Thomas Serrier

Factors of Reconciliation: Is There a European Model?
Thomas SerrierT

he violence that broke Europe in pieces and resulted in millions of deaths during thetwo world wars may have created the impression that “nothing tears us apart quite likefamily.”1 What a contrast with today in any event!
A crowd of a million people in London ʼ s Trafalgar Square, in the streets ofBarcelona and Rome, 600,000 protesters in Madrid and Berlin, several hundred thousand in Paris,
demonstrations in Warsaw, Prague and up to Minsk…: the largest trans-European gathering tothis day was held on 15 February 2003 to say no to the war in Iraq. If the European states weredivided between participation (United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Central Europe)and the refusal to participate (Germany, the Netherlands, France, Belgium …) in the coalition
initiated by George W. Bush to overthrow Saddam Hussein, European opinion, for its part,
seemed united. Doubts over the legitimacy of the operation coalesced with the powerful tradition
of “Never again” that proliferated in Europe after 1945. Drawing on this mass demonstration,
Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, two of the most celebrated European intellectuals of theday, published a plea entitled “After the War. The Renaissance of Europe” in several European
newspapers on 31 May 2003.
The meaning of this title did not refer to an imagined future for the period following theongoing conflict in the Middle East, but rather interpreted the present as being the indicatorof a secular shift. Guided by geopolitical urgency and European construction expectations, theanalysis by Derrida and Habermas in fact took up the great irenic narrative which, with certain
slight differences, makes post-war Europe the period of successful consolidation of democracy
and an irreversible conversion to the culture of peace.
“Where have all the soldiers gone?” we might well wonder, with James J. Sheehan, in thinking
about the peaceful way of life that prevailed at the turn of the twenty-first century, from Lisbon
to Tallinn and from Belfast to Sofia. This was before the wave of terrorism that hit European
countries and led to a renewed stress on security.
War and, sometimes, even the idea of military intervention, seemed to have been banned,
maybe not in all European countries, but in an overwhelming majority of them. This shift had
been taking place since 1945, even though it was slowed by the Cold War. It reached its peak withthe 2012 Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to the European Union for its contribution to “peaceand reconciliation, democracy and human rights.” It was supposed to have transformed Europe,a continent of incessant wars, into a permanent sanctum of peace. This great narrative became
commonplace. For instance, the objectives of the “House of European History”, established in
2007, to recount “50 years of the European adventure” since 1945―Year Zero―are explicit: “In1945, at the end of the war, Europe touched the bottom of the abyss.”2 And the title of the lastbook by Ian Kersaw, Hitlerʼs biographer, picks up exactly the same thread: Europe to hell and1Elie Barnavi, “Faire prendre conscience aux Européens de ce qui leur est commun (Raise awarenessamong Europeans about what is common to them),” Le Monde, 19 October 1999.

2

Exhibition catalogue, It’s our history! Fifty years of European adventure, Brussels, Tempora, 2007, p. 29.

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Factors of Reconciliation: Is There a European Model?

back.3
If tensions remain within the European Union or at its margins (Cyprus, Macedonia, Ukraine,
Russia), the shift that took place since 1945 demonstrates the possibility of a rapprochement
between former enemies. For many historians, this metamorphosis goes far beyond the simple
fact of the European construction in an exclusively political and institutional sense.
To analyze the scope and limits of European reconciliation, four main points must be taken
into consideration.
The first regards the historical, material, and moral context in which this movement towards
reconciliation took place. The second focuses on those players who had a leading role in both
the rapprochement itself and the effort to put the process of reconciliation itself at the centreof European collective memor y. The third will evoke the role of the political management ofmemory issues in these developments; and finally, the fourth will examine the existence of a
specific European model of conflict resolution.

