Human Rights and Memory

9. East Meets West: Europe and Its Others

9 east meets west: europe and its others The most comprehensive example of countries relinquishing aspects of their sovereignty to supranational bodies is the adjudicatory authority individual states have conferred upon the European Union. The European Court of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights illustrate the symbolic value and the juridical power that human rights can carry. The commission accepts complaints from a variety of nonstate actors, and national jurisdictions must abide by the decisions of the European court. As we have pointed out, postwar Europe is largely the product of the memory of fear. But it is important to reiterate that this does not only imply the kind of denationalization that characterizes some of the institutional transformations in the European Union. Rather, reactions to cosmopolitan pressures have prompted new articulations of national interests, as the example of the rise of a European Right, which has appropriated a multicultural rhetoric to defend the dominance of majority groups, shows. This neonational dynamic also finds expression in international relations: recent transatlantic tensions between the United States and some European nations cast doubt on how much diversity European universalism can tolerate; another realm in which national narratives seem to evoke earlier juxtapositions to cosmopolitanism is evidenced in the dissimultaneity of memory cultures that reflect ongoing tensions between western and eastern Europe, the east meets west 123 subject of the first section of this chapter. Another dimension relates to a renationalization in which national memories of past atrocities serve cosmopolitan purposes and vice versa. Here we encounter a paradox whereby universal dispositions are deployed to reinforce particular orientations . We discuss this dynamic in the second section in a case study of how memories of expulsions in Germany have shifted between particular and universal references, appropriating human rights tropes to rehabilitate the nation via a universalistic narrative. Countering a narrow cultural, geographical, and institutional focus, some theorists have suggested studying Europeanization in a global context with “an awareness of the importance of cultural dynamics; the centrality of contestations generated by multiple perspectives on issues central to European transformation” (Delanty and Rumford 2005, 7). As this section illustrates, common references to negative myths of European wars and distinctive memories of human rights abuses continue to produce a myriad of nation-specific reactions. Nevertheless, or perhaps precisely because of the persistence of particular memories, universalism remains a salient feature of European cosmopolitanism, even if its proponents explicitly reject the type of homogenizing claims that characterized earlier Enlightenment thinkers. Our historical analysis exemplifies how a moral universalism continues to emanate from the European model by generalizing its postnational aspirations as universal features rather than particular western European experiences. This misperception operates on both the normative and analytic levels. For one thing, it tends to privilege universalism, as it emerged in a Western context, and project it onto the rest of the world (Chakrabarty 2000). As such, it frequently becomes exclusionary, precisely by paying scant attention to the widespread persistence of particularism. These features are reminiscent of the universalistic assumptions that guided modernization theories during the 1940s and 1950s. There was little normative and conceptual space to account for ethnic or religious particularities. They were treated as residual categories, and as evidence that backward particularism stood in the way of progress. Some current scholarly responses to retribalization and religious fundamentalism even suggest that Western secularization, along with aspirations to separate church and state, was 124 human rights and memory never really the norm and is increasingly the exception. With the end of the cold war this imbalance came to the fore, as western Europe increasingly focused on memories of the Holocaust, and negative features of nationhood have been complemented by central and eastern European moves to extend memories of victimhood beyond World War II. Many of the postwar tropes articulated by Karl Jaspers shape contemporary debates about the nature of Europeanness and the precarious balance of universal and particular modes of remembrance. Overall, European cosmopolitanism retains a strong universalistic penchant, drawing on a narrow western European experience. Jaspers’s postwar vision of a core Europe propelled by France, Germany, and the Benelux countries, the rejection of nation-centric politics, the commitment to spread Enlightenment values, the cultivation of a particular social model, and above all the “lessons” of World War II, circumscribe the contours of this western European cosmopolitanism. For the most part, it is still predicated on a sense of universalism and a...