EU Memory, Amnesia and the “Ukrainian Crisis”

Commemorating peace-making in European Union politics resembles more the invocation of a mantra than a serious effort at recollection. There is little memory of the sea change in mindsets that political reconciliation required both at the end of WWII and of the Cold War (Pond, 2012; Guisan 2003and 2011), and to which grassroots initiatives contributed especially. The problem seems amnesia rather than excessive or distorted memory. Major scholarly works have appeared in the last ten years on the EU as an agent of conflict resolution (Diez, Albert and Stetter, 2008; Tocci, 2004 and 2007; Whitman and Wolff, 2012). But this research fails to relate the early European tradition of peace making and its popular involvement to current policies. 

How to remedy this gap in our knowledge? And why should this matter? To answer the first question this essay draws from Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. A hermeneutical analysis of EU peace-making practices in the 1950s and 1990s allows us to theorize the witnesses of the actors involved, thus to turn individual stories into concepts applicable to other situations.  This approach does not replace, but complements the comparative strategies deployed to study the EU and conflict resolution. To answer the second question, the essay examines the negotiations with Ukraine over the Eastern Partnership and analyzes critically the substantive content of the Association Agreement, which pays little attention to peace-making.