The Period Following the Two Wars: Exhaustion, New Order, and Reorientation
Today it is common to hear both journalists and representatives of the EU declare that Europe
was “built on the foundations of reconciliation.” Perhaps this is forgetting that the strategic choiceof the “fathers of Europe,” including Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, had been to promote
the interconnection of economic interests, that would prohibit any direct confrontation between
European nations (particularly France and Germany). It was not based on reconciliation, andeven less on friendship among the people, difficult to imagine so soon after the warʼs end.
With respect to both the recent past and the centuries-old legacy of conflicts, all officials, fromall sides, regardless of their political affiliation, initially chose to remain silent. In the speech hegave in Zurich in 1946, Winston Churchill summarized that position by stating that the objective
should be to “turn our backs upon the horrors of the past.”
In retrospect, however, it is the in-depth transformation of relations between former
adversaries that gains notice. Particularly because the “last catastrophe” (Henry Rousso), namely
WWII, was not the only conflict to overcome between European nations. The wreckage of 1945
echoed the ruins of 1918. Before that, there were the traces left by the Napoleonic Wars, theReligion wars and the Hundred Yearsʼ War… over the ages, quasi-standardized conflicts formatted
the relations between “hereditary enemies”. The Franco-German and Polish-Russian examples
are only two among countless others.
Even today, tensions among European countries remind us that the way of overcoming these
rivalries is not self-evident: it is neither the product of any historical necessity nor the effect ofa natural movement towards friendship between the countries in question. The resurgence,
between Poland and Russia, or between Greece and Germany, of negative stereotypes anchoredin age-old historical legacies, nurtured by a succession of institutional, social, and financial crises,
reflects the importance of the challenges.
If there is a consensus on the necessity of reconciliation, it is far from being permanently
secured. The context of reconciliation among European countries is well known: from the cost of
human and material devastation left by the war in 1945, to the absolute urgency of reconstruction,
by way of the incorporation of European countries into the two opposing Cold War blocs. The
effect of which was the control of any policy that would destabilize the new order imposed andguaranteed by the American and Soviet superpowers. One could add, to the risk of being accusedof cynicism, the disappearance of the most virulent sources of conflicts during the inter-war
period, as a result of massive transplants of populations into areas of inter-ethnic mixing by thetwo totalitarian States in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
3

Ian Kersaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949, Penguin, 2015.

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Thomas Serrier“Europe is sick. Too sick even to hope for some cure. The therapeutic must yield to thesurgical. An operation is necessary. None would be more efficient than exchanges, even imposed
exchanges, of population,” wrote Nikolai Politis in 1940. “In the Europe of tomorrow, the interestof order and peace will require the coincidence of political borders with ethnic borders.” Politis
was, however, not a pro-Nazi. On the contrary, he was a jurist and political leader who embodied
a generation of cosmopolitan intellectuals committed to building European stability in the wakeof the First World War. Winston Churchill was the first to call into question the ethnic balancesof the pre-WWII period in Europe, speaking of a “clean sweep” as a necessary evil to ensure
lasting peace. This sensitive and disturbing issue continues to trouble the collective conscience ofEuropeans. In 2003, the Polish writer Stefan Chwin, who was born in 1949 in Gdańsk, wrote in a
provocative paper:“The time has surely come to stop mentioning only the losses related to the deportation ofwhole ethnic groups, but also to raise soberly and coldly the “positive aspects” of these massive
population displacements.”4This argument questions the tacit agreement of the exclusively negative nature, in terms ofconsequences, of the displacements of populations that occurred before and immediately after
the Second World War. However, would Europe that is being built today have been permitted tosee the light without the “original sin” of these massive displacements of populations by the Nazi
and Soviet totalitarian regimes? Might it be possible that it is precisely these huge displacementof populations during the 40s and 50s that finally saved central Europe after 1989 from a massivecrisis akin to that which ripped through the Balkans between 1991 and 2001?

