The anti-communist moment: competitive victimhood in European politics

Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory, this article argues that the field of the political debates about Europe’s “constitutive historical legacies” was characterised by two positions, both inherently anti-communist: the cosmopolitan Holocaust memory framework of the post-Cold War Western European “integrator position” and the heroic-national memory framework of post-Communist countries “returning to Europe.” The interaction of these two positions was influenced by the conditionality of the enlargement process. The debate was thus not de-politicised, as often stated, but consensually anti-communist. The pan-European anti-communist moment hindered politico-ideological framings and changed political struggles into a mimetic competition between self-victimising actors in which claims were moralised and restricted to anti-communism.