It’s like you’re making a theater play and you have no prima donna, you don’t have a lead actor. You are building everything with the actors and none of them speaks the same language.
Head Designer, House of European History
How does consensus emerge in politically and morally fragmented environments? Sociological writings investigating this question have traditionally drawn on trade-off models that explain cooperation through choice-models derived from economics [Axelrod Reference Axelrod1984]. If cultural mechanisms are introduced, they typically direct attention to the persistence of conflict rather than consensus [Lamont and Volnár Reference Lamont and Molnár2002]. The question of cultural elements of social consensus has received less theoretical attention ever since social theory departed from Talcott Parsons. Because of its focus on values, Parsons’ model of consensus seems both static and conservative to today’s thinkers. Yet in order to understand contemporary modes of creating cultural coordinates for social cohesion—telling stories that bind and stick—we need to bring this question back into perspective. To do so means to engage with the salient sociological topics of conflict and fragmentation; not to equate culture with consensus, but to show how culture can be mobilized in a way that builds consensus.
Social memory is an excellent field for the study of this set of problems. Past experiences, whether imagined, socially transmitted, or autobiographical, are sources of orientation in the present. The collective weight of references to the past goes beyond the individual and the “collected”, i.e. the aggregate level [Halbwachs Reference Halbwachs1994; Olick Reference Olick1999]. Groups, nations and corporations stitch their cultural quilt with powerful providential narratives. They do so in order to define how they wish to be seen, but also to convey who they are not. Social memory therefore entails both a unifying and a fragmenting potential.
In this paper, I examine the framework of the European Union (EU), because it is a truly fragmented arena in which the puzzle of cultural unity is politically decisive. European institutions suffer from a lack of legitimacy, as indicated by the low voter turnout in the elections to the European Parliament, which has steadily decreased ever since the first elections in 1979, or the popular rejection of the draft for a common European constitution in 2005. The EU has grown considerably in the past decade: the 2004 and 2007 accessions of 10 Eastern European countries has seen roughly 104 million people from the former Eastern Bloc join the EU, constituting about one-fifth of its general population. At the same time, the continuing economic recession has strained the principle of equality between member states, with Germany (the largest European economy) emerging as an informal primus inter pares of European monetary and labor politics, arousing tensions specifically between Northern and Southern Europe.
But the European crisis is not only institutional. It is also a crisis in narrative. The Cold War provided narrative stability with a common enemy binding European nations together in their respective blocks. The Western European “peace narrative” of overcoming war and Nazism constituted the dominant theme of cultural cohesion especially after the end of the Cold War [Ifversen Reference Ifversen, Berger and Lorenz2011: 461; Sierp Reference Sierp2014: 121-123]. Around the turn of the century, the EU adopted the foundational role of Nazism as a negative blueprint to promote a unique model of democracy born out of a tragic past [Assmann Reference Assmann2007; Littoz-Monnet Reference Littoz-Monnet2011: 490]. Today, attempts to derive European unity from history are plagued by two conspicuous antagonisms. First, the memory of Soviet communism is critical for Eastern European citizens, but not so in the West. It stands in significant tension with the memory of Nazism. Second, the “peace narrative” was thoroughly challenged by the failure of the EU to act in the face of the Balkan wars of the 1990s and is currently overshadowed by the wars in Ukraine and in Syria.
Given this scenario, what pathways exist for building a cultural blueprint of European unity on the basis of references to a common, shared past? To explore this question, I investigate the case of the House of European History (heh), a museum designed and financed by the European Union, scheduled to open its doors to the public in 2016. Because it seeks to overhaul the past by replacing national narratives with a transnational story, the heh is an excellent case to advance our understanding of how democratic societies can seek to repair their social fissures by transcending and re-inventing their past in a manner that suggests an underlying unity.
But how can something persistent ever be invented? This puzzle of contingency and constraint is usually resolved by declaring one’s allegiance either to the logic of history (as an objective reality) or to that of memory (as a cultural fabrication). I suggest a model that explains memory formation as a cultural process but enables us to trace the dynamic relation between its contingent and constraining aspects. This requires a discussion not of the qualities of memory as such, but rather of micro processes of its social construction from which we can infer elements of a theory of memory planning. I start out with a theoretical argument on what professionals involved in negotiating and drafting memory do in order to cope with publicly contentious narratives.
Understanding agency in designing the past
Most sociological accounts of memory planning, or mnemonic agency, understand memory as an inherently political phenomenon. At the level of nation states, it has recently been theorized as the strategic representation of history for the sake of managing national identity [Rivera Reference Rivera2008], or as a move to equip political power claims with morally compelling stories [Müller Reference Müller and Müller2004; Mink and Neumayer Reference Mink and Neumayer2013]. In this view, groups represented through elites engage in “memory battles” [Leggewie and Heuer Reference Leggewie and Heuer2009]. A tension runs through these writings between memory as a soft phenomenon and the hard political stakes involved in its formation. While the sacred, non-instrumental (or in Max Weber’s terminology, wertrationale) character of memory is usually acknowledged, memory planners are paradoxically regarded as approaching memory in a highly strategic way: they have clearly articulated interests; they select and generalize from the past—based on their extensive information about it—whatever serves their interests; they engage in cost/benefit calculations; they minimize risks; they seek to accumulate power by translating their own habitus into an accessible version of itself. Lauren Rivera [Reference Rivera2008] for instance finds that democratically elected governments, in managing their nation’s “spoiled identity,” must choose between commemoration, isolation, or strategic self-representation. The latter, directing attention away from traumatic and negative aspects of the past, is associated with the least cost, and is therefore seen to be the most effective method. Georges Mink and Laurie Neumeyer claim that “reactive memory” [2013: 10-13], a highly selective pinpointing of the past for the sake of mobilizing angry collectivities in the present, is currently the most effective way of drawing popular support.
This is an attractive but narrow view of mnemonic agency. It is complicated if we accept the premise that actors cannot simply assemble the past for present purposes [Olick and Robbins Reference Olick and Robbins1998] nor present fragments that promise to convey the most convenient and convincing story because they cannot position themselves above the normative constraints that come with memory struggles. Shifting attention to cases where memory actors do not fight but try to find a common ground offers a fresh perspective: they must evaluate power and hegemony in existing debates by calibrating their own positions in relation to these constraints. In the museology literature, accounts of actors’ reflexivity and critical perspectives on hegemony are a leitmotif [McCall and Gray Reference Mccall and Gray2013; Ross Reference Ross2004]. Yet in sociology and cultural studies, the classical approach of decoding exhibitions for their underlying power relations still prevails. Since museum planners are well-read and trained in challenging hierarchies, I suggest taking actors’ commitments to reflexivity seriously and analyzing how the question of power itself is negotiated in museum planning. As I will show below, in the case of traumatic memories, representing the past means above all separating the sacred elements of recognition from an instrumental, profane perspective on the past and ensuring that a moral distance to strategic, reductive approaches to the past is maintained.
