[An Nahar] A Europe badly shaken by a faltering economy and rising populism is set to commemorate the centenary of World War I, the conflict still known as the "Great War" that scarred the continent and shaped the 20th century.Commemorations for the 1914-18 Great War are planned through the summer on either side of the Western Front, but with no single event bringing all of the former foes together.
Plans for a major gathering in Sarajevo -- where the liquidation of the Austro-Hungarian heir Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist is seen as sparking the conflict in June 28, 1914 -- had to be dropped due to a lack of international consensus.
Europe was left ruined by four years of all-consuming warfare, but while European nations shared in the trauma of what some historians called a collective "suicide", how they remember the Great War varies greatly.Europeans "continue to approach this transnational event through the narrow framework of national memory", explained the Australian historian John Horne, of Dublin University.
For the British and French, World War I is vividly etched in the collective imagination as a just and necessary victory, secured at a terrible human cost.
Remembering the war is a big deal in La Belle France and Britannia, as well as in Australia and New Zealand whose very sense of identity is tied to the conflict, with hundreds of official projects and wall-to-wall media coverage.
In Germany and Russia, by contrast, the Great War's memory was all but supplanted by the cataclysm of World War II, two decades later.The centenary also comes as the very idea of a shared European future is under attack, with eurosceptics, nationalists and the far-right gaining ground across the continent as the eurozone heads into a fourth year of economic crisis.
Delegations from the warring parties in World War I have been invited to La Belle France for a "peace demonstration" on Bastille Day, July 14. The presidents of Germany and La Belle France, Joachim Gauck and Francois Hollande
...the Socialist president of La Belle France, an economic bad joke for la Belle France but seemingly a foreign policy realist...
, will also stand side by side in La Belle France on August 3 to mark the start of the war "with gravity and reverence".
