After the Cold War, some populations have asked for an official recognition of their sufferings under the Central European Communist regimes, and the enlargement of European organizations has provided these “memory entrepreneurs” with new venues and resources. The condemnation of the “Communist crimes” has been one of the most controversial issues discussed in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) after 1992, and in the European Parliament (EP) after 2004. As a result, the EU has adopted in 2006 the “Europe for Citizens” program, whose section on “Active European remembrance” calls for “preserving the sites and archives associated with deportations as well as the commemorating of victims of Nazism and Stalinism”. This paper will focus on the political and institutional logics of this successful agenda-setting, through an analysis of the link between transnational mobilizations and the design of a “new” European public policy. Public policy is considered as a specific form of collective action shaped by various actors whose mobilizations, be they at the national or the transnational level, may anticipate or go further the formal inclusion of certain “problems” in the European institutional framework. I will investigate the way the issue of the “crimes of Communism” moved across European arenas (PACE, EP, EU Council, European Commission) in order to test two hypotheses: a European controversy develops only if there is a coincidence between domestically-driven mobilizations and existing national or ideological cleavages within European institutions; a new European policy is shaped not only by a salient controversy, but also by the possibility for the EU to use pre-existing public policy elements to address this new “problem”. This case study will contribute to a broader debate on the tension between the fluidity of the institutional “rules of the game” in the EU and the path dependency of public policy.
