WHEN THE FIRST SIX European nations formed the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951, they not only aimed to improve economic wealth by creating a common market but also to guarantee peace among the European nations. As the former foreign minister of France, Robert Schuman, put it in a speech held in October 1953: “Our initial considerations were of a much less economic than political nature. Detoxify the relationship between France and Germany, secure peace, create a climate of cooperation across Europe. This was our main aim.” This political aim of safeguarding a peaceful relationship between the European nations was later confirmed in the Treaty of Rome of 1957, which was signed by the heads of Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. The countries declared themselves to be “resolved by thus pooling their resources to preserve and strengthen peace and liberty, and call[ed] upon the other peoples of Europe who share[d] their ideal to join in their efforts.” Thus, from its very beginnings, the European Union, which grew out of the ECSC and was formalized with the adoption of the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992, was legitimized by a shared European memory of violence and the clear aim to guarantee peaceful coexistence through economic cooperation between the European countries.

Ann Rigney draws the conclusion that this aim was carried out through the creation of a common “master narrative that would underpin the European project and help generate the sense of a common past.” Indeed, according to Rigney, “the unprecedented scale of intra-European slaughter in the twentieth century” urged many politicians and intellectuals to promote a European transnational identity based on what the European countries had in common rather than focusing on old divisions.

According to Lagrou, collective resistance to fascism was the first shared narrative and identity model that developed in the immediate postwar period. Berger, on the other hand, states that, at first, politicians tried to build a united Europe against the “negative foil” of the Second World War. Rigney observes a transition of the European master narrative that emerged as a consequence of the growing awareness in the 1960s “both of the enormity of the Holocaust and the prevalence of collaboration under Nazi occupation.”