Europe seems awash with historical hang-ups. And they are important ones. They may define the continent’s future as much as the outcome of Germany’s current political convulsions, or the state of Italy’s banks, or whether Brexit Britain manages to cobble a transition deal. Large crowds of Greek people recently protested against the use of the name Macedonia by the neighbouring former Yugoslav republic.

In Paris, there is intense debate about whether the writer Charles Maurras, a leading intellectual figure of French early 20th-century ultranationalism and antisemitism and a prominent supporter of the Vichy regime, should be listed among the names to be officially “commemorated” this year (he was born in 1868). Poland’s new law aimed at curtailing any discussion of the role some Poles played in the Holocaust led to a spat with Israel and the US. In Germany, where the far-right AfD holds 94 seats in the Bundestag, a local Berlin politician (of Palestinian family background) last month called for newly arrived migrants to be sent on mandatory visits to concentration camp memorials to assist their “integration courses”.

Rows about European history are hardly new. A long-running dispute in Austria over what to do about the house where Hitler was born, in Braunau, is one example. The legacy of colonialism is a recurring theme in French, British and Dutch debates. Populist regimes in Poland and Hungary have made a staple of rewriting history, or of approaching it very selectively, to suit their own political goals. Russia’s aggression in Ukraine came accompanied with a full-blown propaganda operation about fighting “fascism”. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s were full of such manipulative rekindling of second world war rhetoric. And historical hang-ups aren’t an exclusively European trait, of course. Witness how the Winter Olympics in Korea highlights again the trauma of a 65-year-old cold war frontline. See how in the US, the civil war is being debated with a ferocity and a frequency unseen since the 1960s civil rights movement.

But such debates have a particular resonance in Europe because the European project has rested from the outset on overcoming historical hatred and forging reconciliation. The EU as it exists today was made possible not through the domination that comes with victory in arms, nor from a frozen armistice, but through patient, deliberative rapprochement. The Germans call this Vergangenheitsbewältigung, a word that is hard to translate but means a combination of analysing the past, coming to grips with it, drawing lessons from it, and learning to live with it.

Boris Johnson is right to say the European project, at its core, set itself the political aim of overcoming 20th-century continental horrors. (He is less right to suggest it is now forging ahead towards complete political unification or federalism – which is at the moment pie in the sky.) It’s often said the European construct is an antidote to war, but it is just as importantly conceived as an antidote to falsifications of history.

The European project has rested from the outset on overcoming historical hatred and forging reconciliation

Reconciliation is the bedrock on which the EU exists. That’s why, for instance, the Greek attacks on Germany during the eurozone crisis (Angela Merkel was portrayed with a Nazi helmet by protesters in Athens) were so worrying. It’s also why the 2015 refugee crisis, as it unfolded in the Balkans, led to fears that conflict might once again flare up in the region. History certainly didn’t end in 1989 – but now it’s back with a bang, just as we prepare to celebrate the centenary of the first world war armistice, signed in a railroad carriage outside Compiègne, northern France. In a recent debate, the American historian Francis Fukuyama said “identity politics are in fact politics of recognition”. And national memories do need recognition, but that’s not the same thing as whitewashing. The president of France, Emmanuel Macron – who likes to cast himself as a leader who will “relaunch” Europe – knows this well. He likes to refer to Paul Ricoeur, the philosopher he worked for as a student. Ricoeur wrote books about history, memory and forgetting.

There is no shortage of official speeches about Europe that are full of historical references. What’s harder to find are events, memorials, statements, educational programmes or museums where Europe’s complex tapestry of distinct national histories are brought together in ways that help to understand the lives, histories and experiences of others on the continent. Europeans still largely see their fellow Europeans’ history through the lenses of their own national past. This surely accounts for much of the growing psychological gap between east and west, but also north and south.

Diverging interpretations of history can act as triggers to confrontation. Likewise, they can breed indifference when things go wrong. In 2007, it was the displacement of a Soviet war memorial in Tallinn, Estonia’s capital, that served as a pretext for Russia to unleash the first ever cyberattack aimed at paralysing an entire country’s institutions. It took western Europeans a while to grasp the depth and importance of this, not least because of that gap in historical perceptions.

To visit national or municipal history museums across Europe is to see at first hand this experience of fragmentation. No one has worked more than the Germans to account for past crimes but elsewhere, and for many reasons, Vergangenheitsbewältigung is still a work in progress, or yet to be fully embraced. I was mindful of this when I recently visited the local history museum in Marseille, which tells the story of a city that from 1830 onwards thrived as a port as the result of France’s conquest of Algeria, but says little about the suffering that conquest inflicted.

Europe’s present angst, drawn from multiple crises and middle-class discontent, comes with a reappraisal of historical notions that were once deemed rock-solid but which no longer seem to be so. It’s not exactly amnesia – rather, it’s a frenzy of fragmented and controversial readings of history. Everything is up for grabs. Consensus on basic facts is no longer guaranteed.

Last year a hundred historians and writers from different countries attempted to bring Europe’s mosaic of separate memories together in a fascinating book published in Paris, titled Europa, Our History (sadly, it has not been translated into English). Also last year, EU institutions inaugurated a museum in Brussels devoted to Europe’s common past and how the continent has tried to overcome its darkest chapters. It is designed to be interactive and attractive to younger generations. We need more of this.

• Natalie Nougayrède is a Guardian columnist