Anxiety, Dissonance and Imperial Amnesia of the European Union/Avrupa Birliginin Kaygi, Uyumsuzluk ve Emperyal Unutkanligi.

• Author: Ejdus, Filip

Introduction

In July 2007, Jose Manuel Barroso, the head of the European Commission (EC), compared "the EU as a creation to the organization of empires. We have the dimension of empire, but there is a great difference. Empires were usually made with force with a centre imposing diktat, a will on the others. Now what we have is the first non-imperial empire". (1) This statement immediately stirred controversy across Europe. To ease the dissonance and calm the tensions, Barroso's spokesman quickly made an assurance that "No one needs to have imperial nightmares tonight. President Barroso [...] referred to a quote by the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk to emphasise that the EU is anything but a superstate". (2) It is no wonder that the next time Barroso mentioned empires, it was to exactly the opposite effect. In a speech delivered to EU heads of delegations in September 2012, he made sure to point out that the EU is "not a nation and not an empire but a group of free willing nations that have decided that by pooling their sovereignty and acting together, they would be more effective in defending their interests and promoting their values". (3)

This article aims to show that this episode is not just a minor slip of the tongue but that it speaks volumes about the EU's memory politics and its anxiety about empires and imperialism. To that end, it builds on the recent literature according to which the EU erases links to colonialism from its memory script because this would undermine the myth of the EU as a peace project. This is a selective interpretation of history, "a foundational tale of pure origins, of an Immaculate Conception, which sets in place the main elements of a wishful and idealised European identity". (4) This idealised script excludes the fact that one of the key motivations for European integration both in the interwar period and in the immediate aftermath ofWorld War Two was to Europeanise colonialism by merging French resource-rich colonies in Africa with German investments through the Eurafrica project.

Building on these insights, others have also shed light on the obfuscated links between colonialism and the European integration project. Patrick Pasture, for instance, shows that although the European integration project's initial aim was to sustain the European colonies, it shook off its colonial legacy following decolonization in the 1960s and by the early 1970s reinvented itself by embracing universal liberal values. From then on, "the colonial dimension of the ECs vanished from European memory...". (5) Aline Sierp attributed such politics of memory not only to the concerns over potential reparations but also to the amnesia which exists at the national level. (6) Also, she mentions the small steps towards greater recognition of the European involvement in colonialism and its links to the early phase of the European integration project. The European Parliament (EP) has been at the forefront of this inchoate atonement which has yet to affect the official memory politics of other EU institutions. (7)

This article builds on these insights and develops them further by making two additional arguments. Firstly, I show that the EU systematically forgets not only European colonialism but also the much longer and broader phenomenon of imperialism, which dominated European politics for 2000 years. This encompasses not only various imperial polities inside Europe (Roman, Holy-Roman, Habsburg, German, etc.) but also European colonial rule over non-European territories and populations. Secondly, I understand this imperial amnesia as an anxiety-driven defensive mechanism which aims to reduce a dissonance between the EU's anti-imperial ethos and its imperial-like behavior. To illustrate my arguments, I use evidence collected from the permanent exhibition of the House of European History (HEH). As a major project of EU institutions, and the only museum of its kind, HEH is a perfect site for interrogating the relationship between history, memory and identity of the EU. In addition to having visited the museum twice, first in December 2017 and then in July 2018, I also draw on the HEH's founding documents, other EU official documents and public statements of EU policy-makers.

In the next section, I outline my theoretical assumptions about the politics of memory, avoidance and anxiety. Then, I discuss the anti-imperial ethos of the EU, its quasi-imperial behaviour and anxiety generated by the dissonance between the two. Finally, I use evidence from the HEH to show that the EU's politics of memory is characterised not only by colonial but also by imperial amnesia.

