The Interplay of the European Commission, Researcher and Educator Networks and Transnational Agencies in the Promotion of a Pan-European Holocaust Memory

Abstract:

The article scrutinizes the structural conditions under which the European Commission works to implement the political aim of constructing a pan-European path to commemorating the mass crimes of the twentieth century. The pivotal obstacle to attaining a common European way of remembering the ‘negative history’ of the continent (or to at least opening up room for discussion about it) lies in the debate between those who stress the singularity of the Holocaust and those who demand that the atrocities of both the National Socialist and the Communist regimes should equally be recognized. Bearing this in mind, the article analyses how the Commission makes use of existing networks of experts in research, memorialization and education and how the specific interrelatedness of these networks affects the Europeanization effort. In particular, it examines the role of networking conferences, highlights two exemplary fields of antecedent interrelations between the memory actors who were convened by the Commission and points to the implications of the fact that the networks and actors involved do not necessarily share a pan-European agenda.