Laure Neumayer will present the conference The Criminalization of Communism in the European Political Space after the Cold War, in the context of the course Rotating International Chair (TRAN 0 607), coordinated by Professor Ramona Coman and taught this year by Prof. Chris Bicketon. The conference is reserved for students of this class.

The book

This book, published by Routledge, retraces the anti-communist mobilisations carried out by Central European representatives in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and in the European Parliament since the early 1990s. Based on archive consultation, interviews and ethnographic observation, it analyses the memory entrepreneurs’ requests for collective remembrance and legal accountability of Communist crimes in European institutions, Pan-European political parties and transnational advocacy networks. The book argues that these newcomers managed to strengthen their positions and impose a totalitarian interpretation of Communism in the European assemblies, which directly shaped the EU’s remembrance policy. However, the rules of the European political game and recurring ideological conflicts with left-wing opponents reduced the legal and judicial implications of this anti-communist grammar at the European level.

The speaker/author

Laure Neumayer is Assistant Professor of Political Science at University Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne and Researcher at CESSP laboratory (CNRS), France. She has co-edited the book History, Memory and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe – Memory Games (2013).