Abstract
The notion of ‘European heritage’ plays an increasingly important role in the discursive constructions of a collective sense of European belonging. This Special Issue critically reviews some of the contemporary instrumentalizations of European heritage as processes of borderwork by which various political and non-political actors demarcate the boundaries of Europe and European identity. Specifically, the nine contributions shed light on some of the top-down and bottom-up uses of European heritage and explore whether the borderwork of European heritage delineates and separates Europeanness as an exclusive and singular identity, or whether it constitutes a space of exchange, flow and entanglement where Europeanness is defined as inclusive and pluralistic. Characterized by interdisciplinarity, methodological variety and a conception of Europe broader than the European Union, this Special Issue aims to broaden the scope of scholarship in European studies and (critical) heritage studies.
Introduction
Whereas heritage was long associated with the cultural nationalism of nation states (De Cesari, 2020: 31), the notion of ‘European heritage’ plays an increasingly important role in the discursive constructions of a collective sense of European belonging (Delanty, 2018; Lähdesmäki, 2017). Diverse actors from across the political spectrum, both institutional and grassroots, utilize sites, artefacts and tangible and intangible practices to produce readings of ‘European heritage’ that define Europeanness (Macdonald, 2013). Characteristic of such constructions of Europeanness is the exclusivity of this identity. While all identity-construction processes can be understood as forms of borderwork (Yuval-Davis, 2006), what requires attention is the effect of this borderwork in construing Europeanness: does the border function as a boundary that clearly delineates and separates by defining exclusive membership and territory, or does it, similar to a seam, establish a (networked) space where exchange, flow and entanglement become possible (Cooper and Tinning, 2020: 3)?
Heritage as borderwork is a complex site of political and ideological claim-making. On the one hand, the use of heritage as a boundary to demarcate exclusive notions of Europeanness is symptomatic of what Ash Amin describes as a ‘new appeal to an old Idea of Europe’ (2004: 3). This appeal is dangerous, he explains, because it creates (not necessarily intentionally) an opposition between ‘white, Christian, reasoning Europeans’ and the rest who do not fit this category, and because in a contemporary reality in which the ‘old Idea of Europe’ is challenged by other worldviews, it ‘will prove to be increasingly vulnerable as a motif for unity in Europe’ (Amin, 2004: 2–3). Heritage thus remains an important source for what Verena Stolcke describes as ‘cultural fundamentalism’, a kind of racism that uses culture, rather than blood or race, as a means of inclusion and exclusion, and which ‘roots nationality and citizenship in a shared cultural heritage’ (Stolcke, 1995: 12). On the other hand, it could be argued that such conservative understandings of heritage have gradually made way to more progressive ones (Hall, 2005: 25); indeed, the way in which heritage has been revisited critically within academia (leading to critical heritage studies, for example) and within the museum (witness the various ‘decolonizing’ projects) supports this observation. Redefining Europeanness by including other, previously marginalized or ignored social subjects who are part of Europe’s past and present, heritage might function as a site of connection to explore and expand former and previously ‘closed’ or ‘exclusive’ European identity categories (Dellios and Henrich, 2020; Eldar, 2022).
The diverse and contentious instrumentalizations of European heritage are taken as point of departure in this Special Issue, highlighting the functions and roles of heritage in the making of ‘Europe’. It critically reviews such instrumentalizations as processes of borderwork by which various political and non-political actors use heritage to demarcate the boundaries of Europe and European identity. Together, the nine contributions in this Special Issue explore some of the many dimensions and implications of drawing on heritage to promote ‘Europeanness’ in political, cultural and legal terms – in other words, of connecting heritage to European identity as a means of defining who is and who is not part of this social collective, as well as the grounds on which the category of this collective itself is founded. As this collection of articles shows, there are bottom-up and top-down uses of European heritage, which can define Europe either in exclusive and singular or in inclusive and plural terms. Specifically, the individual contributions present in-depth case studies of heritage as borderwork across a variety of European projects, ranging from uses of heritage in European cultural institutions and European law (part 1) and claims to European heritage in populist and far-right discourses and practices (part 2), to critical reconsiderations of conventional and exclusivist perspectives on identity and heritage through cultural analysis (part 3). They share a common interest in how a particular reading of European heritage is used in social contexts as instances of borderwork that delineate identity categories of sameness or difference, of connection or of separation. By bringing these perspectives together, they shed light on some of the many ways in which institutional and non-institutional European actors mobilize various readings of European culture, religion, law and history either to sustain boundaries regarding Europeanness or to establish spaces of connection and engagement.