To advance our understanding of mnemonic agency, we therefore need to turn attention to the logics of symbolic power. As symbolic action entails transcending one’s position, individuals must rely on some sort of normative guidance when drafting narratives of unity. For the case analyzed in this paper, I will show that the imperative of displaying a transnational attitude constitutes both an expressive and conceptually loosely-defined space. These two characteristics enable memory agents to identify the transnational with the sacred and create an incentive to maintain a moral distance from its counterpart, the national.
Techniques for telling powerful stories about the past, together with their inclusive and exclusive effects, have been explored for museums [Linenthal Reference Linenthal1995; Teeger and Vinitzky-Seroussi Reference Teeger and Vinitzky-Seroussi2007], public sites of commemoration [Conway Reference Conway2009; Schwarz and Wagner-Pacifici Reference Schwarz and Wagner-Pacifici1991; Vinitzky-Seroussi Reference Vinitzky-Seroussi2002] and truth and reconciliation commissions [Moon Reference Moon2008]. These studies have presented important insights into the ways narratives can be used to assuage conflict and to speak to different audiences at the same time, such as methods of taming inconvenient aspects of the past [Teeger and Vinitzky-Seroussi Reference Teeger and Vinitzky-Seroussi2007], or ways of rescuing the moral status of historical actors whose legacy is highly contested [Schwarz and Wagner-Pacifici Reference Schwarz and Wagner-Pacifici1991]. Such narrative maneuvers are read from the materiality of exhibitions, monuments or texts; this is at times supplemented with interview material. However, these writings have not clearly spelled out the implications of timing for the study of memory planning. From the perspective of ex post observations, the narratives documented appear as something planned all along. Yet, thinking about narratives as an outcome of a planning and negotiation process begs the question of what memory actors do before they are able to tell—and materialize—their story as directed towards an audience. I therefore suggest studying the pathways that lead up to a narrative outcome and distinguishing between consensus achieved at the level of planning and consensus narrated towards an audience. Introducing this difference is necessary if we wish to understand the rationale behind the avoidance of certain topics in the emerging narrative.
I arrive at this methodology by combining museum studies with cultural trauma theory. In museum studies, planning and curating has been characterized as a process of cultural classification [Bennett Reference Bennett1995; Macdonald Reference MacDonald and Macdonald2006; Pomian Reference Pomian1990]. “Cultures of collecting,” in Sharon Macdonald’s view, are not restricted to the logics of acquiring objects; they hint at the rationale behind the establishment of symbolic orders [2006: 95]. Museum scholars have reflected on collectors’ and curators’ roles with regard to the institutional and professional norms that guide this type of activity, such as reflexivity or transculturalism [Macdonald Reference MacDonald2003; Prösler Reference Prösler, Macdonald and Fyfe1996]. This perspective can be fleshed out by taking into consideration the broader moral tensions that typically come with efforts to represent contested and traumatic pasts, as described by cultural trauma theory [Alexander Reference Alexander and Alexander2003; Eyerman Reference Eyerman and Alexander2004; Giesen Reference Giesen2004]. Cultural trauma theory does not suggest that psychological trauma exists at the level of society; rather, it investigates the conditions, modes and pathways through which past events might come to be regarded as a “wound” by groups and organizations. Seen through this lens, curators’ symbolic action coalesces institutional norms and larger cultural understandings; its relational quality in these two arenas becomes fathomable. Alexander [Reference Alexander2009] has proposed a differentiation of the conceptual tools of “coding,” “weighting,” and “narrating” that allow for a process-analysis of memory negotiations. From a curator’s perspective, we can think of coding as making sense of existing interpretations of the past; weighting as resolving fragmenting tendencies, creating a standpoint of unity by making symbolic concessions; and narrating as creating a meaningful synthesis of form and content towards the museum’s space and meeting lay visitors’ demands. Separating these elements enables an understanding of what actors are negotiating about and an appreciation of the intrinsic forms of reasoning in the process.
I will show that in order to incorporate these imperatives of classification into a successful story of unity, a credited and existing cultural script, which attaches concrete content and logical structure to the notion of unity, needs to be found. This most recent approach to European identity building reformulates an old template of political unity—a segmented model, which emphasizes its inner differences as productive—in a way that enables the grounds of conflict to be controlled. Of all potential fragmentations, the heh team has chosen to focus specifically on the complicated relationship between Western and Eastern European memories. It has turned the challenge of integrating Eastern and Western European history, specifically the traumatic 20th century, into the narrative core of the exhibition. Symbolic power, the key factor in an emerging public memory narrative, resides at the level of introducing and defining such an existing template of unity throughout the process.
Unearthing a European Memory: The “House of European History”
Hans-Gert Pöttering, then president of the European Parliament, first publicly announced the heh project in 2007 (Vovk Van Gaal and Itzel Reference Vovk van Gaal, Itzel, Borodziej and von Puttkamer2012: 75, see also Huistra, Molema and Wirt Reference Huistra, Molema and Wirt2014). The heh is not the first attempt to build a museum of European history, Footnote 1 but it is the first project that enjoys the necessary institutional and financial backing. It is also pioneering in not simply positing a European history but in taking great pains to derive “European experiences” from historical events and phenomena. Expecting to reach around 200,000-300,000 visitors per year, the heh will be the flagship project of forming a European memory. Footnote 2 Ever since the project was launched, the heh team has built an extensive professional network around Europe and beyond. After its opening in summer 2016, it will run travelling exhibitions throughout the continent in the proximate future. As a model institution and as a narrative blueprint, one can expect it to have a major impact on future European cultural politics. The heh exhibition will address visitors from all age groups and from all backgrounds. It will be available in at least 24 languages [Vovk Van Gaal and Itzel Reference Vovk van Gaal, Itzel, Borodziej and von Puttkamer2012: 77]. The majority of visitors are expected to have only a limited knowledge of history; therefore the House’s main goal is to be exciting, and to offer a fresh, coherent and memorable account of European history.
