Introduction

The tone of political debate in Europe has recently been marked by an unprecedented politicization of European history. Indeed, history strikes back again in the language as well as ideas advocated in historical and political narratives, filling the spectrum of competing memory policies and contributing to an ever-growing societal polarization. This phenomenon seems particularly pronounced in post-totalitarian societies within which the uses and abuses of the past have become a dominant feature in political rhetoric about reckoning with authoritarian (or in the case of Italy and Germany – totalitarian) dictatorships in the interwar period as well as the period of Nazi occupation and their relevance for identity politics. Of equal importance would be the memory politics related to the legacy of communist regimes in the years 1945–1989 in the case of Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union republics, and the former Yugoslavia. Nowadays, the instrumentalization of the past has become the rhetorical modus operandi of the European far-right populist milieu. It is the key objective of this monograph to explore why and how contested legacies symbolically associated with 20th-century dictatorships have been used and often abused in political discourse by the populist far right in contemporary Europe.