Unsettled Landmarks

Today this comfortable ritual seems anachronistic, redolent of a bygone age. Eighty years after the fall of the Third Reich, fascism is coming back in Europe. Six EU countries — Italy, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, and the Czech Republic — have hard-right parties in government. Similar parties have become major actors throughout the European Union, from Germany to France and from Poland to Spain.

In this context, it may well seem better to avoid international commemorations. After all, J. D. Vance, the ubiquitous vice president of the United States, the liberators of 1945, could celebrate freedom by eulogizing the Alternative für Deutschland, or the equally ubiquitous Elon Musk could do so by making a Hitler salute.

On the eastern side of the continent, Vladimir Putin will commemorate the sacrifice of the Soviet people in the struggle against fascism — twenty million dead — by praising the heroism of the Russian army that invaded what he calls “Nazi” Ukraine three years ago. Our historical landmarks are unsettled; conventional memory does not fit the terrible mess of our present.

Despite its official character, VE Day was also a memorial milestone for the Left. As Eric Hobsbawm emphasized, it represented a victory of Enlightenment against barbarism. A coalition of liberalism and communism, the antagonistic inheritors of the Enlightenment heritage, had defeated the Third Reich. This view was hegemonic in the culture of Resistance, according to which anti-fascism fought against the enemies of civilization. While true in many respects, such a perspective was nonetheless too simplistic.

Perhaps, instead of engaging in a ritualistic and coopted form of commemoration, this anniversary should inspire us to conduct a critical reassessment. VE Day celebrates the victory of a military alliance in a world war that possessed many dimensions, including the establishment of a new world order in which this “Enlightenment” coalition could not survive.

In the West, the United States became the dominant superpower; in the Soviet bloc, the USSR war of self-defense against the Nazi aggression turned into military occupation and a new form of colonialism in Eastern Europe. The ideas of liberalism and communism had become institutionalized in the form of imperialism and Stalinism.

For the Left, the end of World War II was a victory of the Resistance movements, which gave a democratic legitimacy to the new regimes born of the collapse of the Third Reich. In most Western European countries, democracy was not imposed by the victors; it was conquered by the Resistance.

As Claudio Pavone pointed out, however, the concept of Resistance possessed several dimensions too. At one and the same time, it encompassed the entirety of national liberation movements against German occupation, a civil war between the forces of anti-fascism and many regimes that collaborated with the Nazi occupiers, and a class war that sought to change society, since the ruling elites and most components of European capitalism had been implicated in fascism and collaboration.

This class war won in Yugoslavia, which became a socialist country, and created the premises for a powerful left in many other countries, from Italy to France. It also reinforced the resistance against Francoism in Spain and Salazarism in Portugal.

Ambiguities of Liberation

Still, if we look beyond the European boundaries, the landscape appears much more diverse. As a global anniversary, May 8, 1945, takes different meanings. While VE Day was celebrated and mythicized as a symbol of liberation in the West, the same was not true elsewhere.

In Central and Eastern Europe, this moment of liberation proved ephemeral, since Nazi rule quickly gave way to a bloc of authoritarian regimes installed by the USSR. In many countries, this meant russification and national oppression.

Nor is VE Day a memorial landmark for liberation in Africa and Asia. In Algeria, the very same date is the anniversary of the colonial massacres of Sétif and Guelma, when the French Army violently crushed the first demonstrations for national independence. This was the beginning of a wave of imperial violence that ran throughout French Africa, reaching its climax two years later in Madagascar.

It was a coalition government in Paris composed of resistance parties that was responsible for this outburst of colonial violence — a coalition that included the main left-wing parties, the Socialists and the Communists. Anti-fascist and anti-colonial memories are not always harmonious and fraternal. The anniversary of the end of World War II deserves critical remembrance rather than apologetic celebrations.