The Challenge of Transnational Memory

Research on the European Parliament before 1979 is understudied, with some notable exceptions (Roos 2020a, 2020b, 2021; Dinan 2021; Rittberger 2003), where it is stressed that the elected Parliament, we know today, cannot be understood without taking into consideration the contribution of the delegates and the evolving nature of the Parliament in these early years. Till recently, within this field, the European Studies literature has failed women’s representation. At the European level, the absence of women is accepted as if equality started to become an issue after the end of the 1970s. My project adopts an interdisciplinary approach, where the politics of presence meets the politics of memory. Political memory can be used as a research paradigm outside of the political use to mobilise memory for the politics of the present (Verovšek 2016) and examines the early women of European integration’s work, and their contribution to the first stages of the integration. In this paper, after presenting the approach adopted, I focus on the challenges in communicating the research. The politics of memory at the European – transnational – level involves challenges already met by the House of European History (HEH) and the European Parliament History Service, in Brussels. On one hand, the permanent and temporary exhibitions seek to present a narrative about Europe and European integration. Yet, the HEH visitors expected a positive narrative, but why should curators ‘focus only on the positive sides in the context of the obvious crises[is] of the European project’? (Dupont 2020) This research does not seek to tell a positive narrative, does not seek to ‘step into the trap of simply creating new myths’ (Abels and MacRae 2021, p. 9), and does not present a ‘hagiography’ – as termed by an anonymous reviewer to one of my manuscripts. The focus is on women’s political agency. Academic research and outputs, following extensive archival research, and the support of the HEH are determinant in the dissemination and communication of the research. Findings illustrate: (1) inaccuracies - among the first 31 women, there was one man; (2) the limits of European identity (3) important past histories forgotten by the present. While, as Riley (2021, p. 241) notes, the researcher cannot become a time traveller to uncover what ‘actually happened’, primary sources enable to identify actors, voices, and institutional developments across time and space, also thanks to the European Parliament’s rich multimedia archive. The challenge of replacing a dominant narrative remains. The scope here is to reflect on how some inaccuracies still exist, how these lives have been written out and how we can better support representation, and in the way we talk about the past in European Studies and the history of the European Parliament. In a broader perspective, to support women in politics, and today’s women in politics, to avoid hearing (still) that any parliament ‘is one of the most unhealthy workplaces that you could ever be in. … a toxic environment.’ (Brooks 2023)