Advocating for the Cause of the 'Victims of Communism' in the European Parliament: Memory Entrepreneurs and Interstitial Fields

After the Cold War, the EU’s official historical narrative was challenged by memory entrepreneurs from the former Eastern bloc, who demanded that Communist and Nazi crimes be placed on an equal footing. The existing literature has mainly focused on these MEPs’ role in the adoption of parliamentary resolutions condemning “Communist crimes” and on the creation of a new public policy aimed at “preserving the memory of the victims of Nazism and Stalinism”. This presentation will highlight a neglected aspect of their mobilizations, i.e. awareness-raising activities aimed at putting, and keeping, the issue of Communist crimes on the EU’s agenda through exhibitions, film screenings, conferences and public hearings at the European Parliament. I will analyze the creation of two intertwined transnational networks, the informal intergroup “Reconciliation of European Histories” and the lobby “Platform for European Memory and Conscience”, which were instrumental in advocating for the cause of the victims of Communism simultaneously within and outside the EP. I will show that these networks represent interstitial fields (Medvetz 2012) where actors from different social sectors – politics, academia, national bureaucracies and civil society, meet and exchange institutional credibility, scientific legitimacy and policy-oriented knowledge. A detailed analysis of selected events organized by these hybrid structures between 2010 and 2015 will shed light on the combination of the repertoires of contention of “expertise” and “scandalization” that were used to frame this new cause in the European polity. This sociological analysis, based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews, will thus contribute to a broader debate on the reconfiguration of memory activism in the enlarged EU.