This Special Issue on European heritage and its role in the making of Europe is characterized by interdisciplinarity, methodological variety and a conception of Europe broader than the European Union (EU). Rooted in the humanities and social sciences, the contributors’ diverse disciplinary backgrounds range from art history, (critical) heritage studies, European studies and literary studies to law and political science. Accordingly, the nine contributions draw on a variety of qualitative-interpretive methods to explore the role of heritage in the making of ‘Europe’, including close-reading, conceptual history, critical discourse analysis, ethnography and narrative analysis. At the core of the contributions are rich empirical case studies of both top-down and bottom-up processes of constructing Europe from ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ perspectives, and positions ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ Europe. Focusing on specific instances of European heritage, each contribution illustrates some aspects of the complex political, social and cultural practices through which actors create Europe and Europeans. To this aim, the authors examine a wide range of materials, including official documents such as EU treaties and institutional reports, political communication such as party manifestoes and speeches, cultural products such as a theatre play, magic lantern slides and a documentary film, as well as ethnographic observations, interviews, media reports and web pages of both institutional and non-institutional actors. Together, the contributions bring various conceptual, methodological and empirical perspectives on how European heritage is utilized in defining Europeanness into a multidisciplinary dialogue, thus broadening the scope of scholarship in European studies and (critical) heritage studies.
The first part of this Special Issue focuses on institutional uses of heritage. In the last few decades, European institutions have launched various cultural projects to anchor ‘Europe’ in a transnational, pan-European approach to heritage (see Jakubowski et al., 2019; Lähdesmäki et al., 2020; Zito et al., 2019). As a supranational institution, the EU thus seems to increasingly recognize the political potential of heritage to promote normative ideas and ideals about citizenship and belonging. This has resulted in what Oriane Calligaro (2015) defines as the ‘Europeanization’ of heritage. A recent illustration of this was the 2018 Year of European Cultural Heritage campaign, organized by the European Commission and promoted with the slogan ‘Sharing heritage, sharing values’ (see Van Weyenberg, 2019). Similarly, the proposition in 2019 of an EU Vice-President for ‘Protecting our European way of life’ by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, is telling, for it stressed the central, but exclusive and often unproblematized role that the concept of European heritage plays within the EU. Although Von der Leyen’s suggestion triggered heated public debate and ultimately resulted in the renaming of the portfolio into ‘Promoting our European Way of Life’ (Calligaro, 2021: 144), research by François Foret and Noemi Trino (2022) reveals that the notion of a ‘European Way of Life’ concerns a reading of European heritage which is rather broadly shared among European citizens.