Data and sources
The primary sources for this research are publications by the European Parliament and interviews with 15 members of the two planning teams of the heh Footnote 3 . Interviews lasted around 1.5 hours each and were conducted between May and September 2014. I contacted participants from both planning teams on the basis of their national origin to achieve a balance between voices from different parts of Europe. About two-thirds of the persons I contacted responded to my request and agreed to have a conversation based on a semi-structured questionnaire. Of interest are two levels: the narratives and the planning process. When first initiated, the heh did not possess a single object [Vovk van Gaal and Dupont Reference Vovk van Gaal, Dupont and Axelsson2012: 46]. Therefore, the project starts out with a narrative framework and must assemble objects and installations that capture and express significant moments of the story, not the other way around. As far as the planning process is concerned, many sensitive issues arise related to disagreements between planners. The heh planning can be considered a controlled process without significant external influences because of the absence of a public debate on the content of the museum. This research studies the planning of the museum at a point in time when it is still not open to the public. Decisions as well as possible alternatives can be traced because they are fresh and there is still much at stake for the actors involved. Actors are not looking back on the project, but are still emotionally and cognitively engaged in their working environment. It is an integral part of my method to locate and systematize disagreements between conversations and voices in the planning. There were few respondents in this study and it deals with a single case. Observed regularities are not regarded as explanatory themselves, rather the explanation of narrative outcomes is derived by tracing the “how” of the process under study [McKeown Reference Mckeown, Brady and Collier2004] and by considering variations at the level of actors’ decision making. The overall aim of this paper is not to isolate causal variables, but to provide a thick description of the process under study and account for the driving forces of the directions taken.
Coding, weighting, narrating as the backbone of museum work
When museums aiming to unite a body politic were first introduced in the 19th century, the task was to educate the broader public as obedient and patriotic citizens by “representing power to them as their own” [Bennett Reference Bennett1995: 98]. This was achieved mainly through the shift from a display of curiosities to a principle of rational classification, conveying a sense of parallel progress between society and individuals. In contrast, in contemporary democracies, museums are “contact zones” (James Clifford), spaces in which identity-related themes like citizenship, race, gender, migration and class are openly challenged [Fyfe Reference Fyfe and Macdonald2006: 39]. They operate in global networks of art, curating, collecting and financing, and their institutional self-understanding cannot be divorced from related principles such as internationalism [Prösler Reference Prösler, Macdonald and Fyfe1996] or transculturalism and hybridity [Macdonald Reference MacDonald2003]. However, the task of creating and affirming moral bonds remains foundational. Even in the most recent reflexive turn towards the new museology with its proposed shift in the role of museum professionals from “legislators to interpreters” [Ross Reference Ross2004], the museum remains in limbo between representation and deconstruction, between telling and transcending stories. Museums fostering a sense of political belonging are riven by this ambiguity because they run the danger of promoting exclusive notions of unity. But they also rely on institutional mechanisms that both generate interpretations of the past and enable public criticism of this process. Institutional constraints, such as historical sciences or journalism, guarantee that the past is not simply malleable in whatever fashion [Olick and Robbins Reference Olick and Robbins1998: 128] and that any present debate has to respond to earlier sentiments and positions.
Whoever wants to write memory therefore needs to engage with an existing language of memory. When a position that links the past and the present is less a reflection of real events than a simplifying yet expressive cultural binary, it is a piece of discursive grammar that I will call a memory structure. Such binary structures can express tensions between triumph and trauma, between perpetrator and victim, between guilt/responsibility and recognition, and between authenticity or distortion, to mention only a few of the most powerful cultural coordinates that structure social memory. These patterns might be seen as composing a language of memory, analytically separable from the specific contents that relate such general patterns to particular historical settings [Alexander and Smith Reference Alexander, Smith and Alexander2003]. In memory politics, moments of choice must be understood as responsive to background scripts: social memory eludes common sense conceptions of choice and decision-making. Offering a systematic account of agency, I will model this interplay of contingency and constraint by examining how memory structures are subject to coding, weighting, and narrating.
Coding
Specific places, dates, events or artifacts become “sites of memory” [Nora Reference Nora1989] when they are imbued with emblematic condensations of historical meaning from the viewpoint of a community. This is the process of coding, in which memory structures are mediated and existing meanings are evoked. The coding of memory structures can be empirically observed in memory debates, when the meaning of “sites of memory” is subject to contestation. Memory debates are responsive not only to the ambitious aims of powerful actors; nor are they filled only with real historical content. They are also subject to overarching symbolic form. The challenge is to disclose the concrete pressures and tensions of coding: how do museum makers arrive at their understanding of what is at stake? They identify those debates not on the basis of their historical but of their moral salience; and they must concentrate on polarized and fragmenting notions of the sacred if they wish to counter them effectively. In dealing with difficult and traumatic pasts, the key challenge for coding is to delineate the scope of victims and perpetrators in the past.
Weighting
Memory actors immerse themselves in the moral salience of historical debates in order to resolve them. The element of contingency within such constraint can be captured with the concept of weighting, highlighting choices of degree, of possible alternative paths [Alexander Reference Alexander2009: 9-10]. I will show that the criteria for choosing are primarily moral and only secondarily political or historical, because weighting is tied to the social activity of memory planning and its relational dynamics. Successful weighting is the key for finding consensus at the level of memory planning. Weighting also refers to the way materiality comes to bear in “cultures of collecting” [Macdonald Reference MacDonald and Macdonald2006]. Cultures of collecting are not restricted to the logics of acquiring objects; they hint at the rationale behind the establishment of symbolic orders. This is especially true for the case considered here: since the heh project started out without possessing a single object, actors’ normative vantage points are the ultimate driving force behind it.
Narrating
Narratives are simultaneously an event structure, an evaluative structure, and a causal structure [Linde Reference Linde1986: 186-188]. Political communities rely on providential narratives, symbolic boundaries, and suggested timeless versions of morality. Through public forms of commemoration and history museums, they aim to convey a story of their past that expresses their inner goals and makes intelligible the way in which the pursuit of these goals has shaped their very history. In myths of origin, the present is always conceived as deficient towards the fullness of the myth [Jan Assmann in Ifversen Reference Ifversen, Berger and Lorenz2011: 454]. The origin is situated outside the linear history to arrive at the idea of a “return,” a fuller, transcendental meaning. Footnote 4 Positive and negative elements, or stories of triumph and trauma, are always interlinked in myths of origin. Traumatic or catastrophic references are perhaps the weightiest foundations for stories of moral progress. Footnote 5 Emotions that are coded as aggressive or destructive in the past can be made understandable as a thing of the past and therefore transformed into cultural scripts that affirm and even legitimize an existing social and political order; in this case, a negative memory-work is performed [Giesen Reference Giesen2004].
