These emotional touchstones, I argue, present what Jacques Derrida calls a ‘hauntology’ at the heart of neo-liberal Europe. The memory of Jews and the infamy of intolerant Europe were to provide the moral beacon for a new Europe. Deployed as guarantee of European postwar liberal ‘tolerance,’ European Holocaust memorialization tends to figure the Shoah redemptively, as an object lesson in ‘intolerance’ demanding vigilance and the protection of all minority groups facing discrimination. Increasingly, however, I will show, this conjuring of the ghosts of Jews and the Holocaust serves as a nationalist and racist conceit, designed to drive a wedge between a redeemed, post-racial Europe supposedly pledged to racial, gender, and sexual equality, and Europe’s disenfranchised immigrant and Muslim populations. This instrumentalization of Holocaust memory validates the new dual paradigm of European immigration policy: securitization and repressive integration.
At the same time, a counterdiscourse initiated by a number of scholars, politicians and critics uses the same emotional touchstones of the Shoah and anti-Semitism by designating Euro-Muslims as the ‘new Jews’ of Europe. I will critically examine the framework of equivalency that underlies such comparisons, and demonstrate that colonial racial formations, rather than the Holocaust per se, provide the political past that haunts Europe in its contemporary citizenship and integration policies.
