Holocaust Remembrance as ‘Civil Religion’: The Case of the Stockholm Declaration (2000)

Abstract

The Stockholm Declaration was the statement which summarized the main aims of the Stockholm International Forum, which was organized to promote Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research globally (hereafter, the SIF 2000; the forum was held on 26–28 January 2000). And despite the presence of non-European states such as America, Israel, Russia and Argentina, political scientist Jens Kroh (2008) has rightly stated that one of the most significant symbolic elements of the liberal representation of the Holocaust at this event was the idea that, ‘coming to terms with such a negative past has almost turned into an informal criterion for accession to the European Union’ (Kroh, 2010). Hence, the Stockholm Declaration demonstrates that the recollection of Nazi-era crimes with a central emphasis on the Holocaust has become a principal part of civic moral education in liberal Western and Westernizing nation states, particularly in Europe since 2000. These views are also echoed in sociologist Helmut Dubiel’s opinion that the SIF 2000’s representation of the Holocaust as a ‘European foundation myth’ is an attempt to ‘release the moral potential of its remembrance’ (Dubiel, 2004: 216–17), as well as in Alon Confino’s view, following and taking to extremes the ideas of Dan Diner, that the symbolism of contemporary Holocaust remembrance as moral and historical rupture has replaced the significance of the French Revolution as the ‘foundational past’ of human values in the West (Diner, 2007: 9; Confino, 2012: 5–6).