Europeanisation, National Identities and Migration ... - europeanization

32 Bernhard Giesen
figure of the perpetrator becomes an archetype of collective identity – not only in
Germany (Giesen 2002). Today many representatives of different European nations
officially confess their nation’s involvement in the Shoah. France is more concerned
with issues of collaboration than with the myth of resistance, Norway’s President
Bruntland admitted that more young Norwegians died in the ranks of the Waffen-
SS than as victims of the German occupation, Poland discovers its own genocidal
involvement in Jedbabwne, the Pope apologises for the non-intervention of the
Roman Catholic Church, and even the Italian neo-fascist leader Fini laid down
flowers at the site of the murders of the Fossi Adratici, etc. Compared to these solemn
confessions of guilt and its representation in monuments, museums and public
debates, the traditional celebrations of triumphant memorial days are increasingly
reduced to the status of local folklore.
The spread of a new culture of ritual confessions of guilt on the part of the
perpetrators centres around the Nazi genocide of the European Jews not only as an
exclusive German issue but as a collective European trauma, that relates to many
nations as victims and collaborators and even includes the allied forces, because
they did not prevent or stop the genocide by bombing the railroads to the death
camps. This secular shift from triumphant to traumatic foundations of collective
memory contrasts sharply with the post-war attempts to purify one’s own
community by shifting the guilt to one nation and within this nation to a limited
group of criminal if not demonic perpetrators. A new traumatic memory of
perpetrators now unites the European nations and provides for a tacitly assumed
moral consensus: a European collective identity based on the horror of the past.
Today, the burden of collective trauma is accepted by European nations because
most of the individual perpetrators are already dead and therefore out of the range
of jurisdiction. By decoupling collective identity from the sum of individual identities,
the present of the European Union has been separated from the European past
of war and genocide. Of course, one can observe right-wing extremism in most
European societies today, but this is treated as political deviance that could never
succeed in entering a national government.
That is why this new European identity based on a collective trauma of Nazism
was challenged when the right wing FPÖ party, led by Jörg Haider, entered the
Austrian government in 2000. The reason for sharp critique was not the mere
existence of right-wing extremism, but the official representation of a member state
by a party that is considered to be ridden with Nazism. We may consider the
European response to the new Austrian government to be grossly exaggerated
– Haider is a right-wing populist not much different from the French LePen or
the Italian Fini – but the Austrian case provided an excellent opportunity to
emphasise the new collective identity of European nations by staging the deviant
case and marking her as an outsider. Stigmatising the Austrian government also
demarcated the European boundary with respect to future candidates for membership
of the European Union. Thus for the first time it phrased an encompassing
identity of the European Union in moral terms without falling back into a missionary
triumphalism.