Please join the East Central European Center at the Harriman Institute for a discussion with Laure Neumayer, Professor of Political Science at University de Picardie Jules Verne. This event is part of the Collective Memory and Democratic Backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe series organized by Harriman Institute Postdoctoral Fellow Čarna Pištan.
Memory has taken center stage in European-level policies after the Cold War, as the Western historical narrative based on the uniqueness of the Holocaust has been challenged by calls for an equal condemnation of Communism and Nazism. Since the early 1990s, Central European representatives in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and in the European Parliament have carried out anti-communist mobilizations in European institutions, pan-European political parties and transnational advocacy networks. This presentation will analyze the memory entrepreneurs’ requests for collective remembrance and legal accountability of Communist crimes. Neumayer will show that these newcomers managed to strengthen their positions and impose a totalitarian interpretation of Communism in the European assemblies, which directly shaped the EU’s remembrance policy. However, the rules of the European political game and recurring ideological conflicts with left-wing opponents reduced the legal and judicial implications of this anti-communist grammar at the European level.
Ways to Attend
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