Europe in quarantine. Strategies for the (re)construction of national identities after the Second World War

Zaragoza, 21st and 22nd November 2023, Faculty of Law – University of Zaragoza.

At the end of the Second World War, most European nation states implemented different strategies to avoid dealing with the complex episodes of their own past, omitting them from their respective collective memories. Two of these strategies were very popular: the creation of positive constructions and myths around their national resistance movement(s), as was the case in France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Norway and Poland. And the so-called “quarantine”, i.e. the identification of war, occupation, collaboration and in general any episode that was problematic to remember, as exceptional moments far removed from the normal trajectory of the nation.

The aim of our meeting is to put both strategies in relation, implementing a transversal analysis of these and other mechanisms that were key in the (re)construction of different European memories and national identities in the post-war period. To this end, we propose a series of interventions that connect several domestic case studies from a transnational perspective, which allows us to reflect in a global way on the European context and its colonial ramifications after 1945.