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 results of the study showed the ambivalent nature of this potential. On the one hand, the image of the Second world war retains 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 beginning of joint efforts to build a single European community in order to prevent the recurrence of these events. Today, 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. On the other hand, the image of World War Two has a serious deconsolidating charge for the common European identity. It is caused by contradictions in the European collective memory, which are more and more clearly manifested in the conditions of modern political conjuncture. 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 image of the Second World War. In the presence of the Global Network, we observe a steady increase of not only the arsenal of means for the representation and visualization of the image of the past, making it more interactive, multimodal, multifaceted and simplified, but also of the number of actors of memory politics, taking part in the formation of the European identity, or rather — an unlimited set of identities.