Setting up the house: negotiating a transnational viewpoint
Coding and weighting are elements of symbolic action that structure the planning process and later determine the narrative outcome. Making symbolic concessions entails transcending one’s position and orienting oneself towards a conceptually loosely defined but sacred space. heh planners do so by signaling readiness to go beyond inimical forces within democratic Europe: they subscribe to a transnational attitude. Museum makers’ imagination is captured by the sacred, negatively defined as a space beyond nationalism and beyond the misrecognition of victimhood.
While the terminology of transnationality is relatively recent, the form of European unity envisioned by the heh team has weighty historical precedents. The concept of European unity has always appeared in tandem with competing national idioms of universalism, as the very idea of transcending the nation is nationally coded [Herzfeld Reference Herzfeld1987, 77-81, 153]. The political structure of European unity is therefore necessarily segmented; yet paradoxically it must be narrated as a top-down model. Conflicts between its parts must be regarded from the perspective of the center to make differences intelligible as something productive rather than destructive. Footnote 6
The heh team has chosen to place the loaded relationship between Eastern and Western European traumatic experiences in the 20th century at the center of attention. In fact, as one planning member states, “we had a constant discussion whether we should diminish the whole picture to ‘East-West’” [Interview, June 18th]. It is remarkable how much heh planners were struggling with the challenge to include Eastern versions of 20th century history: many report that fundamental knowledge about Eastern European history is lacking and that Western European narratives are deeply entrenched, even in the case of Eastern European curators who hold Western European university degrees. As one planning member observes:
The greatest challenge faced by our team is to break the Western German, French and British view on Europe. No matter where these young researchers come from, they are already trained in the “main narrative” of the Germans, French and British […] It’s the academic hegemony of our university landscape, decades of integration historiography have left deep marks, it’s incredibly difficult to counter this within one, two, generations. You have to parade it like a flag [Interview, May 26th].
The East-West tension is perhaps the best demonstration that existing power relations within the European Union do not translate directly into the symbolic order of the emerging narrative of unity. Actors are aware of power relations, interpret them and wish to challenge them with their project. The fact that two Eastern European professionals were heading the respective planning teams can safely be regarded as an expression of the concern over an institutional dominance of Western professionals in this project. The symbolic power of mnemonic agency is poignantly expressed through the transposition of agency, i.e. “acting on behalf” of someone else [Adams Reference Adams2011]. By persistently pointing to blind-spots of Western European historiography from an Eastern and East-Central European perspective, some Western European museum planners relieved their Eastern colleagues of the pressure and expectation of bringing up these moments in the first place [Interview, July 25th]. More than mere politeness, this dynamic enables consensual outcomes in the negotiation of narratives because it allows a tacit yet structured division of labor. Westerners engage in self-criticism with respect to their lack of knowledge of Eastern history and Easterners, in turn, engage in symbolic detachment from nationalism. In the case of those museum planners who did not advocate a historicized and tamed version of nationalism (such as casting doubt on the legitimacy of the post-WWII territorial order), “acting on behalf” became impossible [Interview, May 23rd, July 18th, July 25th]. Another example that probes the obstacles “acting on behalf” faces with regards to transnational consensus was the interpretation of the year 1989 as a mere expression of consumerist desire, and not as a truly democratic, bottom-up political revolution [Interview, May 23rd], a view of 1989 that dismisses the morality of a European subjectivity. I will discuss the context and ramifications of this new agency script of European memory in the final part of the paper. In what follows, I will present the central debates as coded by heh planners and then proceed to show how they address the moral salience that comes with the specific way these memory structures are aligned in the perspective of the planners. Footnote 7
Expanding or limiting the notion of victimhood
The centrality of Holocaust memory in Western Europe stands in tension with the centrality of the memory of victims of state-socialist, and specifically Stalinist crimes, in Eastern Europe. The debates about broadening the scope of who legitimately counts as a victim of state-socialism (and therefore receives recognition as a victim of a state-organized, political mass crime) without trivializing the Nazi crimes has been fervently led in different European venues, most prominently in the European Parliament itself [Littoz-Monnet Reference Littoz-Monnet2013; Mälksoo Reference Mälksoo2009; Rostoks Reference Rostoks and Muiznieks2011]. These debates point to many delicate and sensitive issues, which can only be cursorily sketched here: Eastern Europeans are fearful that the Western Holocaust-centered memory is forgetful of their respective national victims of the Nazi occupations and Soviet-controlled regimes. Western Europeans are suspected of having a merely vague idea of the scope of terror that Nazism and Soviet communism brought specifically to Belorussian, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian civilians [Snyder Reference Snyder2010]. Western Europeans in turn find fault with Easterners’ inconsequential and delayed attempts to deal with wwii collaboration and their country’s role in the Holocaust. Footnote 8 Coding these debates presents curators with the challenge of looking for legitimate criteria of victimhood, specifically in the course of and in the wake of the Second World War.
Expanding or limiting notions of perpetrators
The Eastern European memory debate on the legacy of state-socialism is concerned with questions of responsibility and perpetrator-ship, on both a moral and a legal level [Mark Reference Mark2010]. Some suggest that state-socialism as such (without any periodization) must be condemned; others hold that only certain aspects (such as the Stalinist terror) should be condemned. The terminology is crucial: by referring to “communist crimes” instead of “Stalinist crimes,” it is emphasized that terror as the central organizational feature of state-socialism did not end with Stalin’s death in 1953 and that later periods of state-socialism were equally criminal. Recent attempts by Eastern European members of the European Parliament to criminalize the denial of “communist crimes” on a Europe-wide level testify to the significance of this position within Eastern Europe [Mälksoo Reference Mälksoo2014]. Yet, the discourse on perpetratorship is also a debate on what might be called a symbolic attempt to create collectivities of victimhood [Mark Reference Mark2010] and to clearly delineate their boundaries. As sociologist Ivan Szelényi and colleagues have shown, the wish to “purify” society from its denigrated elements after the demise of state-socialism has had immense social, political and even economic consequences [Szelényi, Eyal and Townsley Reference Szelényi, Eyal and Townsley1998: 102-112]. In a more recent analysis, Maria Mälksoo [Reference Mälksoo2014: 89] has concluded that state-coordinated prosecution has rarely lead to punishment of former perpetrators by criminal law, demonstrating the primary significance of the symbolic dimension. Eastern European societies are divided within and towards Western Europe along these lines [Mark Reference Mark2010].
