Professor Natan Sznaider, from the Academic College of Tel-Aviv (Israel), introduced the seventh debate on Democratic Security. He presented his reflections on Europe, its roots, the Holocaust, and the need for reconstituting the identity of Europe.
In his exposé, Sznaider went back to the legal origins of democratic security by retracing how human rights and collective responsibility came to be embodied in international law following the end of the Second World War. Whether one sees the Holocaust as the culmination of the history of anti-Semitism, the apogee of the history of racism, or a crime against humanity, there is no denying that its occurrence paved the way for the legal encoding of human rights in the immediate post-war period. Through the lens of cosmopolitanism, Sznaider argues that the experience or memories of catastrophe, together with seeing the Holocaust as a crime against humanity, created the necessary impetus for establishing the notion of ‘individualised guilt’. It is a memorial specifically to the European barbarism that was made possible by the marriage of modernity and the nation state.
For him, Europe's collective memory of the Holocaust recalls the basis of the EU. If we want to excavate the original consciousness of cosmopolitanism that lies at the basis of the European project, it is the collective memory of the Holocaust and the ensuing Nuremberg Trials that provide our clearest archive, for this was the first kind of legal system that went beyond the sovereignty of the nation state. Perhaps a deliberate remembering these origins can help to overcome the wave of modern-day pessimism that surrounds the European idea.
