The Image of the Second World War as a Factor in the Formation of Contemporary European Identity

Abstract

The image of the Second World War is one of the most significant images of the past for the European identity. The purpose of this study is to analyze its potential for the formation of the modern European identity as a supranational construct. The ambivalent nature of this phenomenon is revealed. The image WWII contains a sufficiently powerful unifying impulse. It is determined by the uniting role of the colossal tragedy, the common misfortune that befell Europe in the middle of the past century, its integrational significance for the joint efforts to build a single European community in order to prevent the recurrence of these events. Nowadays, this momentum is realized through the preservation of European memory, the institutionalization of anniversaries, the broadcast of the memory of the war in the process of intergenerational communication in the functioning of the institutions of education and cultural environment as a whole, the articulation of traumatic memories in the political discourse. At the same time the author demonstrated that, the image of WWII has a serious deconsolidating element for the common European identity. It is caused by contradictions in the European collective memory. The new technological revolution that has engulfed Europe, accompanied by a steady shift of communication practices into cyberspace and the emergence of the phenomenon of cyber-memory, changes the mechanisms of representation and reception of the war image. The Global Network facilitates a steady increase of both the means for the representation and visualization of the image of the past, making it more interactive, multimodal, multifaceted and simplified. The number of actors of memory politics, who take part in the formation of the European identity, or rather ‒ of an unlimited set of identities has been growing.