Memories, Dissonance and Anxiety

Collective memories are inextricably linked to identity. Who we are hinges primarily on where we think we come from. However, what we decide to remember collectively is also radically interdependent with what we choose to forget collectively. Revealing these forgotten elements of history does not only illuminate the little-known past but can also shed light on the aspects of a polity's identity obscured by those memories which are foregrounded in the stories told about the self. However, not all memories matter equally. In contrast to historical memories that are usually no longer important for the group's life, collective memories are based on the mediated experience of the group and have a bearing on that group's identity. (8) Therefore, collective memory is a much more spontaneous narrative that evolves organically out of society and is closely tied to its self-understanding, which "the common people carry around in their heads". (9)

Collective memories are always plural, contested and in a constant state of flux. This is especially so in polities as complex and diverse as the EU. To fend off anxieties that could stem from the inability to tell a coherent story about "who we are and where we come from", all polities, including the EU, construct what Yael Zerubavel calls "master commemorative narratives". This is a "basic 'story line' that is culturally constructed and provides the group members with a general notion of their shared past". (10) Master commemorative narratives tell a story based on selecting and omitting key events, remembering and forgetting, which led to the group's emergence and evolution as a distinct entity. The story is usually periodised into major stages, in which dark ages are usually juxtaposed with earlier golden eras and ongoing revivals. Polities aim to maintain their master commemorative narratives because they satisfy their basic need for ontological security or "the persistence of feelings of personhood in a continuous self and body". (11) Actors that can sustain their biographical continuity have a stable sense of agency. In contrast, agents struggling to sustain their autobiographical narrative get engulfed by anxiety and lose the ability to act purposefully.

In the broadest possible sense, anxiety is a feeling of inner turmoil over the uncertainty of future events. For Soren Kierkegaard, one of the first thinkers to systematically reflect on it, anxiety is unfocused fear which stems from "our ability to choose even the most terrifying of the possibilities". (12) For other existentialists such as Martin Heidegger, anxiety stems from humans' awareness of mortality. This is why it is a fundamental mood, which serves as the ground for all other emotions. (13)Anxiety is often conflated with fear and other emotions such as guilt, shame, etc. While fear is related to concrete physical and external danger, anxiety is, to use the words of Giddens, "essentially fear which has lost its object through unconsciously formed emotive tensions that express 'internal dangers' rather than externalized threats". (14) On the other hand, shame is "anxiety about the adequacy of the narrative by means of which the individual sustains a coherent biography". (15)

The inability to synchronise different memory narratives, or memories with behaviour, produces cognitive dissonance, discomfort which arises from two or more conflicting ideas and beliefs. (16) To reduce the resulting anxiety, people can revert either to avoidance, or denial that the dissonance exists, by changing the dissonant convictions and memories or strengthening consonant memories. (17) In Giddens' view, "avoidance of dissonance forms part of the protective cocoon which helps maintain ontologi-cal security". (18) He uses the metaphor of the protective cocoon to depict an emotional barrier that helps "bracket out" threats to agents' integrity and enables them to "go on" in social life. Amir Lupovici defined avoidance as defensive measures aimed at reducing dissonance by self-restriction to information, creating ambiguities, or looking for consistent and supportive information. In Lupovici's words, avoidance "allows actors to separate the threatened self from the source of the threat and secure the boundaries of the self". (19) Thus, avoidance helps maintain the protective barrier that inoculates the self by blocking out disturbing feelings of vulnerability and fragmentation, allowing an agent to act purposefully.

The literature on anxiety, memory and ontological security has identified several distinct forms of anxiety-driven avoidance in memory politics. One of them is forgetting. Dmitry Chernobrov distinguishes forgetting by repression, when memories are pushed into the unconscious, from forgetting by forgiving, or "helping the subject come to terms with its own troubling past...". (20) While the former threatens to resurface in the future as an unprocessed trauma, as in the case of the memory of inter-ethnic violence in Yugoslavia during World War Two activating five decades later, the latter is a healthier form that is expected to come about through mourning and reconciliation. When it takes place abruptly, following regime changes or revolutions, forgetting can also take the shape of memory erasure. One case in point is the...