LONDON — A new museum planned for later this year by the European Parliament in Brussels seeks to recount 20th century Europe with a particular emphasis on postwar political and economic integration. Outside its doors, however, is another story: crises and challenges that have threatened the very core of European Union unity.
An ongoing migrant crisis that saw more than 1 million people pour into continental Europe last year continues unabated, fueling nationalist and anti-E.U. parties. A string of recent terrorist attacks — Paris in November, Brussels in March — has raised other concerns about open borders and security.
At the same time, the Eurozone economic crisis has not ended — far from it. According to most recent E.U. statistics, the continent’s current seasonally adjusted unemployment rate is 10.2 percent. But in certain member states, such as Spain and Greece, the figures are nearly twice as high: 20.1 percent and 24.2 percent, respectively.
And then, of course, there is the question of political dissolution altogether.
On Thursday, voters in Britain will go the polls to decide whether or not the country should even remain in the European Union at all.
But a Pew survey released earlier this month indicates dissatisfaction with Europe’s governing body is widespread across the continent. Ballots in other countries may follow in the foreseeable future.
So where, and what, exactly is this “shared” European memory that will be extolled by the Brussels museum?
For decades, a certain definition of European identity has been shaped by the European Union, which often styles itself as a community of nations dedicated to preventing a repeat of Europe's dark and terrible 20th century, including two world wars, the Holocaust, and the uprooting of millions between the rising tides of Nazism and Stalin.
For some historians, the problem is that European history is a patchwork of national and ethnic narratives, which cannot be recast no matter how hard E.U. leaders try.
“It’s not that history is not there, it’s that there are competing claims to historical narrative,” said Philippe Sands, the author, most recently, of “East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity,” a study of how contemporary human rights law grew out of the Nuremberg trials.
In the particular case of Britain, Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London and now the de facto leader of the “leave” campaign, has used the history of World War II to justify his opposition to the European Union. In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, he likened the bloc to a “Nazi superstate.”
On the other side, Simon Jenkins, the British journalist and chairman of the National Trust, invoked the same history, but for the opposite cause. As he wrote in the Guardian last week: “I fear German dominance. That’s why I’m for remaining in the E.U.”
For Timothy Snyder, an expert on the histories of both Eastern Europe and the Holocaust, the European Union’s bid for a singular postwar view was always a flawed gamble.
“There isn’t a common European history of those traumas,” he said of World War II. “There are a variety of national histories of those traumas.”
“European integration, despite its many successes, never quite reached the level of historical pedagogy. In a moment of stress, people fall back on their particular national interpretations of what went wrong in the 20th century,” he added.
Snyder added that opponents of the European Union — in Britain but elsewhere in Europe — rely on “an imaginary history of the nation state: the idea that one can leave the E.U. and go back to a nation state.”
But this, he said, this is a phantom goal.
“In fact, there is no place to go back to — the mythical history of the nation state is quite literally a road to nowhere.”
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