Exhibition
The European Union is a supranational political and economic union of 27 countries that is committed to protecting the rights of its 450 million citizens. It also works against the violation of those rights.
Founded in the years immediately following the Second World War, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) — an economic post-war cooperation organisation — consciously set itself against the backdrop of a war-devastated Europe. Its 1950 founding declaration set out to unite former enemy states, stating that, ‘The contribution which an organised and living Europe can bring to civilisation is indispensable to the maintenance of peaceful relations.’
Perhaps, then, it was not an organisation best insulated from becoming a political institution: the ECSC broadened its scope in the decades after to include political activities and through years of institutional reform and citizen activism, the European Parliament began to function as a directly elected democratic body in 1979.
At the same time, Europe’s reckoning with the Holocaust was just beginning. The trials of Nazi perpetrators in Nuremberg and across European nations that had been occupied during the war, the Eichmann trial in Israel and the collection of testimonies from survivors, and attempts at denazification on both sides of the Iron Curtain began to spark personal and political struggles on the continent.
With the collapse of the Soviet regime beginning in 1989, a new dimension was added to Europe’s collective memory. The struggle against totalitarianism and its aftermath in Central and Eastern Europe, including the Yugoslav wars, which resulted in the largest number of refugees in Europe since the end of the Second World War, and a critical re-evaluation of the Holocaust in Central and Eastern Europe strongly shaped understandings of European history and identity. Politically, EU Member States and candidate countries began to confront their roles in the Holocaust more directly and more thoroughly both on a national and European level.
Thus, in the 1980s and 1990s, the European Parliament, looking back on Europe’s recent history of dictatorship, and in view of the enlargement of the EU to Central and Eastern Europe, led the European institutions in establishing frameworks to deal with the material and immaterial damages of this legacy, and to prevent its recurrence.
The 1986 Joint Declaration against Racism and Xenophobia, signed by the European Parliament, the Commission and the Council, provided the initial basis for the European Parliament to take action against antisemitism in Europe. In light of the Declaration, a Committee of Inquiry into Racism and Xenophobia was set up by Parliament, which, in 1990, presented its findings in an extensive report, cataloguing antisemitic and xenophobic incidents across Member States and neighbouring European countries and including a series of recommendations to the European institutions and Member States. The report was intended to generate greater awareness among the European institutions and citizens, emphasising that 'we must ensure that our Europe is an open society based on the respect of fundamental rights and the rejection of all forms of discrimination'.
In 1993, Parliament adopted a resolution on the protection of Nazi concentration camps as historical monuments. From 1995 onwards, however, the focus of resolutions shifted to addressing the impact of the Holocaust on its victims and the need for Holocaust education. Beginning with a resolution on the return of looted property to Jewish communities, successive resolutions outlined approaches and attitudes to Holocaust research and education, combating racism and remembrance of the Holocaust.
More recent resolutions have contributed to fighting antisemitism, remembering the Holocaust of Roma and Sinti communities, and tackling neo-Nazi violence and hate speech. Furthermore, Parliament’s Working Group against Antisemitism, established in 2016, brings together Members of the European Parliament at a cross-party level to improve the way in which the EU combats antisemitism.
The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, to which EU Member States have been bound since 2009, declares that the ‘Union is founded on the indivisible, universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality and solidarity; it is based on the principles of democracy and the rule of law’. Article 1 of the Charter states that ‘Human dignity is inviolable’, and Article 21 states that ‘Any discrimination based on any ground such as sex, race, colour, ethnic or social origin, genetic features, language, religion or belief, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority, property, birth, disability, age or sexual orientation shall be prohibited.’
When the European Parliament held its constitutive session in 1979, President Simone Veil took leadership of the assembly. ‘For this is the first time in history, a history in which we have so frequently been divided, bent on mutual destruction, that the people of Europe have together elected their delegates to a common assembly representing, in this Chamber today, more than 260 million people’. These words take on added significance when recalling that 35 years earlier, Veil and her family were arrested and she was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bobrek and Bergen-Belsen.
With the intertwining of the EU’s core mission and the history of the Holocaust in mind, we turn to the testimony of those who remind us: never again.