Peter Verovšek’s Memory and the Future of Europe is an ambitious addition to the sizable literature on European memory. Verovšek’s central claim is that a focus on collective memory can help explain both the successful origins and the contemporary crisis of the European Union. Whereas Europe’s postwar generation was able to draw on the common experience of war and (anti-)fascism to discredit nationalism and to drive European integration, newer generations lack a shared narrative that can put the European project on a strong moral foundation again. Moreover, the EU’s eastern enlargement has brought postcommunist memory struggles into the fold that challenge Europe’s singular focus on what Verovšek calls “the rupture of 1945” (p. 4). This fragmentation and loss of memory, so Verovšek argues, have reduced the EU to a project of narrow-minded economism and competing national interests, leaving it increasingly powerless in addressing multiple crises in the wake of the recession, Brexit, and the rise of illiberal regimes in Hungary and Poland.
Verovšek divides his argument into its theoretical, diagnostic, and prescriptive components. Drawing on thinkers of the Frankfurt School, he argues that the ruptures of totalitarianism, total war, and the Holocaust destroyed existing narrative frameworks and provided the “cognitive, motivational, and justificatory resources” to rethink the nation-state. A common generational experience thus not only created the ground for a shared emotional connection to specific events, but also reordered “the boundaries of the thinkable” (p. 38) and provided the rationale for a feasible political alternative.
In the diagnostic part, Verovšek uses this framework to hermeneutically trace the centrality of a shared war experience for principal actors in the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (Monnet, Schuman, and Adenauer) and in the subsequent deepening of European integration (Delors, Mitterrand, and Kohl). This “classic narrative of integration” (p. 77), in which Europe is seen as a response to violent nationalism, no longer has the same purchase in the twenty-first century, as war experiences have faded away, and as most Eastern European member states cannot relate to 1945 as a key turning point in history. In addition, Verovšek reminds us, the Eurozone crisis has added a north–south rift to the fault lines within the EU that has further undermined its legitimacy. In the absence of a common normative reference for all Europeans, Verovšek observes a regression to the prioritization of narrow economic and national interests, leaving Europeans caught between illiberal populists and neoliberal market fundamentalism.
In response to these multiple pathologies, the book’s prescriptive section is based on the premise that the creation of new integration narratives can no longer be a top-down project; it expresses some modest hope for the emergence of a transnational public sphere that allows history to be debated from a genuinely European perspective. In the book’s last thematic chapter, Verovšek evokes the comparative case of the United States to argue that Europe may need a similar public veneration of its founding moment but cautions that Europe’s elite-driven founding cannot summon forth the same democratic energies.
Several other studies have addressed some of the central issues and arguments of Verovšek’s book: total war and the Holocaust as civilizational breaks, the mnemonic schisms running through Europe, and the legitimation crisis of the EU. Verovšek’s considerable contribution lies in tying these themes together and in grounding them in a conceptual apparatus that links questions of collective memory to a theory of change. The book convincingly invites us to view the past not simply as a source of conservation or conflict but as a resource for political transformation, democratic innovation, and postnational solidarity. However, some of its analytical, conceptual, and normative claims and assumptions may deserve further scrutiny.
Verovšek’s overall argument that we are witnessing a recent loss and fragmentation of a shared narrative about the past may implicitly overstate the existence of a consensus on the meaning of the rupture of 1945 during earlier phases of European integration. This is in no small part the consequence of letting ideas about the shared experiences of the war generation do a little too much work beyond the specific group of “founding fathers” covered in his empirical analysis. Verovšek’s discussion of de Gaulle reminds us that an alternative view in postwar Europe envisioned a strengthened nation-state rather than integration as the most promising safeguard against war and totalitarianism (an assessment that is incidentally shared by many of the new member states that joined the EU in 2004). Shared generational experiences and their gradual disappearance over time thus cannot exclusively account for narrative clashes and their outcomes, which suggests that this explanatory model of integration needs to be supplemented by stipulating the (geo)political, material, and cultural conditions that allow for specific justifications to emerge and take hold.
This relates directly to the conceptualization of collective memory implied in this study. Verovšek’s claim that his focus on “individual leaders … [is] common within collective memory studies” (p. 52) neglects the attentiveness to public culture, mediation, and actors other than political elites in the field of memory studies. This seems especially significant given that Verovšek’s concerns are the continued relevance and potential democratization of integration narratives. Notions like postmemory or prosthetic memory have become essential vocabulary in memory studies precisely because they remind us that the potency of collective memories does not necessarily rely on the subjects’ direct experience of events. An example is the well-studied case of Germany, where a direct connection between the memory of 1945 and a pro-European stance has become more pronounced in later generations than in the immediate postwar population (for whom the very term “Holocaust,” as Verovšek also acknowledges, did not yet exist). Consequently, a critical theory of memory needs to go beyond the category of experience and reserve a much stronger role for what we may want to call “the means of collective memory production.”
This leads me to the normative assumptions that guide Verovšek’s argument. Here, too, central debates in the field of memory studies could have been brought in to show the contested nature of Verovšek’s premise that shared political projects presuppose a shared past among its members. I only briefly name two here. First, Jürgen Habermas’s work, which explicitly links Europe’s past to its political future and which is used throughout the book to scaffold Verovšek’s own approach, has been repeatedly scrutinized by other theorists for potentially introducing restrictive, pre-political conditions for European membership in its reliance on a shared past. Second, ever since the publication of Michael Rothberg’s seminal Multidirectional Memory (2009), the focus of memory studies has shifted from the importance of shared pasts to the practices of connecting seemingly unrelated histories in the search for new political solidarities; these practices are highly relevant to any discussion of European memories (the memory of European colonialism, which is crucial to Rothberg’s original argument, is absent in Verovšek’s book).
Finally, although Verovšek’s approach is to be unequivocally lauded for connecting memory debates to the current crises of the EU that are linked to its democratic deficits and neoliberal policies, his prescriptions on how exactly memory can come into play as a political resource and critical practice are often elusive (except for his brief suggestion to historically link austerity and the erosion of democracy). What Verovšek helps make clear, however—and herein lies another major contribution of the book—is that a classic narrative of integration no longer suffices, because its historical conclusions (“never again” war and genocide) were largely driven by a logic of avoidance that cannot provide sufficient guidance for a European Union that is in dire need of reinvention.
