It had few shared values and symbol

It had few shared values and symbols, and certainly was not a community of memory. As Tony Judt (2000, 293) argues, both western integration and that pursued under Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe were characterised by ‘the erection of an unnatural and unsustainable frontier between past and present in European public memory’ (or better, in European public memories). Shared memories in the west were limited to the integration process itself and did not reach back beyond 1945, apart from the resolve of ‘never again.’ A focus on the future rather than the past had also characterised older concepts of European integration (Speth 1999, 169).