Perchoc, Philippe

One past, two assemblies - 2014.


68

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the EU’s enlargement (2004), issues related to the interpretation of European history have increasingly come up for debate in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and the European Parliament. World War Two, the Holocaust, the fight against Soviet domination in central Europe and the crimes of Communism have been recurrent themes in a conflict of symbols that sets at odds European nation-states with different historical heritages (East/West) and political lineups (right/left). Although more than half of the member states of the Council of Europe also belong to the EU and share much of the same twentieth-century history, the debates and the resolutions adopted by the European Parliament and the Parliamentary Assembly are admittedly quite different. This difference can largely be put down to the “logics of operation and socialization” in these two assemblies.