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Forchtner, Kølvraa - 2012 - Narrating A 'New Europe' From 'Bitter Past' To Self-Righteousness
Forchtner, Kølvraa - 2012 - Narrating A 'New Europe' From 'Bitter Past' To Self-Righteousness
Forchtner, Kølvraa - 2012 - Narrating A 'New Europe' From 'Bitter Past' To Self-Righteousness
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What is This?
Article
Bernhard Forchtner
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
Christoffer Kølvraa
Aarhus University, Denmark
Abstract
The 1990s and 2000s saw a memory and remembrance boom at both the national and supra-/
transnational level. Crucially, many of these emerging memory frames were not simply
about a glorious and heroic past, as in, for example, traditional nationalist narratives. Rather,
groups started to narrate their symbolic boundaries in a more inclusive way by admitting past
wrongdoings. In this article, we look at a corpus of so-called ‘speculative speeches’ by leading
politicians in the European Union and, against the aforementioned historical background,
analyse their representations of Europe’s past, present and future. By utilising the discourse-
historical approach in critical discourse analysis, narrative theory and elements of Reinhart
Koselleck’s conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), we illustrate how, first, a ‘new Europe’,
based on admitting failure, is narrated. However, second, we also show that such a self-critical
narration of a ‘bitter past’ is, paradoxically, transformed into a self-righteous attitude towards
Europe’s ‘others’.
Keywords
Apologetic performances, bitter past, collective memory, conceptual history, corpus linguistics,
critical discourse analysis, discourse-historical approach, European identity, judge-penitence,
narrative theory
Corresponding author:
Bernhard Forchtner, Institute of Social Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Philosophische Fakultät III,
Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany.
Email: b.forchtner@hu-berlin.de
Introduction
When Joschka Fischer, on 12 May 2000 and in the wake of the then successful imple-
mentation of the euro, addressed the finality of European integration, a powerful
debate on EUrope’s self-understanding was initiated. It resulted in the European
Convention (2002–2003) and was publicly carried further during the crisis over the
Iraq war. However, with the collapse of the debate over a European constitution and
an emerging financial crisis, this European narrative boom has seemingly went bust.
We see this situation as an opportunity to reflect on a particular dimension of this
identity construction and ask: How have high officials in Europe intervened in this
debate during the past decade? These text-producers enjoy the privilege of being
perceived as speaking for Europe and, therefore, their performances have an effect
on policies as well as corresponding to and institutionalising a broader development
in which remembering is ‘replac[ing] progress and revolution as the master meta-
phor of history – at least in parts of the Western public sphere’ (Giesen, 2004: 10).
True, European integration was, from the beginning, a project connected to memo-
ries of the past. Already, the Schuman Declaration (1950), which suggested a steel
and coal community comprising France and Germany, was legitimated by an ambi-
tion to make war ‘not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible’, and summa-
rised recent European history in the statement that ‘[a] united Europe was not
achieved and we had war’. Even so, these articulations portrayed war primarily as a
tragedy which happened to Europe, rather than an atrocity for which Europe had to
take responsibility.
However, in recent decades, it is not simply remembering which has become crucial,
but a form of remembrance which accepts responsibility, admits wrongdoing and thus
casts a shadow over in-groups’ positive self-representation. Thus, authors like Mark
Gibney et al. (2008) speak of an ‘age of apology’. Similarly, Jeffrey Olick (2007) refers
to ‘politics of regret’, while Bernhard Giesen (2004: 130) claims that ‘public rituals of
confession of guilt’ are more and more significant for the construction of (trans)national
identities. Focusing on the Holocaust in particular, Jeffrey C Alexander (2002) described
this development in terms of the emergence of a ‘tragic narrative’. These authors share
an understanding of contemporary (European) identity as being constructed through
apologetic performances, that is narrations (of Europe) in terms of an emotive and com-
mon history of war and conflict: a ‘bitter past’ (Eder, 2006: 267ff). Such modes of nar-
rating the past stand in sharp contrast to more traditional (nationalist) political myths
(Bottici, 2007), which typically construct a heroic image of the past. In such triumphal-
ist narratives, past violence and suffering are perceived as being nessesary, justified and
even glorious in light of the present and the future. Mythical narratives turn bitter only
when they involve either an implicit or explicit claim that elements of the communal
past are to be regretted and possibly even apologised for. Thereby a more complex story
of what we are emerges, based on admissions of wrongdoing which might enable more
inclusive symbolic boundaries.
