‘Great friends’: Creating legacies, networks and policies that perpetuate the memory of the Fathers of Europe

Abstract

This article highlights the uses of friendship by associations that perpetuate the memory of the Fathers of Europe. It demonstrates that the invention of the tradition of the ‘Fathers of Europe’ is not the monopoly of European institutions. It was made possible by the mobilization of associations of heirs that have perpetuated these Fathers’ memory since the 1960s. From a social history perspective, the article analyzes some case studies that show how associations of friends devoted to the Fathers of Europe have been created, and what kind of activities they have led throughout time. International friendship emerges as a set of reconstructed memories through the practices of the transnational spheres, by transforming a dead friend into an exemplary friend in order to legitimize a certain vision of the European past.