Memory Entrepreneurship: Armenian Genocide Recognition in Europe

Abstract

Abstract Scholars have analyzed how political actors appropriate Holocaust-related memory laws to whitewash the past and undermine democratic traditions in various European countries. However, political actors in Europe have debated several other memory laws, which far-right MPs appropriate to serve their own purposes. The recognition of the Armenian Genocide is an understudied example of this phenomenon. Drawing from data collected in four countries—Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Latvia, and Sweden—this analysis introduces the rhetorical strategies of memory justification and memory extrapolation to examine how far-right MPs, in very distinct geopolitical contexts, appropriate and instrumentalize Armenian Genocide memory to attack pluralism and promote their own versions of Europe. Through an analysis of the instrumentalization of the Armenian Genocide, this article examines a growing crisis at the center of contemporary European politics. This crisis, which involves actors promoting very different goals and values, increasingly threatens the socio-political cohesion of Europe.