Other continents build their politics around interests, ideology, or economics. Europe does all of those things too — but it does them through the lens of memory. The 20th century left wounds so deep that they still structure political choices, institutional design, and foreign policy relationships today. Understanding European politics without understanding this is like reading a map without knowing where you started.
What “Memory” Actually Means Here
This isn’t about nostalgia or sentiment. Collective memory — the term political scientists use — describes something more precise: a society’s shared understanding of its past, and the way that understanding actively shapes present decisions.
Every European country carries its own version of the 20th century. Germany’s foundational political memory centres on Nazism and the Holocaust — the obligation never to repeat it. Poland’s memory runs from Nazi occupation directly into Soviet domination, with no liberation in between. The Baltic states share that Soviet experience and feel its weight particularly sharply given their geography. France navigates the Vichy collaboration alongside its colonial history, neither of which sits comfortably in national mythology. Spain is still working through the Franco dictatorship, which ended only in 1975.
The same historical period looks entirely different from each of these vantage points. That isn’t relativism. It’s the political reality that any European project has to navigate.
How Memory Built the European Union
The EU is, at its origin, a memory project. Its founding logic — six nations that had recently fought each other deciding to build shared institutions — only makes sense as a response to what had just happened. Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, and Konrad Adenauer weren’t primarily economists. They were statesmen who had witnessed catastrophe and were designing something to prevent its recurrence.
The EU’s institutional architecture reflects this. The European Parliament’s 2019 resolution on the importance of European remembrance frames the entire EU project in these terms: keeping historical memory of totalitarianism alive is a precondition for maintaining democratic values and the rule of law. The resolution explicitly equates Nazism and Stalinism as systems of totalitarian terror. Both sets of victims deserve equal remembrance, the Parliament argued.
That equation is itself politically significant. It reflects Eastern European historical experience as much as Western European experience — and several member states contested it, which illustrates exactly the problem the resolution was trying to address.
Different Memories, Different Europes
The most persistent tension in European memory politics runs between West and East — not because either side is wrong, but because they remember different things.
For much of Western Europe, the Second World War’s central legacy is the Holocaust and the need to prevent the conditions that produced it: authoritarian nationalism, racial ideology, the collapse of democratic norms. Germany built its post-war political identity around this so explicitly that remembrance is effectively institutionalised. Holocaust memorials, Stolpersteine, mandatory history education, legal restrictions on Holocaust denial — these are not incidental. They are state policy.
For Eastern Europe — Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Baltic states — the narrative is more complicated. Nazi occupation was followed not by liberation but by Soviet occupation. The memory of Soviet-era repression, deportations, and political control is as formative as the memory of Nazi violence. The 23 August date designated as the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism — marking the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 — reflects this dual memory. It was a push from Eastern European states to have their specific historical experience formally recognised at the EU level.
This distinction has direct political consequences. Eastern European attitudes toward Russia, NATO, and sovereignty are shaped in large part by living Soviet memory. When Poland and the Baltic states respond more urgently to Russian military pressure than some of their Western partners, this is partly strategic calculation and partly historical reflex. Memory is influencing policy in real time.
When History Becomes a Weapon
Historical memory can function as a tool of statecraft — governments use it to mobilise populations, justify policy, or delegitimise opponents. Russia’s deployment of the “Great Patriotic War” narrative to frame its role in Ukraine is the most visible current example. The Soviet victory over Nazism sits at the centre of contemporary Russian national identity as the state constructs it. That framing makes any comparison between Russia and Nazi Germany — as Ukrainian and Baltic politicians have drawn — politically explosive rather than merely provocative.
Meanwhile, Western European debates about colonial memory are following their own trajectory. Belgium’s reckoning with the Congo, France’s ongoing argument over Algeria, the Netherlands’ examination of the VOC period — these are domestic political processes. But they also shape foreign policy positions and bilateral relationships in the present. How a country frames its memories is not politically neutral.
The Council of Europe’s history education work addresses this directly. History teaching, the Council argues, should develop critical thinking and democratic citizenship rather than simply transmitting a national narrative. That is easier to endorse in principle than to implement in practice, since national narratives are precisely what history education has historically been for.
Can Europe Build a Shared Memory?
The EU has tried, with partial success, to construct a European layer of memory that sits alongside national memories without replacing them. The Holocaust remembrance framework is probably the most successful example: January 27, the date Auschwitz was liberated, is now an internationally recognised day of remembrance with broad institutional support across the continent.
Where Shared Memory Gets Complicated
The harder project — finding shared frameworks for memories that genuinely conflict — is ongoing. The attempt to equate Nazi and Soviet crimes in a single European memory framework generates real political arguments. Former communist countries push for recognition of Soviet-era crimes as equivalent in historical gravity to Nazi crimes. Some Western European countries resist that equivalence. The resistance stems partly from historical reasoning, partly from concern about complicating relations with Russia, and partly from worry that the equivalence can serve to relativise the Holocaust.
Generational change adds another layer. The youngest European voters have no personal connection to the events that shaped post-war politics. For them, the EU’s founding logic — never again war between European nations — is an abstract historical fact rather than a lived emotional reality. That shift in the relationship to memory carries political consequences. They are only beginning to become visible.
As explored in Culture Is No Longer Neutral Ground, the question of shared frameworks — who decides what gets commemorated, whose experience is centred, and on whose terms — is increasingly contested across European cultural institutions. Memory politics and cultural politics are converging in ways that will continue to shape the EU’s internal coherence.
History in Europe is never simply past. It is a resource that politicians deploy, an identity that citizens carry, and a wound that is periodically reopened by present events. Understanding which memory is operative in any given political situation — and why — is one of the more useful analytical tools available for making sense of European politics today.
Key Sources
- European Parliament – Resolution on the Importance of European Remembrance for the Future of Europe
- Council of Europe – History Education
- European Parliament Legislative Observatory – European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes
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