Legitimation Through Remembrance? The Changing Regimes of Historicity of European Integration

Abstract:

This article is a socio-historical analysis of the European institutions' attempts to promote a memory of European integration since the 1950s. It demonstrates how the European institutions and their representatives referred to and symbolized various pasts in order to root the European project historically. EU elites have used the past for their contemporary political strategies resulting in specific ‘regimes of historicity’, which evolved in correspondence with the context of European integration. For the pioneers of the European Community, the future was the dominant time-category. From the mid-1970s, the increasing weight attributed to memory and heritage is the sign of the emergence of a new regime of historicity: presentism. In this regime, the official discourses and initiatives attempt at (re-)enacting a common European past in the citizens' present. Through the analysis of concrete actions—historiographical projects, official ceremonies, cultural programmes—I show that the promotion of a transnational European memory is a manifestation of this regime of historicity. Memorialization processes, which often neglect historical accuracy, re-present elements of the past in order to materialize commonalities and to foster collective identification. These uses of the past are addressed to the public and are apart of the legitimation strategies of the EU.