Totalitarian experience and European Memory

The current European crisis reveals the limits of the institutional integration from below, limits of transnational identity based on European collective memory. It is clear that the European Union will not achieve full integration and collective identity as long as our national images of memory differ. We need to create a different common memory and history in the European Union beyond the commemorative rituals of any nation-state. Only if we overcome old conflicted divisions regarding the instrumentalization of different national pasts can we create a transnational European future. New Europe needs a different memory and a completely new collective self-reflection.