Memory & The Future of Europe: Rupture and Integration in the Wake of Total War (Pre-Recorded)

Session Submission Type: In-Person Author meet critics

Session Description

The development of the European Union as a community-based project of integration with decision-making powers outside the constitutional architecture of the nation-state is the most significant innovation in twentieth century politics. In this way it raises fundamental questions our understanding of the state, sovereignty, citizenship, democracy, and the relationship between political power and economic forces. Despite its achievements, events at the start of the twenty-first century – including the political, economic, and financial crisis of the Eurozone, as well as Brexit and the rise of populism – pose an existential threat to the EU.

Peter J. Verovšek’s new book, Memory and the Future of Europe, which has been nominated for the 2020 Memory Studies Association’s first book award, addresses the crisis of the EU by treating integration as a response to the rupture created by the continent’s experience of total war. The book’s argument builds the work of Hannah Arendt and the Frankfurt School to develop the concept of historical rupture. Although the past usually limits autonomy by forcing events into existing causal chains, Verovšek argues that Europe’s experience of total war (1914-45) created opportunities for political change by providing actors with the cognitive, motivational and justificatory resources to question existing narratives, institutions and practices.

After setting up this theoretical framework, the builds on the original archival research to document how important postwar leaders, especially Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman and Konrad Adenauer, helped to create the European communities by combining the economic logic of integration with moral arguments based on the imperatives of a bellicose past. While this economic focus worked as long as it was supported by the normative resources of the past, the fading of the memories of war has made economics into the EU’s sole raison d’être.

Moving from the history of European integration to contemporary problems, the second half of the book traces Europe’s existing pathologies to the project’s loss of its moral foundations rooted in collective memories of total war. As the generations with personal memories of the two world wars pass away, economic gain has become the EU’s sole raison d’être. If it is to survive its future challenges, the EU will have to create a new historical imaginary that relies not only on the lessons of the past, but also builds on Europe’s ability to protect its citizens by serving as a counterweight against the forces of globalization. By focusing on collective memory as a historical explanation for integration and as a continuing resource for the future of the European project, this book breaks new ground in European Union studies and offers interesting resources for thinking about the EU’s responses to both the financial crisis of 2008 and to the more recent challenges of far-right, populist leaders in Central Europe, especially Victor Orbán in Hungary and Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland.

At this author-meets-critics roundtable, leading experts on European politics will analyze and discuss this new book. In addition to offering new insights into the politics of the EU, this session will also reflect on and evaluate the potential of the paradigm of collective memory as a methodological framework for understanding the EU and European politics and society more generally.

Sub Unit

• Division 15: European Politics and Society

Chair

• Peter J. Verovšek University of Sheffield

Presenters

• Bojan Bugaric University of Sheffield, Department of Law

• Kalypso Nicolaidis University of Oxford

• Paul Petzschmann Carleton College

• Catherine Blanche Guisan University of Minnesota

• Onur Bakiner Seattle University