In what follows, we investigate how Europe’s common past is narrated and what
kinds of European self-images emerge from this narration. We do so by analysing a
corpus of so-called ‘speculative speeches’ (Wodak and Weiss, 2004), in which leading
EUropean politicians narrate a Europe for the 21st century, a ‘new Europe’ (this phrase
occurs regularly in our corpus, e.g. Barroso, 2005; Prodi, 2003a; for another analysis of
how Europe is done, see Wodak, 2009: 1ff).
In the following section, we introduce the genre of ‘speculative speeches’ and the
corpus we have compiled. Then we briefly outline our method(s) of analysis which
are drawn from the discourse-historical approach (DHA) in critical discourse analy-
sis (CDA), the multi-disciplinary notion of narrative and Reinhart Koselleck’s
brand of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte). Finally, we describe the corpus
linguistic (CL) tools which we utilised in order to render more transparent the pro-
cess of engaging with and downsizing the data. Our analysis then draws these con-
siderations together and proceeds via two steps. First, we analyse how the past is
narrated as being crucial for understanding Europe and its present and future values.
Second, we investigate how speakers subsequently demarcate Europe from the sur-
rounding world, and thereby run the risk of turning an apologetic narrative into a
self-righteous ‘European myth’. We conclude with reflections on the promises and
pitfalls of narrating a ‘bitter past’.
Given the heuristic function of his scheme here, we restrict ourselves to Toulmin’s
so-called simple model, consisting of data, warrant and claim, which still helps in the
transparent reconstruction of an argument’s structural composition. The claim describes
the point of arrival, that is what is at stake and which can be identified by asking ‘What
exactly are you claiming?’. The data on which this claim is based can be identified by
asking ‘On what grounds is your conclusion based?’. Finally, warrants are ‘statements
indicating the general ways of arguing being applied in each particular case and implic-
itly relied on as ones whose trustworthiness is well established’ (Toulmin et al., 1979:
43). They can be identified by asking ‘How do these data justify the claim?’. Within the
DHA (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001: 74ff), the notion of topos has been applied instead to
designate both formal and content-related ‘conclusion rule[s] that connect[s] the argu-
ment or arguments with the conclusion, the claim’. From the perspective of CDA, these
conclusion rules are either sound or fallacious, enabling or preventing the more or less
undistorted exchange of standpoints through particular ways of representing events,
objects or persons (for this normative distinction, see Forchtner and Tominc, 2012).
Our analysis employs Toulmin’s model in combination with the aforementioned dis-
cursive strategies in order to identify the basic argumentative structures of the speeches,
thereby enabling us to analyse how the immediate claims made by the speakers are
often intervowen with implicit narrations of Europe’s past, present and future.
With regards to the concept of narrativity, we draw on converging insights from a
variety of disciplines. In linguistics, William Labov (1997) views narrative as a ‘choice
of a specific linguistic technique to report past events’, which involves at least one tem-
poral juncture, that is two clauses sequentially arranged and referring to events indicating
a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ (Labov, 2006: 37). Narratives therefore are about changes or
developments, in other words events, involving both a choice of events and the choice to
arrange them according to the fundamental schema of beginning (prior state)–middle
(event)– ending (new state). An event, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1984: 65) claims,
‘only gets its definition from its contribution to the development of the [narrative’s] plot’.
