Holocaust Memory and the Universal Sovereignty of the Liberal Democratic State

Despite the large body of scholarship on global Holocaust memorialization and recent writing on the West’s preoccupation with antisemitism, the interconnection between the two issues has been largely neglected. This article seeks to fill that gap. It argues that the previous focus on the politics of identity as an explanation of global Holocaust memory politics has been misplaced. Instead, the article contends that Western states established the idea of the Holocaust’s universal meaning as central to a new political philosophy of the liberal democratic state after the Cold War. As Western policy elites anxiously attempted to assert the global sovereignty of this political form, the conceit of the Holocaust’s universal meaning played a critical role. The article goes on to argue that the systemic shock of 9/11 led to the securitization of Holocaust memory as part of the ideational defence of the liberal democratic state, and its absorption into the global surveillance order. This is the genealogy of the global North’s preoccupation with anti-Zionism as antisemitism, in which the State of Israel is protected as a totem of the liberal democratic state’s philosophical essence, and its war against the figure of the extremist. The intergovernmental act of defining antisemitism should be understood, therefore, as a feature of the state and inter-state surveillance system established in the war on terror.