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3 Memory as border work: the 2008 Italy–Libya Friendship Treaty and the reassembling of Fortress Europe Chiara De Cesari A border is made real through imagination. (Van Houtum 2012: 412) In this chapter, I examine one peculiar border zone, namely the Mediterranean Sea – and more precisely that stretch of sea extending between Italy and Libya – in order to explore how memory-making contributes to its re-bordering. The cemetery of an astonishing and growing number of migrants and asylum seekers, this stretch of sea has become a symbol of Fortress Europe and of
The development of the European Union as a community-based project of integration with decision-making powers outside the constitutional architecture of the nation-state is the most significant innovation in twentieth-century political organisation. It raises fundamental questions about our understanding of the state, sovereignty, citizenship, democracy, and the relationship between political power and economic forces. Despite its achievements, events at the start of the twenty-first century – including the political, economic, and financial crisis of the Eurozone, as well as Brexit and the rise of populism – pose an existential threat to the EU.
Memory and the future of Europe addresses the crisis of the EU by treating integration as a response to the rupture created by the continent’s experience of total war. It traces Europe’s existing pathologies to the project’s loss of its moral foundations rooted in collective memories of total war. As the generations with personal memories of the two world wars pass away, economic gain has become the EU’s sole raison d’être. If it is to survive its future challenges, the EU will have to create a new historical imaginary that relies not only on the lessons of the past, but also builds on Europe’s ability to protect its citizens by serving as a counterweight against the forces of globalisation. By framing its argument through the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Memory and the future of Europe will attract readers interested in political and social philosophy, collective memory studies, European studies, international relations, and contemporary politics.
A bellicose past entangled all European nations in bloody conflicts. They drew a conclusion from that military and spiritual mobilisation … the imperative of developing new, supranational forms of cooperation after the Second World War. Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (2003) The classic narrative of integration In the previous chapter I showed how Monnet, Schuman, and Adenauer drew on the resources of collective memory they had obtained as a result of the narrative break of 1945 to imagine, motivate, and
age cohort of people. They have a sense of themselves and other people have a sense of them as ‘a generation’. The ‘baby boomers’ in post-war America and the ‘1968 generation’ in Europe are examples. Millennials across the developed world are another. For Mannheim, generational memory is shaped by pivotal, public, ‘transformative events’ during a ‘critical period’. Previous research on Israeli collective memory bears this out. It showed that age cohorts placed most emphasis on the pivotal events they experienced during their youth. The Holocaust was an exception
Loyalty, memory and public opinion in England, 1658-1727 makes an important contribution to the ongoing debate over the emergence of an early modern ‘public sphere’. Focusing on the petition-like form of the loyal address, it argues that these texts helped to foster a politically-aware public through mapping shifts in the national ‘mood’. Covering addressing campaigns from the late Cromwellian to the early Georgian period, it explores the production, presentation, subscription and publication of these texts. Through an in-depth examination of the social background of subscribers and the geography of subscription, it argues that addressing activity provided opportunities to develop political coalitions. By exploring the ritual of drafting and presenting an address, it demonstrates how this form was used strategically by both addressers and government. Both the act of subscribing and the act of presenting an address imprinted this activity in both local and national public memory. The memory of addressing activity in turn shaped the understanding of public loyalty. The volume employs corpus analysis techniques to demonstrate how the meaning of loyalty was transformed over the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries. The shifts in public loyalty, however, did not, as some contemporaries such as Daniel Defoe claimed, make these professions of fidelity meaningless. Instead, Loyalty, memory and public opinion argues for that beneath partisan attacks on addressing lay a broad consensus about the validity of this political practice. Ultimately, loyal addresses acknowledged the existence of a broad ‘political public’ but did so in a way which fundamentally conceded the legitimacy of the social and political hierarchy
The revenge of memory has been slow … If the problem in Western Europe has been a shortage of memory, in the continent’s other half … there is too much memory. Tony Judt, ‘The Past is Another Country’ (1992) Questioning the classic narrative Transnationally shared collective memories of war and suffering – framed in terms of the rupture of 1945, which allowed for a re-evaluation of existing narratives and the creation of new ways of linking past and future to the present – have played an important role in ‘imagining Europe’ ever since it was first
10 Sweden, military intervention and the loss of memory Annika Bergman Rosamond and Christine Agius Introduction Since the 1990s, Sweden has gradually changed from a neutral country to one that is ‘militarily non-aligned.’ It has taken active part in international peace operations under the command of NATO and the EU, and contributed forces to operations in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Libya. In 2015 Sweden also set aside resources to train Kurdish troops in Northern Iraq in the fight against ISIS (Dagens Nyheter 2015). At the 2014 NATO Summit in Warsaw, Sweden
The dreams of the future move in the temporal dimension of past life, fed by memory … out of which all wishes and hopes are deduced. Reinhart Koselleck, Terror and Dream (2004) Critical theory and collective memory 1 Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, collective memory has become a central concept in the humanities and the social sciences. 2 Its surge in scholarly importance coincides with a number of broader social movements, most notably the student revolts of 1968, when the first generation that came of age in the
European integration in the first two chapters of Part I showed how the leaders of Europe built on the cognitive, motivational, and justificatory resources of collective memory to create a European political community over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. In the previous chapter I then traced how the project has started to sputter with the passing of the generations that had experienced the rupture of 1945 first-hand. Since the turn of the millennium these new leaders have found it difficult to resolve the interlocking economic and political
4 How we fell into the memory hole and got to where we are today Milton Friedman and challenges to the welfare state Since the 1980s Milton Friedman’s theories have not only reigned as the orthodox ideas governing the economic and monetary policies of the US, and to a large extent the UK, but they have also become embedded as the official philosophy of the IMF, which has attempted to impose them on less developed countries, or countries in crisis, when they have come to the West with outstretched hands. Back in the twentieth century Friedman had dreamed – though