memory’ is geared to a world of communication flows and great migrant mobility. As media and people are incessantly on the move, she argues that new possibilities arise ‘for shaping post-national citizenship and for creating new lines of solidarity within the global arena’ 5 . In their influential book on The Holocaust in the Global Age , 4 Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider had already argued along similar lines, describing a global scenario, in which the constraints of ethnic nationalism and particularism give way to a universal and cosmopolitan memory for post-national citizens of the world.…”

On agonistic narratives of migration

“….] the arts have the potential to generate new narratives that break away from inherited models, by providing a conduit for bringing into play new perspectives and unfamiliar voices that fall outside dominant discourses’ (Rigney, 2012: 621–2).…”

Remembrance as remaking: memories of the nation revisited

“…Multiscalarity thus acknowledges the continued relevance of the national in today's entangled world even as it relativizes its importance in relation to alternatives operating at scales below that of the nation (the family, the city and the region) or at scales larger than the nation (diasporic, European, planetary). Where the concept of the transcultural tends to emphasize the ‘unbounded’ character (Bond et al ) of memory production, multiscalar approaches emphasize instead the continued, if not increased importance of boundaries and borders as a result of increased entanglements (De Cesari and Rigney : 4; Rigney ; see also Graziano ).…”