Abstract
For meaningful and successful politics in Europe, we need to understand the differences in how different communities and societies see the history of the continent. In this article, my aim is to provide tools for such understanding by investigating the experience of collective memory by philosophical, more precisely phenomenological, means. My starting point is that collective memory is a collective experience. I argue that collective memory as an experience involves so-called sedimentations of former experiences created by the experiences of former generations. Such sedimentations are the historical and cultural layers in our experiences that participate in how we interpret and relate to the world around us. To demonstrate the explanatory power of this approach, I discuss actual cases of collective memory in post-Soviet European societies and communities, mainly in Estonia and among Ingrian Finns. I suggest that due to different collective memories, the same historical and contemporary political objects may appear very differently to different societies and communities, which challenges international politics in Europe if it is not considered.
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