Saturday, March 15, 2014
Senate (Omni Shoreham)
If political communities are to be built against a significant other, then “Europe’s worst enemy is its Past”, remarked Tony Judt some years ago. Departing from this idea, the paper will analyse “lessons from the past” at the European Parliament and PACE after the 2004 enlargement of the EU to focus on the group of MPs who are participating to these memory deliberations. Using a database of debates, the group of “memory entrepreneurs” composed of around 70 MEPs (EU) and 100 MPs (PACE) will be analysed, focusing on the biographical, national and political variables. It will show that national and political views are to be taken into consideration, nonetheless one may also discuss whether age or profession (historians for example) are relevant to explain their engagement on these memory issues. The paper will discuss the influence of the MEP/MPs’ profile on the content of “lessons from the past”.
The database used for the oral participation analysis has been set up in the framework of an on-going research at the Université Catholique de Louvain (from the European Parliament and PACE’s website data) and it gathers parliamentary debates about the totalitarian crimes (from the Nazi and Stalinist periods), the commemoration of historical events like the Budapest upraising, the Solidarity movement and the commemoration of Srebrenica and teaching of History in conflict and postconflict zones.