Actors of the Reconciliation Process: Emblematic Figures and Social Foundations
In 1945, various actors pledged to (re)build Europe on the principle of confrontation of ideas
rather than confrontation of weapons.
The first condition was to take a decisive step out of the spiral of revenge and violence that had
been one of the characteristics of Europe until 1945. “Far from avenging us, whoever strikes orslaughters a German prisoner, insults us,”5 declared Robert Antelme in 1945, shortly after being
himself freed from the Dachau concentration. For this man, a member of the French resistance,
it was the memory of his friends, victims of the war, that imposed a new humanism, based on
the respect for the former enemy: “Revenge will come only from the victory of the ideas (…) for
which they died. ”6This ethic of reconstruction is the prerequisite for a new departure. Joseph Rovan, also aformer deportee to Dachau, who was born in Munich and took refuge in France after Adolf
Hitlerʼs rise to power, declared in a famous article that France will have “the Germany it deserves”
according to its attitude, unforgiving or constructive.
This new ethic arose from the substitution of national antagonisms with a new moral vision
based, on the one hand, on the rejection of the principle of collective condemnations and, on
the other hand, on the idea that the greatness of a nation can only be measured by its degree ofadvancement and capability to respect a former enemy.
In 1989, the President of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel, during a meeting with his German
counterpart Richard von Weizsäcker, did mention that his people had already accepted theprinciple of collective guilt leading to the systematic expulsion of the German minority inCzechoslovakia: “We expelled them, not on the basis of established individual guilt, but simply
4

Stefan Chwin, « Das « Glück » der Vertriebenen », (The « luck » of the displaced), Neue Bürcher Zeitung,
20-10-2003.

5

Robert Antelme, Vengeance, Paris, Farrago, 2005, p. 10.

6Ibid., pp. 11-12.

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Factors of Reconciliation: Is There a European Model?

because they belonged to a particular nation. (...) In acting thus, we have injured ourselves.”7
The Franco-German situation, without necessarily being at the heart of this transformation,
became emblematic of these evolutions which emerged in the civil society well before it became
an official position.
Former protagonists of the Second World War, veterans, members of the resistance, andformer prisoners of war, invested with a moral authority played an essential and exemplary rolein this reconciliation process. Intellectuals like Władysław Bartoszewski in Poland, Joseph Rovanor Jean du Rivau in France, Jorge Semprun between Spain, France and Germany, but also thedissidents Lev Kopelev and Alexander Solzhenitsyn also played a major role. Their friendshipwith the German writer Heinrich Böll during the 60s and 70s, made a process of reconciliation
possible, beyond the memories of Operation Barbarossa, Stalingrad, Soviet troops in berlin in
1945, also beyond the ideological constraints of the Cold War.
The role of the Church is also well-documented, most notably in the German-Polish case. In
October 1965, an important letter was sent by the Polish ecclesiastical authorities to their German
counterparts. The use of the formula: “We forgive and ask for forgiveness” allowed both thesufferings endured by the Polish people throughout the war and by the Germans expelled after
the defeat of the Wehrmacht to be acknowledged.
This healing work, that carefully took into account each countryʼs suffering, had begun, in the
middle of the war, with Father Franz Stock, a German prison chaplain who helped hundreds ofFrench detainees by ensuring the exchange of messages between those sentenced to death andtheir loved ones and who, after the war, stayed in France to support German prisoners of war.
After the war, many former members of the resistance, who escaped German camps, exhorted
their comrades to avoid any nationalist excesses and to encourage mutual knowledge andexchanges involving the youth of both countries, politicians, trade unionists, journalists or evenentrepreneurs.
It is this spirit that presided over the beginnings of the Bureau International de Liaison etde Documentation (BILD) and, in August 1945, the foundation of two journals, Dokumente andDocument published in France and in Germany. The initiatives by these individual figures were,
followed by various cultural, political or professional initiatives. The Franco-German Institute (DFI)
was established in Ludwigsburg in 1948 to foster exchanges and language learning. Partnerships
grew; meetings between historians came in quick succession and for instance Georg Eckert
created a program for the systematized critical re-reading of textbooks. The Elysée Treatyof 1963 thus officially sealed a reconciliation that was well under way, and essentially further
strengthened it. Over fifty years, more than 8 million French and German youth participated in
the exchanges organized by the French-German Youth Office (FGYO).