The three contributions in part 1 analyze how institutional actors harness European heritage to produce narratives about Europe. In the first text, Tuuli Lähdesmäki discusses the place of Christianity in the EU’s political discourses on cultural heritage. Looking at the European Heritage Label (EHL) and the House of European History (HEH), Lähdesmäki argues that by approaching religion as cultural memory, tradition and heritage, the EU presents religion as part of the narrative of Europe’s past rather than as a religious practice in the European present, which, as she concludes, is a strategy employed in recognition of the multicultural reality of Europe with its multitude of secular and religious worldviews. Subsequently, in their contribution Viktorija Čeginskas and Sigrid Kaasik-Krogerus scrutinize how the concept of ‘intercultural dialogue’, which emerged as a new paradigm in EU policies around the early 2000s, was institutionalized and instrumentalized in and by the EU in the context of the EHL as its flagship heritage initiative. In their three-part project, they first focus on the EHL’s selection reports to examine the meanings attributed to the concept of ‘dialogue’. Second, they investigate the institutionalization of the concept of ‘dialogue’, and finally they consider the potential of the EHL to develop heritage diplomacy. Their conclusion is that much critical potential of the concept remains untapped as a result of how the EHL action currently utilizes the concept. The third contribution in this section, by Kaius Tuori, explores the emergence of the idea of a common European legal heritage. Tuori traces the role of Roman law as the foundation of Europe’s legal heritage and how debates over its centrality drew together three previously separate narratives about legal history, human rights and European integration. Despite this convergence, he concludes, the process of constructing a narrative of Europe’s shared legal past was also selective and exclusive.
The second part of this Special Issue explores uses of European heritage at the far right of the political spectrum. Despite their typical opposition to the EU – usually referred to as ‘Euroscepticism’ – populist and far-right politicians, parties and movements draw on the notion of Europe in ideational, organizational and strategic terms. Research in the disciplines of political science and cultural studies sheds light on Europe as a space for far-right transnational organization and cooperation, not only regarding institutional politics such as in the European Parliament (McDonnell and Werner, 2019), but also in the protest arena (Caiani and Weisskircher, 2021; Volk, 2019). In one of the few research projects on right-wing populist instrumentalizations of European heritage so far, Chiara De Cesari, Ivo Bosilkov and Arianna Piacentini find that populist supporters ‘tend to contrast a negatively connoted EU as economically disadvantaging for the nation-state and the working classes with a positively connoted idea of European heritage combining ancient Greek and Roman history with Christianity and the Enlightenment’ (De Cesari et al., 2020: 28). Against this backdrop, the three contributions in part 2 shed further light on the under-researched notion of ‘European heritage’ in populist far-right politics.
Johanna Blokker addresses heritage politics as a dimension of current discourses of the European populist far right. Drawing on specific examples, she demonstrates how the
The third and final part of this Special Issue shifts the focus towards non-institutional and non-political actors that critically engage with the issue of European heritage through artistic and cultural practices. The three contributions in this section investigate specific uses of heritage as critical reactions to existing notions of European heritage that not only include (some) citizens, but also work as boundary setting practices that exclude others by drawing borders between those who are deemed to ‘belong’ to Europe and those who are deemed not to. The three contributions explore the critical potential of ‘heritage’ as a means to think beyond an exclusive understanding of Europeanness and to retrieve European heritage from outside the continent’s commonly assumed geographical boundaries (Delanty, 2018; Macdonald, 2013). Together, the close-reading and contextualization of the various cultural practices discussed in part 3 reveal the need to review European heritage in more dynamic and inclusive terms. Such cultural practices have the potential to imagine borderwork as creating a ‘seam’ that variously connects people in a shared space of exchange and entanglement.
Astrid Van Weyenberg and Didi Spaans analyse Tom Lanoye’s ‘theatre novella’
A Special Issue such as this is a collaborative effort of many people. We would like to thank all the contributors, some of whom joined this project as part of a panel at the virtual Council of European Studies (CES) conference in June 2021. Originally scheduled to take place in Iceland in 2020, this conference was postponed and eventually held online; we thank all the participants who endured the challenges of the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions and joined us digitally. Our gratitude also goes to Ingrid Garosi, who collected and annotated a bibliography for us at the onset of this project. Her input was invaluable to us to conceptualize some of the issues we wanted to consider. Crucial to completing this Special Issue was the work of the external reviewers who dedicated their time to carefully and constructively engage with the manuscripts and to whom we are deeply indebted. We would like to acknowledge our text editor Christopher Williams-Wynn for his constructive suggestions. Finally, we would like to thank Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) and the Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture (ICOG) at the University of Groningen for providing financial support for the editing process.