The construction of narratives entails selecting only those events which support the wider
plot, that is those in congruence with the narrative’s overarching ‘point’ (see also Van Dijk,
1980: 14). This is observable in, for example, traditional nationalist narratives in which
troubling elements of ‘our’ past are often omitted as they do not correspond to the
national self-image (Wodak and De Cillia, 2007: 343–345). The force of narrative
derives from its linear arrangement of (selected) events in a unified plotline, making the
succession, the (implicit) causalities and the conclusions of the story appear natural
(Ricoeur, 1992: 142). In sociology, Margaret Somers (1994: 606) has similarly argued
that ‘it is through narrativity that we come to know, understand and make sense of the
social world, and it is through narratives and narrativity that we constitute our social iden-
tities’. Ricoeur likewise claims that narratives are central when it comes to constructing
collective identities. His idea of narrative identity entails that ‘[n]arrative constructs the
identity of the character (…) in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the
story [the plot] that makes the identity of the character’ (Ricoeur, 1992: 147ff). For narra-
tives in which the in-group is the central ‘character’, the construction of a collective self-
image is thus done through the narration of a common past. It is therefore crucial to
emphasise that even though narratives proceed ‘forwards’ in time – one event seemingly
leading to the next – they are in fact constructed retrospectively. Labov (2006) accounts
for this with his notion of narrative pre-construction, indicating that the composition of a
narrative starts from ‘the end’, from the idea of ‘where it is going to go’, and only there-
after identifies an appropriate beginning and middle which suit this end. Concerning col-
lective identity, this implies that the retrospective composition of a common narrative is
always undertaken in light of the community’s present situation; it is the ‘end’ of the
narrative (the community’s present and future situation) which determines which kind of
beginning (the community’s foundation) and middle (its history between foundation and
present) will be considered appropriate communal narration of the past. Within CDA, this
idea has been utilised in research on nationalism, indicating that it is through narratives
about the historical foundation of the national community that its present identity is
strengthened and re-affirmed (Heer et al., 2008; Wodak et al., 2009). In the following, we
will likewise argue that the specific narrations of a common European past ultimately
serve to legitimate the contemporary identity constructions and political priorities
of the EU.
In addition to a focus on how group identity and boundaries are produced through
historical narratives, Reinhardt Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte offers a conceptual tax-
onomy which identifies three different dimensions – temporal, spatial and hierarchical
– in the conceptual construction of collective identities. The temporal dimension con-
cerns the fundamental conceptual distinction, before:after. Any rendering of the human
world and any exercise of action must relate itself to the temporality of human existence,
that is the tension between a ‘space of experience’ and a ‘horizon of expectation’
(Koselleck, 2004: 257). In any society, choices made regarding the future are always in
some sense informed by the past, but past experiences are also understood in the light of
future goals. Koselleck thus emphasises that a society’s conceptual self-description
always involves narrative (re)descriptions of its past and imaginings about its future.
The spatial dimension concerns the distinction, inside:outside. To think about society
is to think of its boundaries. DHA renders this idea in terms of the always present mark-
ing out of ‘self’ versus ‘other’ in the construction of a community. Koselleck’s most
elaborate analysis of the inside:outside distinction is carried out under the heading of
‘asymmetrical counter-concepts’. Analysing examples, such as the Nazi notion of der
Untermensch (Koselleck, 2004: 155–191), explores how transitions from relationships
of recognition to conflict and persecution between communities can be traced in their
conceptual universes. Although relations to the ‘other’ are not necessarily ‘asymmetrical’,
be biased in the way they co-occur’, and Costas Gabrielatos and Paul Baker (2008: 10ff)
add that collocation patterns tend to reveal the semantic profile of a word. The initial list
of collocates was restricted by the following settings: span +/–5; mutual information
(MI)>3; log-likelihood (LL)>6.63; minimum collocation frequency 5. While the
MI score indicates the strength of the collocation, it favours low-frequency content
words. In order to balance the latter effect, we also considered LL, which determines the
statistical significance of co-occurrences (see Gabrielatos and Baker, 2008: 11).
Having established our list of collocates, the concordances were independently read
by the two authors and categorised according to Koselleck’s three conceptual dimensions
of identity (Table 1). Given that some concepts have very different meanings according
to the context they appear in, for example division/divide which can both be temporal
and spatial, the ultimate decision was taken after a discussion of such cases.
In a second step, we looked for clusters around Europe which contained these
collocates (settings: span 2–5; minimum frequency 3). Clusters are sequences of words
(Continued)
Table 1. (Continued)
(Continued)
Table 1. (Continued)
with no concern for meaning which are computed automatically by WordSmith. We then
‘cleaned up’ these clusters, that is we deleted any ‘surplus’ such as <in a > in <in a new
Europe>, resulting in the following 34 relevant clusters (Table 2).
Finally, working with the pivot table function in Microsoft Excel, we identified texts
which contained at least one cluster from each dimension and at least five different
clusters in total. While it has to be said that this downsizing procedure favours longer
texts, as they have a greater chance of containing collocates and clusters, it did enable
the automatised, that is computer-assisted, rather transparent and systematic compila-
tion of a primary corpus of five speeches (18,493 words in total). This primary corpus
includes three speeches by the then President of the European Commission, Romano
Prodi (2003a, 2003b, 2004), one speech by his successor, José Manuel Barroso (2005),
and one speech by Angela Merkel, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany and
then President of the European Council (2007). We ultimately focused on passages in
which the node word Europe appeared close (+/–5 words) to a collocate – at which
point we started the qualitative analysis.
violent and bitter dimensions of its history. This is visible in a speech delivered by Prodi
(2004) at a seminar against anti-Semitism.