The Role of Symbolic Gestures of Reconciliation in Europe
The echo that met the solemn gestures of reconciliation can be understood against this socialand cultural backdrop. The aura of the protagonists, the symbolic nature of the chosen historical
backdrop (Reims, Verdun, the location of a memorial to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising, Krzyzowa…), the strength of these gestures, supported by the power of the speeches or on the contrary, by the silence that is sometimes preferable for adding to the impact of some ofthese gestures, played an essential role.
But we know that the official Polish press, after Willy Brandtʼs famous gesture of kneeling in
1970, held back images of the West German Chancellor repenting in Warsaw. We also know thatthe symbolic venue proposed for the “Reconciliation Mass” that was celebrated in the presence
7

Richard von Weizsäcker and Vaclav Havel, “Échange pragois sur la culpabilité (Reflections on guilt fromthe citizens of Prague),” Esprit, No. 162, June 1990, pp. 5-8.

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Thomas Serrierof Chancellor Kohl and the Polish Prime Minister-President Mazowiecki on 12 November 1989
in Krzyzowa was suggested at the very last moment to avoid embarrassing historical blunders.
Instead of this former Prussian territory, centre of the anti-Hitler resistance, located in Poland
since 1945, Kohl had first considered the Annaberg hill, the site of clashes between German
forces and pro-Polish paramilitary in 1921.
Another significant transnational symbol has been, without question, the handshake between
French President François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl in Verdun in 1984. A similar pattern
emerged when Queen Elizabeth II, whose cousin Lord Mountbatten had been assassinated by
the IRA, and former IRA leader Martin McGuinness shook hands for the first time in June 2012,
remembering “all who died in the Irish conflict,” while leaders of Sinn Féin had refused the ideaof such a meeting a year before considering that it was “too early.”
The performative character of solemn rituals is, however, not certain. On the contrary, therepetition of such formal gestures can seem artificial, performed in order to “prove” the reality ofreconciliation. In a biting commentary, German journalist Klaus Bachmann criticized in 1994 the“kitsch of reconciliation”, based on the mechanical repetition of the same ritualistic and hollow
gestures.
Writing on this very topic, Valérie Rosoux stated that “the joint celebrations of WWI armistice
day each November 11 by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy certainly illustrates the passage
from duel to duo. Do they evoke however the same emotion as the first ones in 1984?
When there is a lack of real support or popular consent or when the gestures of reconciliation
are clearly related to political ends, they can easily become counterproductive. This was for
instance the case of the “brotherly kiss” between Leonid Brezhnev and the Secretary General of
the East German Communist Party Erich Honecker on the 30th anniversary of the GDR.
Conversely, a situation may still be too sensitive to make such a gesture possible. This was thecase of Bosnia, where, after the wars between 2000 and 2010, several ceremonies, modelled after
the figure of Brandt kneeling in Warsaw, never producing unanimity, in fact quite the opposite.
When Serbian President Boris Tadic travelled to Srebrenica in July 2005, the associationsof mothers of the victims initially refused to allow the head of State to par ticipate in thecommemorations. In 2013, his successor, Tomislav Nikolic, declared that he was kneeling to ask
forgiveness, but refused to use the words “massacre” or “genocide”. Two years later, the Serbian
Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic was forced to leave the memorial of Srebrenica.

The Work of Time and Memor y: A European Paradigm?
One of the key difficulties of the process of reconciliation is to suggest that a turning point canoccur in an instant, while for the populations, especially for the victims, the process can only be
accepted in the long term. In the aftermath of violence, is it in generations that such an evolution
is possible. The issue is to transform painful memories by giving them a constructive or reconstructive meaning. The central issue is the reason of all these European conflicts that havetaken so many soldiers and civilians from us – A moral question to which politicians have oftenchosen not to respond and remain silent.
That attitude was the most common choice right after 1945 as it had always been. In fact, for
centuries, silence and amnesty were regarded as prerequisites for any reconciliation. In 1946 in
Zurich, Winston Churchill set out a clear and explicit objective that everyone could understand:“We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past.”
Major changes in attitude came later, during a long period that extended from the 60s to the90s. It led to a complete reversal of the imperative to forget. Today, populations and European
authorities alike insist on the importance of memory from all sides.
Despite the shor tcomings, obstacles and silences that may persist today between
neighbouring countries and former European enemies, it is true that this ability and willingness
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Factors of Reconciliation: Is There a European Model?