The debates briefly sketched here are truly fragmenting; nowhere are they open to a multivocal interpretation, i.e. offering multiple layers of meaning potentially coexisting with each other [Vinitzky-Seroussi Reference Vinitzky-Seroussi2002]. The challenge of weighting is to make this transformation occur. Weighting must engage with moral tensions and go beyond the fragmenting tendencies found at the level of coding. Weighting is a craft; it introduces contingency to avoid overly radical and exclusive positions and create new reference points for sacred notions of memory. As some planners of the heh assert, they experience literal “relief” when being able to go beyond entrenched positions in memory debates.
Through weighting, the victim and perpetrator debates outlined above are resolved together within the paradigm of totalitarianism. As a structural requirement, the idea of a “uniqueness” of Nazi crimes must be abandoned; Footnote 9 otherwise state socialist crimes would, from a common perspective, only be second order crimes. Consequently, the heh team has chosen an approach that displays the two regimes together. On the second floor of the exhibition, a single pathway entitled “obstacles to democracy” leads up to the space that features both totalitarian regimes. Both regimes are displayed in a central room, the largest and most monumental part of the exhibition. In this sacred space at the heart of the exhibition, windows are covered and a dramatic lighting technique is employed. The two regimes are represented by gigantic monoliths, physically facing each other:
Suddenly you come to this big plaza. Everything was kind of human scale until now, the narrative was human scale, suddenly you have this huge thing—[the monoliths] are around 15 feet tall, this big projection—suddenly it’s a completely different story (Interview, August 11th).
The regimes are compared according to five themes: mass mobilization, ideology, youth movements, terror and genocide. Within these five themes, similarities and differences are established. While the architectural display here suggests a fundamental similarity, the main difference highlighted will be the nature of the terror exercised by the two regimes: as repeatedly emphasized by the museum planners, victims of Nazism were ideologically clearly defined and could not escape these fatal categories; in contrast, Stalinist terror was fundamentally arbitrary and could therefore target anyone, and even blur the distinction between perpetrators and victims. Footnote 10 In terms of the classification strategy at work here, the difference between Nazism and Stalinism is therefore no longer one in kind but one in degree. Both regimes are now structurally equivalent in their difference to the European subject. heh planners have arrived at a political trade-off by avoiding what, from this newly emerging rationality, can now be classified as too radical a perspective. The emerging formula of weighting can be summed up as follows: communism cannot be condemned as such, because it fought against Nazism; Nazi crimes can no longer be unique, because this overrides Eastern European quests for recognition of state-socialist crimes, and therefore their space of reconciliation in the common European memory framework. Museum makers express relief over the possibility of engaging in this kind of symbolic exchange. This, however, is not a necessary or logical outcome. Rather, it is the central cultural move to unite Eastern and Western notions of the sacred: for Westerners, rejecting the notion of the uniqueness of Nazi crimes today is a symbolic nod to the East and its claims for recognition of state-socialist crimes. For Easterners, focusing this part specifically on Stalinist crimes and not communism as such is a symbolic positioning against incendiary voices in their respective countries voices claiming that communism needs to be condemned at the European level with the tools of penal law [Mälksoo Reference Mälksoo2014], and that the distinction between Stalinism and communism is but a relativization of an epoch of terror. As such they engage in what is perceived as a self-victimization strategy at the expense of a common European narrative. In other words, it is only through the weighting of specific elements of memory structures in these debates that a moderate position can be found. Moderation as a moral stance is not an essential quality, but emerges relationally.
Coding and weighting create a common standpoint on the basis of moral tensions in the planning process itself. In order to build culturally binding notions of unity, this consensus needs to be translated into a coherent story. This can be achieved by controlled narration.
Narrating consensus towards an audience
The heh exhibition presents a chronologically arranged story of progress, Footnote 11 which unfolds in three steps [European Parliament 2013]. Europe’s ascendancy occurred in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century—with the salience of “great ideas” such as liberty, equality, self-determination, human rights; but also of racism and social Darwinism, and of “great ideologies” such as socialism, capitalism, nationalism and imperialism. As this is the time of Europe’s entry into modernity as a global power, the seeds for both the positive and the negative ramifications of these great ideas are to be found here. The 20th century sees the fallback into anti-civilization through the rise and implementation of totalitarian ideologies, mass war and total war, a development that also proved to be self-destructive in terms of Europe’s power position in the world. 19th century ideas of individualism, human and civil rights were fundamentally challenged, specifically in developments leading up to the Second World War. Europe was profoundly divided in the 20th century, a development only to be reversed after the Second World War, but specifically with 1989—when Europe was finally united again. European institutions are specifically foregrounded only with the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, when the European Union in its current form was founded. The new narrative therefore is not one of unity created “out of the ashes” of war, but rather one of re-gained unity. It becomes immediately evident that this narrative incorporates the baggage of 19th century nationalism as something ambivalent if not positive, something that earlier, supra-national self-representations by the EU have consistently avoided. This is truly a master-narrative in terms of the dramatic genre: it has a beginning, a middle, and an end; the actor has to go through a time of severe crisis only to arrive morally replenished at its denouement. Footnote 12 The classical Western European site of memory, 1945, is exactly in the middle of the critical period. Given this ambiguity, the narrative coherence has to be re-established along a changed framework that incorporates the 19th century and the development leading up to wwii in both East and West.
For this story of unity to work, a number of narrative techniques are necessary. This is because of the vagueness of the category of transnational: when addressing a broad audience, there is no guarantee that visitors will share museum planners’ understanding of what is at stake. I suggest labeling these techniques “synchronic defragmentation,” “diachronic consistency,” and “memory over history”.
Synchronic defragmentation
Synchronic defragmentation involves finding a common perspective from which differences can be intelligibly told at one point in time. That which separates can still be regarded from a common viewpoint. As one interviewee put it, “we’ve got as Europeans things that bind us and that separate us.” The task is to “show how the separations have been used and misused and that ended in processes which nearly destroyed the continent in the 20th century” [Interview, June 16th]. The critical aspect then are differences, as they have to be narrated as qualities in themselves. This can be done by weighting differences as within the same phenomenon of equality [Taylor Reference Taylor and Taylor1994].