Europe’s history has many glorious pages. I think of the democratic principles we have
inherited from Greek civilisation. I think of the flowering of the Renaissance and the
advances of the Age of Enlightenment. But Europe’s past also has many dark and
terrible chapters. Chapters that relate the worst of man’s cruelty to his fellows. It has
seen persecutions and pogroms. It has seen the Inquisition and the Wars of Religion. It
has seen burnings at the stake, autos-da-fé, noyades and purges. Most terribly, within
the span of my own generation, it has seen concentration camps, mass extermination,
genocide and the unique horror of the Shoah. Often these have been passed off with
euphemisms – such as the ‘Final Solution’ and the equally obscene ‘ethnic cleansing’.
There are killing fields elsewhere too, but this does not reduce the heavy burden of
guilt we Europeans bear for the past. We are not here to judge other nations or
continents or their crimes. We are here to talk about Europe. Let us have the courage
to face the facts and call things by their true names.
This argument – which illustrates the so-called ‘age of apology’ well – is supported by
applying a variety of discursive strategies. Starting with realisations of the strategy of
nomination, it is crucial to note that Prodi, throughout the speech, constructs the audi-
ence in terms of ‘we’, ‘us’ (lines 1, 12, 13). He thereby addresses a homogenised, all-
inclusive audience which is drawn into his narrative. Furthermore, there is a shift between
establishing the data (particularly lines 1–9) and the claim (particularly lines 11–14), in
that the former speaks of ‘Europe’ (lines 1, 3) while the latter nominates the in-group as
‘Europeans’ (furthermore, lines 12–14 heavily employ the aforementioned personal
deixis).
Arguably, ‘Europe’ might be perceived as a more abstract entity, and to speak of
‘Europeans’ right at the beginning might provoke the listener/reader to ask: Who exactly
was responsible for ‘the worst of man’s cruelty to his fellows’? This, however, would cre-
ate division where Prodi aims to unify the continent, thus ‘Europeans’ as active and unified
agents only occur at the end of the passage. With regard to how Europe is characterised, the
dominant strategy of predication is indeed not one of positive self-representation (although
there are references to more traditional positive self-representations). For example, Prodi
lists ‘many glorious pages’ (line 1; strategy of intensification and predication) and seem-
ingly attempts to mitigate the subsequent self-criticism (lines 3–9) by stating that ‘[t]here
are killing fields elsewhere too’ (line 11). However, these comments are always followed
by the adversary ‘but’, in other words expressing opposition to these very statements. More
importantly, ‘Europe’ is explicitly characterised via a list of clearly negative images (‘dark
and terrible’, ‘man’s cruelty to his fellows’, etc.; lines 3–8). The force of this listing is fur-
ther increased through anaphora, that is ‘It has seen’ (lines 4–5; another rhetorical operation
is visible in lines 13–14 where a clear antithesis ultimately justifies the claim that we have
to have ‘the courage to face the facts’). This rather negative predication of ‘Europe’ is sup-
ported by the metaphorical framing of its ‘history’/‘past’ in terms of a book: while there are
‘glorious pages’ (italics added), terrible aspects fill entire ‘chapters’ (italics added). By
emphasising the danger of ‘euphemisms’ (line 9) and rejecting the potential relativism of
pointing to other ‘killing fields’, awareness of these shortcomings is further intensified (see
also the many intensifiers such as ‘many’, ‘worst’, ‘Most’; lines 3, 4, 6).
The primary emotion evoked in these articulations of Europe’s (pre-integration)
history is guilt – not pride. Its major point is to impart a moral imperative in the form
of ‘facing up’ to a terrible past, an obligation which it puts on all Europeans (see the
note on nomination above). This is, however, not a fully unfolded narrative, given that
Prodi only makes the moral demand that the dark past should be acknowledged without
actually narrating Europe’s departure from it, that is without marking out a beginning,
a transitional event and an ending.