to confront the memories of the wars that ravaged Europe give the European Union Member
States a particular vocation in terms of conflict resolution. To cite Guy Verhofstadt, one example
among many, the devastating experience of the two world wars and particularly of the Shoah is8“the source of a particular European sensitivity and generosity.” Unlike the United States, often
perceived as arrogant and unilateral, Europe has learnt “humility” from past tragedies.9

The Limits of the European Model
It would be easy however, to establish the list of ongoing conflicts or unresolved issues in Europe,
from Ukraine to Cyprus, divided for over 40 years. The categorization between resolved andunresolved conflict is in itself highly subjective.
These limits do not prevent the EU from seeking to extend its model of reconciliation beyond
its borders.10 First, beyond the limits of Europe, the question concerns the normalization ofrelations among the EU members or between some of its member states and states outside of
the Union. In this specific instance, the main challenge is posed by the colonial past of European
countries. The spokesperson of the European delegation at the Conference in Durban, Louis
Michel, described a horizon of “historic reconciliation between North and South” based on anarrative that implicitly integrates, at its very core, the acknowledgement of responsibilities. “Overthe centuries, European history has been contrasted. The best has coexisted with the worst.
European countries have been in turns both conquerors and subjects, martyrs and aggressors,
fraternal and fratricidal, bearers of generous ideas but also of abject designs.”11 But recognitionof an injustice does not systematically lead to an apology. Many things are at stake, from the legal
and financial consequences that could result from possible reparations, to the consequences oninternal policies, and electoral sanction.
The fact that France and Algeria have never managed to sign their “Elysée Treaty” nor enact
their own type of “Verdun handshake” is revealing in this regard. More than half a century after
the independence of Algeria, the Franco-German model has been definitively abandoned by
the officials and the political advisers of the two countries. Without doubt because the FrancoGerman model is based on the recognition of a kind of symmetr y between the two former
enemies. Moreover, between France and Germany, there is a reciprocal cultural fascination. It is
without doubt much less the case between Germany and Poland, but the Franco-Algerian case, aswith other situations opposing former colonizers and former colonies, is entirely different.
Colonization automatically cancels any idea of symmetry as it imposes a hierarchy between
the parties.
Beyond the difficulties of applying the European model of reconciliations to former colonies,
there are other limits to this global aspiration. The European experience is without a doubt aremarkable precedent. However, at the global level, it does not constitute a unique model for all
post-conflict situations. According to Valérie Rosoux: “The grammar of reconciliation gradually
set out by the European countries does not result solely from a sui generis experience. It is alsosignificantly influenced by the example of the establishment of “reconciliation commissions”,
whether in Latin America or for the most emblematic of all, in South Africa in the 90s.
Far from dictating the way forward, the European States seem to have become fascinated,with a model of reconciliation based on forgiveness. The charisma of Nelson Mandela had a lot to
do with these developments adapted for the European theatre, as in the case of the International
Crime Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
8

Guy Verhofstadt, Brussels, 18 December 2001.

9

Guy Verhofstadt, Brussels, 08 December 2001.

10

Thierry De Montbrial, Le Monde, 7 April 2007.

11

Durban, 30 August 2001.

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Thomas Serrier

The concept of “forgiveness”, according to V. Rosoux, also appears nowhere in the projectof the founding fathers of the European Union. Actually, in the founding texts of the European
community, there is much more question of the pooling of each nation ʼ s interests than ofreconciliation between the people, or even of the establishing conditions for lasting peace
between European nations.
The idea that taking memory issues into account, if not as the sole instrument but at least as
an essential ingredient in the process of reconciliation, is a fairly recent development, as we havesaid. Nevertheless, it remains a strong feature and an essential factor of reconciliations in Europe.
It bears witness to the weight of the past and the pedagogical value given to the past, even themost difficult one to face, on Europe. The ravages of past centuries, especially the last one, haveregularly brought devastation to the “old continent.” The fear of diving back probably explains theEuropean obsession with the urgency of reconciliation.

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