After All These Years, Still Divided by Memories? East Central Europe and European Union Politics of Memory Twenty Years after the Enlargement

Abstract

The article analyzes how central and eastern European members of the EU relate to the main nodes of the EU’s politics of memory, such as the first and second world wars, the Holocaust as Europe’s negative founding myth, Soviet Communism being equally as criminal as the Nazi regime, expulsions as a pan-European trauma, the legacy of colonialism, Europe as a continent of immigration, and Europe’s post-1945 success story. The author argues that mnemonic divides between the West and East in Europe remain visible despite the EU’s efforts to bridge this gap over the twenty years since the 2004 enlargement.