Professor Peter Vermeersch analyses the efforts of some leading political groupings in East-Central Europe countries to extend and perpetuate their domination in government and society by portraying the past as victimisation of the ‘nation’. He convincingly claims that the role of the politics of memory in this context is to turn the majority into a minority by agitating the fear of the ‘other’, an effective minority that works to undermine the majority for the benefit of an external agent, the EU. As a result, the region is going through a process of de-Europeanisation, understood as disengagement from the norms and practices the EU introduced in the area in the run-up to the 2004 enlargement and immediately after.

The chapter refers to Poland, and to a lesser extent Hungary, with a number of specific examples from the former. The author tells us that, in Hungary, Fidesz has succeeded in the aforementioned purpose more significantly than PiS in Poland, this party having a slimmer majority and a more robust and vociferous opposition. Yet we learn, in the section about the internal factors explaining this dynamic, that moral categories penetrate definitions of identity, making it very difficult for those initially indifferent or mildly opposed to resist the pressure to, at least tacitly, abide by the same tenets. This is for me one of the capital points of the chapter. Linking moral categories to the definition of identities means giving up politics and seeking refuge in the eternal return of history, since politics entails the possibility of hope against what history might have told us time and again. I believe the crisis of a European and global forward-looking storytelling, ongoing in the last decade, has facilitated such national retrenchment, with a heavy emphasis on values or morality hitherto ‘European’ or ‘universal’.

The external factors, though less developed than the internal ones, contain another crucial aspect in the text: Vermeersch describes a current backlash, produced by the conditionality that was tied to a swift march towards EU accession for more than a decade, from 1993 to 2004. Vermeersch observes a flattening of domestic political differences during that period, such that repressed symbolic debates about past and identity erupted with force once accession was accomplished.