A common viewpoint can be achieved through the arrangement of objects. One curator explains this for the section on the First World War:
When you put certain objects from several countries side by side, they open up a different perspective and relationship. So here we’re looking at the concept of the enemy, the concept of propaganda used in war. As soon as you put these things side by side, you see the emergence of certain patterns, certain tropes of how low European relationships got during World War One, but you can see that this is a commonality that exists right across the continent” [Interview, June 16th].
The switch of perspective entailed here is a fine example of how national perspectives can be subdued to a larger reference point. The same strategy is used later in the exhibition to show that the oil crisis in 1973 was an experience that was felt and experienced all over Europe, even if it is remembered today within respective national frameworks. But to achieve a similar effect for morally salient issues, on which museum planners themselves had to come to a consensus, poses a greater and more consequential challenge. The year 1945 and its aftermath is an example of this. At the level of coding, in Western Europe the year 1945 is a reference point for the narrative of origin and creation. The story of origin is connected to the image of a total moral and physical destruction of the continent; the story of creation to the subsequent effort to reconstruct the continent in the name of a new moral age. In Eastern Europe, we find the opposite claim: that 1945 marks the moment in history when Western Europe handed over Eastern Europe to Stalin, as exemplified by the coding of the Yalta conference as a betrayal in Eastern Europe today [Troebst Reference Troebst, Pakier and Strath2010: 58-60]. In this view, the Red Army’s legacy of successfully fighting the Nazis is completely overshadowed by a memory of being hijacked by the Soviets and the omnipresence of Red Terror, to end only in 1989-1991. In this perspective, 1945 is the beginning of a stolen time.
Consequentially, through the process of weighting, 1945 not so much marks the beginning of democracy, but a return to it; however it does not yet do so for the entire continent. Eastern Europe, in this new narrative, is held in the grip of the Soviet Union after 1945. One Western European planning member signals a concession when referring to the year 1945: “I wouldn’t emphasize it too much as a kind of year for the European Union, because it’s only the darkness, it’s only black, it’s only void!” [Interview, June 18th]. Another planning member asserts that Westerners will have to familiarize themselves with the fact that 1945 was not a liberation for Central Eastern European societies [Interview, May 26th].
At this point, the heh planners face the difficulty that the story of European political integration and the building of supranational structures is, in its first decades, limited to Western Europe alone. But in order to locate and narrate the European subject immediately following 1945, the play with similarities and differences can be employed. First, by pointing out continuities of problems generated by the war—such as mass expulsions and huge transfers of populations—the narrative of a total break in the West is altered and moved closer to the Eastern version of a disturbing postwar development. Second, the heh exhibition charters entirely new territory by concentrating on similarities between Eastern and Western Europe in the period between 1945 and 1973. An entire floor of the exhibition is devoted to this period. A car is exhibited as a paradigmatic object for the rise of consumer societies in both parts of Europe. This section of the exhibition argues that, in principle, comparable tendencies of modernization could have been experienced similarly in the East and West after 1945 until roughly 1973. Along with this presentation, the role of the United States in providing the initial bonds of European integration—chiefly in the context of a military integration against the threat from the East—is narrated as a mere sidetrack of the story. This interpretation of the Cold War was hotly contested between the two planning teams, since the optimistic narrative adapted by the curating team amounts to downplaying aspects such as the immediate nuclear threat, the militarization of societies on the brink of war, the fierce political cleavages between anti-communism in the West and anti-liberalism in the East, as well as the crucial role of the United States in launching the overall political framework for a European integration. One member of the Academic Committee sensed a generational difference and reasoned that younger curators were less aware of Cold War realities [Interview, May 26th]. However, this mode of presentation is driven by the attempt to balance the challenges the year 1945 and its aftermath present for a narrative of “united” East and West: bringing the East closer to the West in this period is a way of capturing European subjectivity, to make differences appear intelligible and the blocks not simply antagonistic. As far as the narrative control of boundaries is concerned, it follows that the Soviet Union and the United States are both de-tangled from European origins and portrayed as external to European agency, although on wholly different levels: the US in terms of its policy agency, the Soviet Union it terms of its ideological agency. Footnote 13 This example illustrates that a narrative technique does not exist independently of the moral tensions that structure the memory planning. What museum makers wish to avoid depends on the way they immerse themselves in existing debates. If the year 1945 were an issue merely of historical but not of moral import, narrating it would not require a political redefinition of the early Cold War years in a common European story.
Diachronic consistency
The exhibition follows a chronological order, but topics have different gravity for the overall story, so that one interviewee referred to the general approach as rather “chrono-thematic” [Interview, June 18th]. Footnote 14 The challenge behind the imperative to achieve diachronic consistency is to create a coherent master narrative and, at the same time, to avoid teleological versions of history by providing multiperspective and multicausal perspectives. Core elements of providential narratives must stand on solid and coherent references between past and present.
From a curator’s perspective, narrative coherence and continuity can be established at critical moments that have a distinct moral connection to other moments in the future or past. This helps to establish defining events along the chronological display. The exhibition can speak either on the level of the individual or on the level of larger entities. Morality, understood as a reference over time, is established at the level of individual choice or fate.
It is worth taking a close look at the way two World Wars are presented in the exhibition to understand how this rewriting of European history through time shapes the rewriting of the classical modern European myth of origin. According to one member of the planning team, the decision to place the two totalitarian systems at the heart of the exhibition has an elementary function:
This is an exhibition devoted to the ideals of democracy and human rights. In this regard, the presentation of totalitarianism is not an end in itself, rather it is meant to illustrate the grounds on which the European idea could be implemented after 1945, but not after 1918 [Interview, June 18th].
