From a Shared Memory to New Re-Localizations: Anti-Communism and European Memory

Memory has gradually articulated as the cornerstone of European identity constructs through official steps, such as the 2008 Prague Declaration, that have upholded a mutually shared identity grounded in the experience of communist and fascist recent pasts. This “totalitarian” memory paradigm responded politically to the demands  of new member states of the EU to be have their histories acknowledged as topoi of cultural identification. At the same time, this mutuality put into place an affirmative transnational approach to politics of memory. Against this background, this paper considers the interplay between the ‘memorialisation’ of European political culture and ongoing changes within discourses on liberalism, recently visible in Eastern Europe in light of the ongoing debates regarding Europe’s “exterior border”. The paper focuses on recent reifications of anti-communist Romanian narratives where expanding discourses of liberal nationalism (Auer 2004)  mirror the negative transnational fluctuations in defining European identity. In 2015 alone, the Romanian Parliament has passed two distinct official bills as  ‘memory laws” and has approved a second official “condemnation” of the recent past in equally purging political terms, that essentialize pristine and purified understandings of the past. The paper links liberal nationalism and the “militancy” of memory (Muller 2009) with the resurgence of anticommunist discourse in order to understand the entanglement between transnational memory and local memory politics. The paper considers memory locally as a trope of “particularity” that answers to contestations of the continuity of Europe as shared political ideal and its resilience.