Elsewhere, Prodi more fully unfolds Europe’s ‘tragic narrative’, including some of its
most central characters: Europe’s founding fathers. These men play a crucial role when
narrating Europe’s departure from its pre-integration ‘bitter past’, a centrality which
is illustrated by their appearance in 15 out of the 62 texts in our corpus. The following
passage is taken from Prodi’s Europe: The Dream and the Choices (2003b), and illus-
trates this narrative pattern.
Men and women born after 1945 will be able to say that they have lived all their lives
without seeing their own countries and their own families afflicted by war – the first
Europeans in history who have been able to do so. I can remember war, though I was
still very young. And my father before me could remember war, and so could my
grandfather, and all the generations before him. ‘Never again’, said the founding
fathers of Europe, and meant it, and so it was.
Here again, reference is made to a common dark past, but it is done somewhat cov-
ertly by explicitly referring only to a set of memories of war (line 1ff). Consequently,
Prodi can again avoid differentiating between perpetrators and victims and instead
represent contemporary Europeans through inclusive categories (‘Men and women’,
‘Europeans’; lines 1, 3), as totum pro parte, rather than as members of particular
communities differently positioned in relation to the perpetrator:victim dichotomy.
The key argument made in this passage is that European history is marked by a
fundamental break. This break is constituted by the historical and moral intervention
made by ‘the founding fathers’ (line 5). It is this intervention which radically separates
centuries of war from the present time in which ‘Europeans’ are able to live in peace.
By foregrounding this, two perspectives are introduced which support the above-mentioned
juxtaposition: first, Prodi emphasises the ‘otherness’ of what preceded this new epoch
by evoking the authority of his own personal experience (‘I can remember war’, line
3). Subsequently, he introduces the perspective of ‘the first Europeans’ (line 2), who
have not experienced war as being in an entirely different position. The founding
fathers themselves are characterised through the mobilisation of two striking recontex-
tualisations. On the one hand, ‘Never again’ (line 5) has – against the background of
the Holocaust – become a rallying cry against contemporary anti-Semitism and evil in
general. On the other, line 5–6 contains an implicit biblical reference as Prodi aligns
with the basic sentence structure of the story of Genesis (1:3), in which each account
of an act of creation is introduced by the words ‘God said’ and concluded by ‘and so it
was’. These (religious) recontextualisations indicate the sacredness of the founding
fathers, making them the secular saints of the Union.
Here we can identify the necessary elements of a narrative structure. The temporal
juncture presented is the transition from a common European state of war and suffering
to one of peace; the event of the narrative is the moral choice and intervention – the
‘Never again’ – of the founding fathers. The narrative’s plotline concerns the beginnings
of European integration, which fundamentally changed European history due to the
founding fathers’ moral refusal to repeat Europe’s violent history. In line with Ricoeur’s
arguments, the overarching ‘moral’ agenda of the narrative significantly colours the
meaning of its central event. In order to function as part of the ‘Never again’ plotline, the
event of European integration must itself be given a moral connotation. In consequence,
speakers tend to separate the economic, instrumental surface of European integration
from its moral value-based essence. This conceptual differentiation constitutes the hier-
archical dimension of European identity in the speeches. Within this framework,
European economic integration is only the means through which the grander moral
agenda of the founding fathers, that is making war in Europe impossible, is advanced.
As Prodi (2003b) claims, ‘behind every economic proposal, behind every fresh venture
on the economic front, there has been a clear and conscious political inspiration and a
sharp choice of values’. Such narration, which backgrounds profane economic aspects
in favour of sacred values, is also explicit in the following speech by Merkel (2007):
Let us not forget: For centuries Europe had been an idea, no more than a hope of peace
and understanding. Today we, the citizens of Europe, know that hope has been
fulfilled.
It has been fulfilled because the founding fathers of Europe were thinking in terms
well beyond their own generation. They were thinking in terms well beyond their own
time. They were thinking in terms also well beyond purely economic freedoms.
This dream could come true because we citizens of Europe have learned over the past
50 years to make the most of our identities and diverse traditions, the lively variety of
our languages, cultures and regions.
This dream could come true because we let ourselves be guided by that quality which
for me gives Europe its true soul, that quality which made the Treaties of Rome
possible.
That quality is tolerance. We have taken centuries to learn this. On the way to
tolerance we had to endure cataclysms. We persecuted and destroyed one another. We
ravaged our homeland. We jeopardized the things we revered. Not even one
generation has passed since the worst period of hate, devastation and destruction.
