Overcoming Trianon

Since the end of the Cold War, major European organizations (namely, the European Union and the Council of Europe) have changed their handling of history and implemented memory-related policies that sought to answer numerous demands for the recognition of painful pasts. This paper analyzes the logics of this Europeanization of memory by looking at the mobilizations of political actors who use the positions they occupy simultaneously in several social spaces in order to put memory conflicts on the EU’s agenda. The paper is based on a case study of the 2001 law on the status of Hungarians living in neighboring countries and its recent developments, which illustrates how a bilateral dispute can be turned into a European problem. It also shows that instead of solving this conflict, the mediation of European organizations altered the discursive tools used by the parties involved, thereby fueling a process of consolidation of the controversial legal category of national minority in EU treaties.