Over the last 20 years, the European Union and its member states have given steady support to the European perspective of the Western Balkans. The enlargement policy of the EU, however, has evolved from “a promise of a European future” (the Thessaloniki Summit) and “a credible perspective” (the Junker Commission) to the post-Brexit’s “firm, merit-based prospect of full membership”, dependent on the Union’s very own political, security, and economic interests. The key pillars of the Enlargement agenda for the Balkans, however, remain the same: democracy, the rule of law, and the respect for fundamental rights are seen as the main engines of economic integration and the essential anchor for fostering regional reconciliation and stability. Beyond examining the effects of EU integration processes on the countries in question, the Western Balkan countries are seen as a test case for the transformative power of Europe (Börzel 2013).
Two decades ago, Europeanisation scholars and policymakers were focused on examining the transformative capacity of the European Union (EU) to induce change in candidate countries. The assumption of this early work was that the EU had the capacity to “export” good practices in democratisation, the rule of law, and various policies to candidate countries, and accordingly, research was focused on assessing the effects of these processes (the so-called “Europeanisation as enlargement” field of research) on three domains: domestic structures, public policy, and normative frames.1 The “domestic turn” in Europeanisation studies attempted to contextualise these impacts by examining how domestic factors affect or mitigate the success of rule transfer (Subotić 2011; Elbasani 2013), which, while still focused on institutions, importantly brought domestic conditions and actors in dialogue with broader EU processes. As the Western Balkan countries slowly progressed in the accession requirements, new research has begun examining the on-the-ground and unintended effects of Europeanisation in other fields, showing, for instance, how the EU visa liberalisation regime effectively further alienated the Roma population of the countries due to its reliance on biometric passports (Kacarska 2019), or the continued existence of segregated “two schools under one roof” in Bosnia as a consequence of OSCE intervention in the 1990s (Swimelar 2013). This research underlines the need for a better understanding of how EU processes interact with local actors and domestic conditions.
In line with the new focus of Europeanisation research, an increasing number of studies from various disciplines have analysed the impact of Europeanisation on the collective memory of both EU member states and candidate countries (Mälksoo 2009; Gensburger and Lavabre 2012; Kucia 2016; Kowalski and Törnquist-Plewa 2017; Milošević 2019). They have concluded that the EU’s politics of memory is based on the rejection of anti-Semitism, xenophobia and racism, respect for human rights, freedoms, and protection of minorities (Levy and Sznaider 2002; Assmann 2014; Leggewie 2008). Common heritage, memory, and shared attitudes towards the past serve as a source of self-legitimisation for the EU (Conwey and Patel 2010; Littoz-Monnet 2012; Calligaro 2013; Sierp 2014; Kaiser 2012; Neumayer 2018; Lähdesmäki 2017). They convey broadly defined European values and undergird the idea of a common future through the fostering of a European identity. The European Parliament (EP) has produced the “EU memory framework”—a number of soft law and decisions that delineate shared attitudes towards the Holocaust and rejection of all forms of non-democratic, totalitarian regimes. Although not legally binding for member states, this framework is selectively downloaded by (potential) members that seek to align with EU norms of remembrance and display their European identities. Yet, it has also provided a rationale to memory entrepreneurs to push nationalist sentiments forward (Milošević and Touquet 2018).
The Union has not yet succeeded in crafting a common European sense of “who we are” based on a narrative of a shared past. For many European elites, the Union remains an emphatic way of saying “never again” to the disastrous ways of the last century. Nevertheless, the EU has become both a memory arena and a political opportunity structure for the “uploading” of domestic preferences: national narratives about the past. In EU relations with candidate countries, not only do the EU’s ideas of the common European past affect local memory practices, but power asymmetries also become more visible. Countries with EU membership play an important part in coercing the candidate countries to redress the matters of the past (e.g. historical injustices, borders, or minority protection), issues that have proven to be very resilient to Europeanisation. These dynamics were particularly visible in the recent case of North Macedonia, whose EU accession process has been delayed because of the “name dispute” with neighbouring Greece. However, precisely because an overwhelming number of studies have questioned how (ethno)national memories have affected the process of EU integration of the countries, we ask a different question: we ask how Europeanisation affects collective memory in the Western Balkan countries.
In addition to studying the results of such power asymmetries between the EU and the candidate countries, our volume explores the possibility that domestic elites and institutions can manipulate memory politics on the national and transnational levels. (Trans)national memory entrepreneurs use and abuse the EU memory framework to achieve a broad set of goals: seeking acknowledgement, recognition for their own narratives of the past, to pacify tensions, and support or even oppose Europeanisation. In this process, collective memory—knowledge and representation of the past—is constantly reinterpreted in the light of present political (individual or collective) needs. Since memory itself is a tension between what is remembered and what is forgotten, what is present and what is missing, memory actors (ab)use its inherent selectiveness to underpin their agendas and support their interests. What this volume clearly demonstrates is that EU memory politics is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, lessons of the past serve as a promise of non-repetition, showing that European countries share a tragic past but have a future in togetherness. Adoption of EU norms of remembrance is instrumental for those who seek to politically signal so-called European values and identities. However, the quest for a shared past based on minimum common denominators is also producing unintended consequences. On the ground, deeply rooted national memories and narratives remain fundamentally unchallenged.
This volume explores how the process of European integration influenced collec...