The House of European History marks nine years since its opening in Brussels, having become something more than a museum. Inaugurated in 2017 in the Eastman building, in the heart of the European quarter, it was conceived as a project of the European Parliament to build a common memory for the continent.
That is the institutional explanation. In reality, it is an instrument of soft power funded with public money to teach Europeans how they should remember their own history.
According to the museum’s own data, the development of the project cost around €55.4 million: €31 million to renovate and expand the building, €21.4 million for the permanent exhibition and the first temporary one, and €3.75 million to build the collection. Annual operating costs were estimated at €13.45 million. Everything depends on the European Parliament’s budget. In other words, on the taxpayer.
The permanent exhibition covers around 4,000 square meters and does not tell the history of European nations, but rather a supposed shared “European memory.” The museum itself acknowledges that it does not aim to narrate the history of each country, but to explore how a common historical consciousness is formed. That is the central point: it does not merely display history; it manufactures a mental framework. And, if there were any doubts, it is certainly not a Christian one.
The journey moves through the myth of Europa, the 19th century, imperialism, the world wars, totalitarian regimes, the post-war period, European integration, and the present. But the narrative architecture is constant: Europe appears as a problem that can only be redeemed through Brussels.
Nation, religion, empire, borders, and sovereignty are associated with conflict. Integration, diversity, critical memory, and supranational citizenship are presented as the natural solution. History thus ceases to be the past and becomes political pedagogy.
The current temporary exhibition, Postcolonial?, open until March 2027, follows that line. It brings together nearly 200 historical objects and 25 contemporary works to argue that European colonialism is still present in education, policing, the economy, housing, identity, and institutions.
The problem is not studying colonialism. It should be studied. The problem is turning it into the organizing principle of European identity as a whole. In that reading, Europe appears less as a civilization founded on Greco-Roman culture and Christianity, that produced law, science, universities, the abolition of slavery, parliamentarism, and individual freedoms, and more as a historical structure of domination that must be morally dismantled. A kind of historical obligation.
This is the museum’s core meaning: it does not deny Europe, it deconstructs it. It empties it from within and replaces it with an administrative, multicultural, and guilt-driven identity, far more useful for a European Union that distrusts nations but needs its own symbols. Symbols that, no matter how often they are repeated, do not truly take root in the foundations of each nation and individual.
Nine years on, the House of European History is not just a very expensive museum. It is a declaration of cultural power. Brussels no longer limits itself to regulating markets, borders, or budgets. It also seeks to manage memory. And whoever controls memory decides which part of Europe is allowed to survive.
Paraphrasing George Orwell: “who controls the present controls the past; and who controls the past controls the future.”