After all, the will to unite Europe was present already in the late 1920s and early 1930s, as the exhibition recounts with the example of a European fraction in the League of Nations. This will is broken by totalitarianism, because totalitarianism is a straightforward attack on the liberal conception of the individual and, therefore, the European subject. European subjectivity is narrated both in terms of traumatic and positive memory. To achieve the traumatic tension, the exhibition narrative establishes a crucial difference between the First and the Second World War: wwi was a “mass war” in which soldiers lost their lives, but wwii was a “total war,” in which the majority of victims were civilians (bombings of cities—a phenomenon all over Europe—were forcefully orchestrated). The moral reference point of European agency is therefore linked to the Second World War. To establish positive references, the section on the interwar period presents the blossoming of individual rights as linked to the corresponding political system of parliamentary democracy. The “obstacles to democracy” part invites the visitor to travel along a common “European road” towards parliamentary democracy, originating in the 19th century and leading up to its demise before the Second World War. Differences are established within this greater European trajectory. But there is also an exception to it. The Soviet Union is represented as the only deviation from the general rule that parliamentary democracies in Europe first developed in the interwar period. It is excluded from the dramatic plot of a fallback into pre-democratic societies, because it had never experienced any kind of democracy, no matter how fragile. In this story, Nazism is a direct, the Soviet Union only an indirect, consequence of wwi.
Diachronic consistency helps to locate European subjectivity in the past and to establish intelligible links to the present. For both regimes, victims’ stories are told on the individual level, also by means of displaying personal objects. In the case of Nazism, this is refined by a section in the exhibition that shows how collaboration with and resistance against Nazism is a type of social action that occurred across Europe [Interview, June 16th, June 18th]. This level of individualization, of pointing to the moment of individual choice and agency, is missing for Stalinism. This has consequences for the attempt to set these two phenomena in a meaningful relation to European subjectivity. If agency is missing in the past, no continuity can be established to the present. Consequently, only Nazism is “Europeanized” here, because it is discussed at the level of European civilians as everyday moral subjects with clear agency.
Memory over history
The overall emphasis on “experiences” reflects the decision to create a museum not of identity, but of memory [Mork Reference Mork2012], a binary in which only the latter stands for dynamism and a multiplicity of reference points for feelings of belonging. Museum makers are convinced that efforts of European self-representation in the past were commonly received as rather tedious and detached from peoples’ day-to-day realities. The challenge is therefore to narrate European experiences in such a way that their relevance for the present can be immediately grasped and that this story is not perceived as that of political elites. Memory as a curatorial technique is first and foremost a narrative tool to control emotions that are connected to specific events and phenomena in the past. By appealing to different kinds and degrees of emotions, memory references can have an alerting or concealing effect.
In their discussion of the South African Apartheid museum, Teeger and Vinitzky-Seroussi [Reference Teeger and Vinitzky-Seroussi2007: 69-70] have introduced the narrative technique of “forgetting through remembering” as one way of arriving at a consensual outcome. Issues that threaten to pollute the core moral messages of the exhibition (such as violent action by those who are to be remembered as uncontroversial heroes) are not fully neglected, but rather tangentially included and sidetracked in the exhibition narrative; they are “symbolically absent” [ibid.: 69]. But sidetracking only becomes necessary when the reflexive technique exceeds the boundaries of curators’ classification criteria. For the heh, this is the case with the relationship between Europe and Islam [Interview, July 25th]. Discussing Islam as a century-old antagonist in the European imaginary would have exceeded the principle of historicization and therefore contained aggressive emotions because this sentiment cannot be effectively turned into a thing of the past; making Islam a particular example of a successful element of the European story would have challenged the principle of inclusiveness, i.e. of telling a story of an audience as broad as possible. The topic is therefore touched upon only in the last part of the exhibition, which is not part of the permanent display.
The heh case also reveals another type of mnemonic narration fulfilling the same purpose. It can be labeled as turning an event or phenomenon into a space of reflection, achieving a controlled multivocal outcome. Through memory, a problematic event or phenomenon can first be historicized: it becomes a thing of the past. Its relevance to the present now consists in a realm of guided interpretations of its implications for society, depending on the viewpoint of the audience. For the reflexive technique, the essential question is whether in the interpretative space construed, the event or phenomenon becomes a source of shame or pride.
This can be exemplified by the way in which nationalism is narrated in the heh exhibition. According to the symbolic consensus established in the planning, national pride is one emotion that contradicts the main narrative. It might well be conjured, but then it is also important to show that it is a thing of the past. The heh model narrative, much as the classical narrative of European integration, has the destructive forces of nationalism as its main reference point: “[The European integration] process prevents western Europe from regressing to earlier chauvinistic, aggressive and imperialistic mechanisms” [European Parliament 2013: 35]. This core conception will not be abandoned, even if the new totalitarian system in the common picture, the Soviet Union, does not lend itself to the memory of aggressive nationalism. The general narrative of the exhibition recognizes nationalism’s emancipatory force in the 19th and early 20th century; as civil and human rights and ideas of their universality are born inside the national contexts. As far as the 20th century is concerned, however, nationalism was no longer a guarantee of these principles; in fact it proved to be the main danger to minority rights. Only a supranational system can guarantee peace and the rule of law. The heh narrative historicizes the emancipatory potential of nationalism and thereby addresses the dilemma of nationalism’s genuine messianic universalism [Herzfeld Reference Herzfeld1987].
Where symbolic power resides: a cultural script at the bottom of the new European history
Historical narratives enacted by institutions express their inner goals and reflect normative outlines of their working structure in the present [Eder Reference Eder2009]. But some narratives of unity are both more fashionable and workable than others. As Lyn Spillman [Reference Spillman1997] has shown for the case of nationalism, historically specific nationalisms model themselves on pre-existing and globally distributed cultural templates. The narrative techniques outlined above have to be embedded in a palpable notion of unity in order to work. To achieve this, the heh draws on the German Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn. Footnote 15 The Bonn Haus provides a coherent and internationally acclaimed cultural template of East-West integration; telling the story not of unification of the two Germanys, but of re-unification of two parts that were forcefully—and illegitimately—separated in the past. Rather than creating European self-representations from scratch or reiterating dismissed attempts of institutional self-glorification, drawing on the German template here means drawing on a credited best practice of memory work. Its credibility enables actors to communicate the model, its purpose, and its anticipated success more easily in inner-institutional contexts. I will present some of the ramifications of symbolic power for the case below. These ramifications are anomalies, pointing to the paradigmatic quality of a scripted model of unity.
The coupling of East/West integration with the symbolic North/South divide produces a precarious position for Southern Europe
Southern European perspectives come to occupy a peripheral position in the main narrative of the House of European History. I argue that this is a structural rather than intended consequence, as it results from the prominence and symbolic force of the East/West thread. Evidence for this explanation surfaced on various levels, which allows me to discuss a number of straw-in-the-wind observations that, taken together, make this argument plausible [Collier Reference Collier2011].