Again, we start by representing Merkel’s position through Toulmin’s scheme (Figure 4):
Again, references to the ‘bitter past’ dominate the passage (in particular lines 1–2,
17–20) and, similar to the first example (Prodi, 2004), an all-inclusive in-group (‘we’ in
lines 2, 9, 13, 17, 18, 19; also ‘us’ in line 1 and ‘our’ in lines 10, 11) is constructed. In line
with this broad strategy of nomination, Merkel speaks of ‘our homeland’ in relation to
European failures (line 19). By using the singular, Merkel presupposes the existence of
one ‘homeland’, Europe. Instead of speaking of different national homelands engaged in
violent conflict, which would depict European history more accurately, Merkel repre-
sents Europe, retrospectively, as if it always was one (although at times fractured) home-
land. Following Labov’s (2006) idea of narrative pre-construction, the narrative’s end (a
unified Europe) restructures its beginning by projecting the idea of a common European
homeland retrospectively, thereby implicitly naturalising the narrative’s conclusion (an
actual unified Europe).
The founding fathers’ vision for Europe is again given a moral rather than a purely
economic meaning (lines 5–7) and serves as the plot mechanism which facilitates the
transition from a dark past to a peaceful unified present. But whereas European peace
was, in the narration of Prodi quoted above, something of a ‘divine gift’ from the found-
ing fathers to ‘Europe’, Merkel ascribes a much more active role to the ‘citizens of
Europe’. The horrors of the past are now not simply ended by the founding fathers, but
become the basis for a learning process including all Europeans. This collective is repre-
sented as actively shaping its future (lines 2, 9) and having collectively learned from its
violent history (lines 9, 17).
The related claim – that ‘Europe’ has learned through the integration process of the
last 50 years to make the most of its diversity (lines 9–11) – constitutes another intertex-
tual reference: this time to the EU’s official motto ‘Unity in Diversity’. Integration,
therefore, crowns a potential which has always existed (line 1) but which has only now
been realised by Europe (re)discovering its ‘true soul’: the quality or value of tolerance
(line 17). Here, Merkel’s use of personal deixis (‘we’) does not simply draw her audience
into the plotline, but constitutes a fallacy of hasty generalisation. After all, the claim that
‘we citizens of Europe have learned’ (line 9, also line 17) could be appropriate but con-
stitutes an unjustified generalisation given, for example, the electoral successes of
far-right groups all across Europe.
Merkel’s narration positions the community as the subject of the narrative, rather than
as the object saved by the founding fathers (who then become the central narrative sub-
ject, as in Prodi above). The effect is that the identity-generating dynamics of the narra-
tive now centre on the collective identity of ‘Europe’, rather than having metonymically
to articulate this through the characters of the founding fathers. The construction of a
collective European identity is therefore much more forceful; Europeans are now directly
ascribed the ability to learn collectively and are, thereby, imputed with a common
soul (represented by the value of ‘tolerance’) much deeper than any instrumental
commonality of economic interests.
The connection between the hierarchical dimension (the ‘soul’ or values of Europe)
and the temporal dimension (the narrative of the ‘bitter past’) is at the core of this con-
struction of European identity. As narrated here, the relationship between Europe’s
identity as a community of values and its history is never one which entails a simple
claim to be the origin or longstanding promoter and protector of these values (arguably,
this differs from the US narrative which is largely about the same values). Rather,
Europe’s claim to a privileged relationship with these universal values rests on the idea
of a communal learning process which has supposedly taken place in Europe. As Prodi
bluntly states in another speech (2003a): ‘[w]e have learnt to our cost the madness of
war, of racism and the rejection of the other and diversity. Peace, rejection of abuse of
power, conflict and war are the underlying and unifying values of the European pro-
ject’. The implicit causality between the two sentences underpins the central point of
this European narrative: Europe’s learning process rests on having experienced the radi-
cal absence of exactly those (universal) values which it now defends and holds sacred.
It is because Europe is guilty of so many wars that it has come to appreciate peace. It is
because Europe has seen the worst of authoritarian rule that it safeguards democracy. It
is because Europeans persecuted each other for so long in the name of religious, national
or racial differences that it has now learned to deal with diversity in a tolerant and inclu-
sive way. The moral imperative which emerges from this plotline is that Europeans
must continue to take on the guilt of their past, must insist on remembering its horrors
– and must therefore look at their history not with pride or nostalgia but with a
determination to make Europe radically different from what it was before.
