‘Never again!’: How EU institutions draw lessons from the past

Lessons from the past have always played a fundamental role in European integration. References to Europe’s bloody history coupled with allusions to the lessons to be drawn from it have dominated institutional communications since the beginning of the EU’s existence. How do these ‘lessons’ look like? Which elements of Europe’s history do they refer to? And how do they get contextualised in today’s Europe?

By tracing back discussions on how Europe’s past should be remembered and by investigating disputes centring on the question of what should be evoked by establishing a specific calendar of official remembrance days, the proposed paper is going to scrutinize the way the EU has dealt publicly with history and memory since 1950. It tries to examine how and with which intentions ‘lessons of the past’ have been invoked in those occasions. It scrutinizes the particular political and ideological purposes connected to them and tries to shed light on the way past and present are causally linked in this process.

The analysis will be based on the examination of speeches by presidents of the High Authority and the European Commission between 1950 and 2010, the different treaty-texts and EP discussions on pertinent resolutions. The examination of relevant data using a mixture of quantitative content and qualitative interpretative analysis will provide some answers to the above listed questions.