The burden of history

May 17th 2007
>From The Economist print edition

Its newest members offer the European Union some history lessons

JAVIER SOLANA, the European Union’s top foreign-policy honcho, recently
offered a neat turn of phrase to explain the importance that Europeans
attach to the past. Ponder the phrase "that’s history", and what it implies
on either side of the Atlantic, he suggested. When Americans say something
is "history", they mean it is no longer relevant. When Europeans say the
same thing, "they usually mean the opposite".

Is this mere wordplay? If only. History lies at the heart of many disputes
that are causing such angst in today’s EU. Thorny topics include Russia’s
bullying of small Baltic states, fierce rows in such countries as Poland and
Romania over how far to probe communist-era collaboration, not to mention
the stand-off between Greeks and Turks in Cyprus. Some of these historical
quarrels are unfamiliar to western Europeans, and they are often highly
inconvenient to boot. Small wonder that a few longer-established union
members are handling the arrival of their newer colleagues rather badly.

The EU used to know where it stood on history-it was best kept simple, and
in the past. In the early decades, history was about one big thing: the
second world war, and the grand project of Franco-German reconciliation.
>From the outset, the EU was partly meant to make war unthinkable inside
Europe. But over the years that miracle of continental forgiveness has
ossified into something more inflexible, even smug. Just as pioneering
Eurocrats toiled to create single European markets in widgets or wheat,
their political masters crafted something approaching an approved single
European history (challenged only in awkward-squad Britain, where the war
was a matter of national pride). This history portrayed a smooth moral
progression from nationalism and conflict (bad) to the sunny uplands of
compromise, dialogue and border-free brotherhood (good).

Enlargement is now challenging all this-especially the recent expansion to
27 countries, including ten former communist ones. The clumsy reactions of
old EU members are partly to do with ignorance. Enlargement has introduced
lots of alien grievances, sending old Brussels hands scurrying to their
encyclopedias to mug up on the 1920 Treaty of Trianon (hated in Hungary) and
Carinthian plebiscite (it makes Slovenes fume). But less forgivably, some of
the insensitivity of older club members carries a whiff of moral
superiority, a sense that it is un-European (not to mention uncouth) to bear
historical grudges.

European politicians have always been quick to use post-war reconciliation
as a cudgel to pre-empt further debate. This can get pretty shameless. Josep
Borrell, then president of the European Parliament, once dismissed
campaigners against the parliament’s nonsensical monthly trek from Brussels
to Strasbourg, because they were Swedish: how could Swedes understand that
Strasbourg, a much fought-over border city, symbolised Franco-German
reconciliation, he asked. This "historic dimension" was lost on a country
that "did not participate" in the second world war (though nor did Mr
Borrell’s-he is from Spain).

Lofty talk of European brotherhood also conceals the fact that, even among
the founder members of the club, there are deep differences about how to
reconcile societies with their past. At one end is the German model of swift
and repeated repentance. Other countries took much longer to break with
post-war silence and myth-making (France springs to mind). Still others
moved on from dictatorship to democracy via pacts of national amnesia that
are only now being challenged (think of Spain). It is striking that French
politicians have been vocal critics of the Polish government over its recent
(admittedly cack-handed) project to cleanse public life of former
collaborators. German politicians, with their tradition of purgative
truth-telling, have been more muted.

In victory, defeat
Above all, the authorised version of European history has floundered in the
face of new members for whom the second world war is not the end of any
debate, but a starting-point for new rows. The EU now has a fistful of
ex-communist countries for whom, as one Brussels official puts it,
"Strasbourg is not a symbol, and 1945 is not a magic year". When Polish
politicians mention Auschwitz, it is often to complain about it being called
a "Polish death camp", rather than the wording they feel is correct: a Nazi
death camp located in Poland. The latest row between Estonia and Russia
concerns the relocation of a Soviet war monument from the centre of Tallinn.
Earlier this year, the Baltics led an unsuccessful push to add Stalin’s
crimes to an EU directive covering Holocaust denial.

This is not to say that the newcomers inevitably have right on their side.
Some nasty anti-Semites lurk within Polish politics. The Baltics mis-timed
their push for recognition of Stalin’s crimes: a directive about racism and
xenophobia was the wrong vehicle. But that is no excuse for the impatient
eye-rolling with which newcomers are often greeted when they air historical
grievances. (During a discussion of Estonia’s war-memorial row, the German
ambassador to the EU observed cheerfully that Berlin was still home to
Soviet war monuments, and even sculptures of Lenin, as if that was
comparable.)

It matters that the EU has a tin ear for some of its members’ historical
memories. It is, at the least, bad manners-not to mention bad tactics when
dealing with Russian assertiveness. In future, history may matter still
more, assuming that the union follows strategic logic and enlarges once more
to take in new members from the Balkans (and perhaps Turkey, even if that is
a lot further off). These are rough neighbourhoods, where history can still
get people killed. If the EU does not learn to listen to and understand
different views of the past, it may find itself stumbling when confronting
future conflicts inside and outside the union. And that would be an historic
mistake.
From: Baghdasarian