The image of ancient Mediterranean civilizations as the cradle of Europeanness is de-emphasized in accordance with the view that contemporary history is a better source of references for European identity. Museum creators explicitly want to avoid telling yet another story of how European politics and culture is heir to ancient ideals, as they identify this motif with the tedious and rather half-hearted traditional narrative that they aim to transcend [Interview, May 26th; June 16th]. In combination with another shift in EU historiography outlined by the heh team—away from a history of institutional integration (the traditional chronology of supranational negotiations around major economic treaties, such as the common market for coal and steel, etc.) and towards political events that are experienced and codified by various actors [Interview, June 18th]—a residual space is created especially for Italy, because of the decreasing overall importance of founding member-states and the so-called founding fathers for the narrative.
As argued above, overcoming totalitarian regimes is at the heart of the new European narrative of regained unity. Southern voices are represented in this story, but their symbolic location is perhaps best described as the periphery of the center. On the face of it, the lurking danger of democratic self-destruction is the same in the South, as the dictatorships in Spain, Greece, Italy and Portugal emerged from fundamental internal divides. Given its distinct global significance and echoing of the radical politics of interwar Europe, the Spanish Civil War could be narrated as a truly European event. But it did not become such a point of reference in the heh. One museum maker classified the memory of the Spanish Civil war as politically unpredictable [Interview, July 25th]. With the absence of a liberal European subject in this conflict, there is a lack of narrative consensus on the allocation of evil and blame (together with ongoing mutual finger-pointing). Again, Michael Herzfeld [Reference Herzfeld1987] has formulated the underlying paradox quite well: only the perspective of a center makes multiperspective and competing narrations possible. In addition, the national script for a potentially transnational story is weak in this case. The Spanish model of a politics of forgetting that aimed to achieve reconciliation by simply moving on once democracy arrived has led to an absence of conceptual repertoires to address the past. Only in very recent years, for example, have social movements started to demand the renaming of Spanish streets. In contrast, the self-reflexive language of memory entered the North-Western European narrative decades ago and has proliferated in university and school curricula ever since. When central elements of this narrative are reformulated, looking to the South does not entail a moment of symbolic relief in the way looking to the East apparently does.
The specific referent of traumatic memory in this project—the aftermath of mass atrocities against, ethnically or socially defined groups—has consequences for the placement of Southern memories. The core part of the exhibition reserves the concept of “totalitarianism” for a systematic comparison between Nazism and Stalinism. While the emphasis on systematic, state-induced mass terror as one of the five elements of comparison helps draw these two repressive systems closer together, it also gives Italian fascism a structurally peripheral position. The toppling of Italian fascism as well as of the Greek, Spanish and Portuguese dictatorships therefore stands in narrative (and physical, in terms of space devoted) tension to the distinct European process of overcoming totalitarian rule in the exhibition.
Finally, the cultural marginality of Southern narratives was amplified by the evident social marginality of Southern Europeans at the planning level of the Academic Committee (though this was not the case at the level of Project Team). Even though professionals from Southern Europe were equally represented in the Academic Committee, they effectively did not participate in the project. Despite my intense efforts I was unable to locate these people. They never came to meetings with their colleagues and turned down my requests for interviews.
National scripts for a transnational story
The heh display of traumatic events invites one to derive values from them. In the rationale of negative memory [Giesen Reference Giesen2004], only by keeping the negative instances of the past present can the foundations of democratic order be truly understood. Some heh planners insinuate that the way traumatic memory is linked to the promotion of cultural and political values in the project resembles a predominantly German template of dealing with the past, akin to what Timothy Garton Ash has ironically labeled the German din (industrial norm) of Geschichtsaufarbeitung [Ash Reference Ash2002: 33]. Whether or not this template is specifically promoted by German professionals in this project cannot be conclusively determined here, but its peculiar characteristics as a Western European discourse become evident in the way positive sentiments associated with nationalism are dismissed. From an Eastern European perspective, the paradigm of negative memory and self-criticism of nationalism is not evident at all. On the contrary, as one member of the Academic Committee emphasized elsewhere, “nationalism in the 20th century clearly played a positive role, because it saved those peoples [Völker] which the totalitarian systems of Nazism and Communism sought to annihilate” [Schmidt Reference Schmidt and Knigge2011: 166]. The interwar democracies all over Europe are generally classified as a failure in the heh narrative, when at the same time they are remembered as a story of independence, of the peak of self-determination untainted by communist digression, and therefore as an unbroken reference point of pride and heroic memory in Eastern European societies today.
Conclusion Symbolic action on behalf of history
Is transnational unity a fiction? In this paper, I argued that the sacred space that guides memory planners’ consensual orientation cannot be conceptualized as a Parsonian institutionalized value: the transnational would then indeed be merely a buzzword, as critics of this concept, much as of the European Union itself, are quick to point to out. Yet it engenders very concrete consequences, both for the dynamics of cooperation and for narrative outcomes. This is because it guides a process of morality-formation, which I have traced in this paper by means of coding, weighting and narrating. At the same time, it is a residue of symbolic power. Because prior sociological studies of mnemonic agency have failed to distinguish between consensus achieved by memory actors and consensus narrated towards an audience, they have failed to give an account of agency that goes beyond a depiction of narratives as pure strategy. They subsequently have misrepresented power in mnemonic negotiations as the outcome of a process in which rational choice planning is simply embellished by flattery.
Instead, I have shown that actors subscribe to the logic of symbolic action and expressively reject what they deem an instrumental take on the past. Curators are concerned with the pitfalls of communicative coercion and representational hegemony, as they value and promote critical reasoning. We could therefore understand the present framework of consensus-oriented negotiations through Jürgen Habermas’ model of discursive ethics. But the emerging narrative consensus is not as clear-cut and rationally molded as the Habermasian approach suggests. Rather, it is erected upon symbolic trade-offs. Against this background, power is exercised by filling a loosely defined space with an existing cultural script of integration. Power sneaks back in, not so much through the backdoor as through a controlled response to shared uncertainty in the process of radically redesigning the primary stage. Building on this analysis, it would seem promising to study related areas of consensus-oriented knowledge creation that are characterized by a high degree of reflexivity and moral urgency, such as ethically sensitive fields in science or technology, in a similar way.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a travel grant provided to the author by Yale University’s European Studies Council at the MacMillan center in summer 2014.
