Introduction

Public debates on European integration may once have been the expression of a ‘permissive consensus’, but in recent elections and referendums the EU has become increasingly politicised (de Wilde and Zürn, 2012). Scholars now talk about a ‘constraining dissensus’ (Hooghe and Marks, 2009), growing polarisation, and the emergence of opposing advocacy coalitions (De Wilde, 2011). This is true in long-time EU countries as well as in the more recent member states in East-Central Europe. What is striking about the more recent public debates in the latter region is the overwhelming presence of historical arguments, especially voiced by those who oppose (further) EU integration. In this region, longstanding themes of national history seem to have become an inexorable attribute of opposition talk against the EU (Ágh, 2016), a tendency that has become reinforced lately by more authoritarian styles of government (Tillman, 2013), government-sponsored commemoration practices that celebrate events of national history pitting the nation against Europe (Milošević, 2017; Rupnik, 2007), and a surge of populist rhetoric surrounding those events. Obviously, revisionist history as a political strategy is not exclusive to East-Central Europe. It is also found, to a degree, among Western Eurosceptics – as has been the case in the rhetoric of the Brexit campaign, for example, which also pitted the nation against the EU. But the way in which such arguments have been used and resonate in East-Central Europe tells us something about the specific functioning of anti-EU rhetoric in this cultural realm of the EU.

It is important to examine these specific renderings of Eurosceptic politics because its effects go beyond the realm of East-Central European domestic politics; in fact, they reach into the arena of international relations in the EU. In October 2017, for example, Poland’s Minister of Culture Piotr Gliński, of the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, accused the House of European History (HEH) – the EU-funded museum in Brussels that invites visitors to reflect on the history of Europe – of not being fair to the national history of Poland. In a letter to the head of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani, Gliņski complained that the museum did not devote sufficient attention to famous Poles and showed the country as complicit in the Holocaust (Rankin, 2018).