Commémorer et diviser en Europe LE 70e anniversaire du sauvetage et des déportations juives depuis les terres sous administration bulgare

How do governments use EU legal standards and resources to deal with historical issues? This question is addressed by focusing on the controversy that sets at odds Bulgaria (an EU member state since 2007) and Macedonia (which has applied for EU membership) over the 70th anniversary of the events of March 1943, when Jews were deported from Macedonia but not from Bulgaria. In this controversy, the EU dimension, far from being autonomous, involves a variety of international stakeholders, including the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the United Nations, private networks of “entrepreneurs of memory”, the United States and Israel. Qualifications are placed on the hypothesis whereby, in new member states, the denunciation of the crimes of Communism competes with the institutionalization of commemorations of the Shoah, since some Bulgarian “entrepreneurs of memory” have stakes in both. The Bulgarian/Macedonia controversy surrounding the commemoration of the Shoah presents a situation wherein the appropriation of the past by EU institutions has paradoxically reinforced the claims by Bulgarian public officials to legitimacy, to telling the historical truth, even as historians are trying to emancipate their discipline from its ancillary role at the nation-state’s service.