In a similar vein, it has been argued by scholars such as Zygmunt Bauman (2004) and
Tzvetan Todorov (2005) that Europe’s identity is not (primarily) defined by its economic
functions, or indeed by the construction of dichotomous self:other relationships with the
external world. Rather, contemporary Europe defines itself against its own past as ‘other’.
It is this departure and differentiation from Europe’s ‘bad self’ which serves as the pri-
mary contrast when articulating its present value-based identity. We claim, however, that
the presence of a ‘bitter past’ as a primary ‘other’ does not necessarily mean that the
external world plays no role in European identity constructions. In fact, the contempo-
rary external world is articulated in relation to Europe as a community of values born of
a ‘bitter past’. Therefore, the spatial dimension of European identity (differentiation
from the non-European other) cannot be ignored. Rather, this spatial dimension has a
potentially profound impact on the ‘tragic narrative’ itself and the kind of European
identity that it produces.
For after all the wars and boundless suffering, something very special has emerged.
We, the citizens of Europe, have united for the better. For we know, Europe is our
common future. That was a dream for many generations. Our history reminds us that
we must protect this for the good of future generations.
And so I hope that the citizens of Europe will say in 50 years’ time: Back then in
Berlin, the united Europe set the right course. Back then in Berlin, the European Union
embarked upon the right path towards a bright future. It went on to renew its
foundations so that it could make its contribution here in Europe, this old continent, as
well as globally, in this one large yet small world we live in.
For a better world. For people everywhere. That is our mission for the future.
When calls for peace refer to Europe nowadays, some may feel they sound hollow and
rhetorical. I do not agree. I do not agree because we can all remember very well the
horrors and massacres of the war fought next door in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. More
recently again, with another war, in a land not far from Europe, in Iraq, millions of men
and women, and especially young people, realised that their own future was at stake, the
future of the society they lived in, and expected to go on living in. And the streets of our
cities, all our streets and all our cities, whatever the attitudes and policies of our
different governments, were filled with the rainbow flags of peace.
Using a vague nomination (‘some’, line 1), Prodi starts by articulating a potential
problem for the original ‘tragic narrative’ of Europe: Why should Europeans still
remember their dark past and work for peace, if the danger of war in Europe has seem-
ingly disappeared? Indeed, Prodi himself, a few passages earlier, admits that ‘[n]obody
now would regard it as a realistic possibility that war should break out between France
and Germany, or between Italy and Britain’. Nonetheless, Prodi forcefully opposes the
imagined accusation from ‘some’ that Europe’s commitment to peace has become
hollow rhetoric. It is unclear who or how significant these imagined accusers are, but
they are soon neutralised by the notorious ‘we’ in the statement: ‘we can all remember
very well the horrors and massacres of the war’ (line 2ff, italics added). Linguistic
realisations, such as the rhetorical repetition of ‘I do not agree’ (line 2), which results
in causality (‘because’, line 2) and presupposes this ‘we’-group, do furthermore
increase the passage’s persuasiveness. Consequently, these voices (‘some’) are isolated
and portrayed as almost insane (argumentum ad hominem).
Significantly, however, the wars which Prodi now expects every European to remem-
ber are not the ones which preceded European integration and which elsewhere are the
major representatives of the ‘bitter past’: the two World Wars (and the Holocaust).
Rather, it is the wars outside the Union, in the former Yugoslavia but also Iraq (lines
3–6). Prodi’s answer to the accusation that it is no longer necessary to fight for peace in
EUrope is to argue that it is now necessary to fight for peace outside the Union and
ultimately beyond the European continent. War is still a potential danger – even if this
danger now lurks outside EUrope. It is interesting to note that this ‘going outwards’ is
gradually introduced in spatial terms: starting with ‘next door’, that is to say still part
of ‘the neighbourhood Europe’, and ending in ‘a land not far from Europe’ (line 3ff), in
other words no longer ‘Europe’. The moral obligation to confront Europe’s dark past
and ensure peace is now implicitly pointing beyond Europe.
The moral/political project which this new version of the ‘tragic narrative’ legiti-
mates is not only about making war in Europe impossible through integration, but now
entails extending the ‘impossibility of war’ to the world outside. The moral obligation
of Europeans – and one which the demonstrators against the war in Iraq seemingly
embodied – now also demands that they oppose war and fight for peace on a global
scale. This new European project is made inclusive and imperative through intensifica-
tion and nomination: not only does Prodi speak of ‘our’ streets and cities (line 6ff), he
also intensifies this statement via the use of ‘all’. As such, knowledge related to ‘peace’
becomes our property, which does not only imply a fallacy of hasty generalisation, but
also excludes ‘others’ as being not wholeheartedly committed to peace (an implicit
argumentum ad hominem).
