In May 1998 acknowledgement of the common responsibility for the extermination of Jews and many other groups during World War II spurred the British, American and Swedish governments to establish the “Task Force for International Coopera- tion on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research” mentioned above, a
16 Østergård, 2003a.
17 See Mazower, 1998, Østergård, 1998.
somewhat militant designation unlikely to be chosen, according to a former German member of the executive committee, had his country initiated it rather than innocent Scandinavians. Since then, many other countries have joined the project.
The mission statement of the organisation runs as follows: “The Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research”
consists of representatives of government, as well as governmental and non- governmental organisations. Its purpose is to place political and social leaders’
support behind the need for Holocaust education, remembrance, and research both nationally and internationally. Initiated by Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson in 1998, the Task Force currently has twenty member countries: Argentina, Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Professor Yehuda Bauer, former chair of the Yad Vashem Research Institute in Jerusalem, is the Task Force’s advisor.
Membership of the Task Force is open to all countries. Members must be committed to the Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, and must accept the principles adopted by the Task Force regarding membership. They must also be committed to the implementation of national policies and programs in support of Holocaust education, remembrance, and research. The governments comprising the Task Force agree on the importance of encouraging all archives, both public and private, to make their holdings on the Holocaust more widely accessible. The Task Force also encourages appropriate forms of Holocaust remembrance. Countries wishing to create programs in Holo- caust education or to further develop their existing information materials and activi- ties in this area are invited to work together with the Task Force. To this end Liaison Projects can be established between countries and the Task Force for long- term cooperation. Such cooperation is mutually beneficial to all concerned.
The first Liaison Project, with the Czech Republic, began in 1999. Within this project’s framework, a national teacher training program at the Terezin Memorial has been developed, and Czech teachers have received advanced training at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. The project also includes cooperation with Roma cultural organisations. The experience with the Czech Republic has served as a model for work in other countries. Liaison Projects have also been initiated in cooperation with Argentina, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. The Task Force has established working groups in regard to each of these
countries, as well as in regard to memorials, information projects, research, and education.”18
Discreetly urged on by the US, Denmark only decided to join as late as the fall of 2003 and was officially adopted as a full member at two consecutive meetings of the Task Force in Rome and Trieste in June and December 2004. This followed some interesting deliberations over the Danish policy of dealing with the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity, including mass killings by communists, at the same time as the Holocaust. At the meeting of the Task Force in Trieste in December 2004, Romania was accepted because of its thorough preparations and willingness to remedy its participation in the Holocaust, whereas Greece was put on hold because of belated preparations.
The first spectacular result of the original Swedish-British-American initiative was the first so-called “Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust”, 26-28 January 2000; an event which initiated what is now referred to as the “Stockholm process”. Forty-seven heads of state and governments participated in this solemn three-day ceremony in central Stockholm. They listened to moving addresses by the Nobel peace prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, US president Bill Clinton appeared on video, the French prime minister Lionel Jospin arrived late and annoyingly had to address an almost empty hall because the Swedish organizers insisted on the scheduled coffee break, the Italian former communist prime minister Massimo D’Alema addressed the audience in English – but called the Holocaust Shoah as is usual in Italian and French – and so on for three full days.
The main message of the event was that what happened in Germany could also have happened elsewhere – and that in fact it did happen in a number of other countries with the active participation of their citizens. This reinterpretation was confirmed by most of the state and government leaders who had taken the time to participate in the conference. Besides the remarkable number of heads of state, the attendees counted almost a thousand diplomats, NGOs, religious leaders, survivors, historians, teachers and journalists. The official goal of the conference was to
“promote the international dialogue on education, raising youth, and research on the Holocaust.” One politician who had not understood the order of the day was the prime minister of Lithuania, Andrius Kubilius. He plunged into a lament about how unfair it is that Lithuania is sometimes blamed for the tragedy of the Jewish people during World War II, because at that time Lithuania was nothing but a geographical notion. Strictly speaking he is right, but he had not understood that the main purpose of the conference was to share the burden of the Nazi crimes. His diplomats afterwards had a hard job rebuilding Lithuania’s credentials as a serious
18 http://taskforce.ushmm.org.
contender for EU membership during the remainder of the conference. They succeeded, and Lithuania was able to join the European Union four years later, but it was a close thing and testifies to the importance in Realpolitik of these apparently innocent “politics of morality”. “Realpolitik is Moralpolitik”, as the Norwegian explorer and international relief organizer Fridtjof Nansen once put it.19
Through these events Göran Persson entered the world of the high politics of morality, almost as an incarnation of his charismatic predecessor Olof Palme. The extremely professional Swedish diplomacy obviously revelled in the spotlights of the international press, the only media not having grasped the potential of the event being Danish newspapers and television channels, which had seen the whole thing as yet another Swedish piece of self-promotion, which of course it was. But it was also more: what the Danes overlooked was that the event and the subsequent Stockholm process were important moments in the new international politics of morality.