ABSTRACT
In 2014, the European Union was one of the major players in political and cultural discourses remembering the outbreak of World War I. In 1973, the European Community drafted a ‘Document on European Identity’, which was the starting point of a political discourse on identity. Since then, the integration process has tried to establish a master-narrative of its own history and identity. It emplots the history of the World Wars as the historical antecedents of its own history of peace since 1945, and the history of the twentieth century before that point is the narratological basis of this discourse. This chapter examines the specific form of historical narrative the EU uses to tell the history of World War I as an integral part of its self-representation of peace-as-identity. The EU uses a specific form of narrative structure, which can be circumscribed as a ‘paradoxical coherence’: the era of wars before 1945 is presented as the contradictional opposite to post-1945 peace in an integrating Europe.