However, the ambition that Europe should now play a role in fighting war and suffer-
ing in the wider world is not simply a moral demand; it also entails a claim that Europe
is uniquely competent to undertake such a task. The argument is that a ‘bitter past’ has
taught Europeans to co-exist in peaceful diversity, despite their cultural, national and
political differences, and that such lessons are exactly those needed in an increasingly
‘small’ globalised world. The following, final, passage by Prodi (2003b) illustrates this
two-step argument:
Europe’s policies in favour of peace and, more generally, its approach to international
relations are a reflection of its history. The first contribution that Europe can make is its
own experience. (…) Europe appears before the world as the most extraordinary
example of democratic governance of the globalisation process. An example towards
which it is no coincidence that other continents such as Latin America or Africa are
looking in the search for new forms of cooperation to overcome old divisions. Born in
order to put an end to war between peoples and in lands that had been the scenes of all
the horrors of conflict, destruction and violence, united Europe is confirmed by
enlargement as a factor of peace, stability and security throughout the continent. (…) We
Europeans have the ambition and feel that we have a responsibility to contribute to
peace, stability and security not only at regional level but throughout the world.
unique knowledge and experience, supposedly gained from the socio-political learning
process, which informs the construction of difference between Europe and non-
European ‘others’. The European project – through strategies of perspectivisation – is
now presented as something to be marvelled at from the outside. The asymmetry is thus
inverted: it is Europe which – from an advanced point of experience – can now take on
responsibility for the rest of the world, something which is likely to enable a degree of
both superiority towards external ‘others’ and a self-righteous relationship to its own
past, present and future. The irony is that the barbarity of Europe’s history now becomes
the raw material on which, through the emphasis on experience rather than on guilt, a
new image of Europe as advanced and knowledgeable, as civilised, is built. The tragic
narrative’s moral dictum, that is to take responsibility for one’s own former crimes, turns
into a (potentially) self-righteous, patronising ambition to take responsibility for the rest
of the world.
In Figure 8, we summarise our analysis above by making heuristic use of the idea of
semantic fields developed by Koselleck (for a similar application of the DHA, see
Krzyżanowski, 2010: 129–131). The image summarises the discourse analysed on
Europe’s identity as one predominantly about values which are rooted in a ‘bitter past’
(left) but in danger of collapsing into self-righteousness (right).
Conclusion
In this article, we have examined narrations of a EUropean identity by leading European
politicians. We proceeded from a theoretical foundation delivered by the DHA, theories
of narrativity and conceptual history. By utilising CL tools along the lines of Koselleck’s
three dimensions (temporal, spatial, hierarchical), we combined computer-assisted
downsizing with a detailed analysis of specific texts through CDA.
What this analysis reveals is that the essence of Europe, its ‘soul’, is rendered in terms
of common values which are made ‘European’ through their inscription into a narrative
of a common ‘bitter past’. This narrative of post-1945 Europe is not dominated by heroic
Acknowledgements
We are thankful to Ruth Wodak and Majid KhosraviNik for their comments on an earlier version
of this article. We are also grateful to Costas Gabrielatos for advice concerning the downsizing
procedure. All mistakes remain our own.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or
not-for-profit sectors.
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Author biographies
Bernhard Forchtner is a Wilhelm-von-Humboldt fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences,
Humboldt University, Berlin. He obtained his doctoral degree from the Department of Sociology
and the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, UK. His thesis
explored the relation between public apologies, societal learning and self-righteousness. He was
the recipient of a DOC-fellowship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and has published in
the field of memory studies, at the interface of sociological theory and critical discourse analysis,
and on prejudice and discrimination.
Christoffer Kølvraa is an assistant professor in the Department for European Studies at the
Institute of History and Area Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. In his research, he has
written on theories of discourse and identity, issues of nationalism and ideology, and contemporary
and historical notions of European identity. In his new book, entitled Imagining Europe as a
Global Player, he focuses on the narratives and discourses through which the European
Commission is constructing a common European identity in connection with ideas about a
common European foreign policy.