Keeping the Memory of Death Alive

The European project has promotion of peace at its very core. Overcoming war through integration is a narrative continuously reproduced in treaty texts, and recently manifested when the EU received Nobel’s peace price. Having war as its founding myth, commemorating this memory becomes central.

That European integration is a project born out of the reconciliation following WWII, is a shared narrative among European political agents. However, I argue, differences exist in the way European history, and the memory of war, is invoked in political debate. Through an analysis of the political debate related to the parliamentary election in 2014, the paper shows how different memories of war was promoted, and how these were tied to competing visions of European integration. The paper argues that two competing decontestations of the memory of war is evident in political debate. One relying on the notion of post-war, and one relying on the notion of latent-war. The paper shows how European history, and especially the memory of war, plays an important role justifying current visions of European integration. Accentuating how past and future, memory and vision, are intimately related in political articulations. Building on the analysis of the competing interpretations of the memory of war, the paper goes on to discuss how the abstraction in the decontestations of European past, presently seen in rejection of the Greek demand for war reparations, is working to impede intra-European differences in memory.