Abstract
Moving from the academic to the cultural field, this chapter shows the ways in which over the last 40 years the promotion of European cultural heritage has become a central element of EU cultural policy and an important means of defining Europeanness at the EU level. The concept of European cultural heritage is pivotal to the promotion of Europeanness because it functions as medium of both hegemonic and decentralized representations of Europe. Interestingly, the concept first appeared at the EU level in a motion for a resolution presented by the EP a few months before the Declaration on European identity of December 1973. Many scholars have interpreted this Declaration as a significant turn in the European integration process, indicative of the decision of the nine member states of the EC to exploit the concept of identity in order to give new momentum in a context of crisis.1 Although the introduction of the concept of European cultural heritage to the EP agenda in the years 1973–1974 was a notably less solemn affair, I argue that it exerted a greater influence on the process of instrumentalization of cultural identity at the European level. This chapter shows that, with the support of the EP, Commission officials used the protection of cultural heritage as a means of promoting a Community action in the cultural sector.
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Notes
See Soledad García, (ed.), European Identity and the Search for Legitimacy (London: Pinter, 1993);
Bo Stråth, “A European Identity. To the Historical Limits of a Concept,” European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 4 (2000): 387–401.
Cris Shore, Building Europe. The Cultural Politics of European Integration (London: Routledge, 2000);
Cris Shore, “‘In uno plures’ (?) EU Cultural Policy and the Governance of Europe. Cultural Policy and European Integration in Anthropological Perspective,” Cultural Analysis 5 (2006): 7–26.
Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe. Idea, Identity, Reality (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 111; Shore, Building Europe, 51; Shore, “‘In uno plures’ (?) EU Cultural Policy and the Governance of Europe,” 18.
Joseph A. McMahon, Education and Culture in European Community Law (London: The Athlone Press, 1995), 122;
Annabelle Littoz-Monnet, The European Union and Culture: Between Economic Regulation and Cultural Policy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 42.
Robert Grégoire, Vers une Europe de la culture. Du théâtre à l’action communautaire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 181.
Grégoire, Vers une Europe de la culture, 183. On the role of Altiero Spinelli, see Francesco Gui, “Società europea, cultura e mass-media. Un memorundum di Altiero Spinelli, commissario europeo,” Memoria e Ricerca 6(2006), 29–58.
See David Handley, “Public Opinion and European Integration: The Crisis of the 1970s,” European Journal of Political Research 4(1981):335–364.
François Hartog, “Time and Heritage,” Museum International 57(2005): 7–18, here 15.
Jean-François Polo, “La naissance d’une direction audiovisuelle à la Commission: la consécration de l’exception culturelle,” Politique européenne 3, no. 11 (2003): 9–30, here 16.
See Oriane Calligaro, “Florence European Capital of Culture 1986 and the Legitimization of an EEC Cultural Policy,” in Kiran Klaus Patel (ed.), The Cultural Politics of Europe. European Capitals of Culture and European Union since the 1980s, UACES Contemporary European Studies (London: Routledge, 2012), 95–113.
Monica Sassatelli, “European Cultural Space in the European Cities of Culture: Europeanization and Cultural Policy,” European Societies Special Issue “Cultural Spaces in Europe,” 10, no. 2 (2008): 225–245, here, 231.
For analyses of this rhetoric, see also Enrique Banus, “Cultural Policy in the EU and the European Identity,” in Mary Farrell, Stefano Fella, and Michael Newman (eds.), European Integration in the 21st Century: Unity in Diversity? (London: Sage, 2002), 158–183
and Gerard Delanty, “Europe and the Idea of ‘Unity in Diversity’” in Rutger Lindahl (ed.), Whither Europe? Borders, Boundaries, Frontiers in a Changing World (Gothenburg: CERGU, 2003), 25–42.
Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989):13.
See Étienne Grosjean, Forty Years of Cultural Cooperation1954–1994 (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1998), 123.
See Philip Schlesinger, “Europeanness. A New Cultural Battlefield?” in Nationalism, ed. J. Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 316–325; Delanty, Inventing Europe and “Europe and the Idea of ‘Unity in Diversity’”; Shore, Building Europe and “‘In uno plures’ (?) EU Cultural Policy and the Governance of Europe”; Banus, “Cultural Policy.”
Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Fictions of Europe,” Race and Class 32, no. 3 (1991):3–10; Galtung (1994), 224; Delanty, Inventing Europe, 111; Shore, Building Europe, 51; Shore, “‘In uno plures’ (?) EU Cultural Policy and the Governance of Europe,” 18.
Fabrice Larat, “Present-ing the Past: Political Narratives on European History and the Justification of EU Integration,” German Law Journal 6, no. 2–1 (2005): 273–290.
For recent studies on the place of the Holocaust in the EU’s self-representation, see Waehrens, Anne, “Shared Memories? Politics of Memory and Holocaust Remembrance in the European Parliament” 1989–2009 DIIS Working Paper, June 2011; Annabelle Littoz-Monnet, “The EU Politics of Commemoration. Can Europeans Remember Together?” West European Politics 35, no. 5(2012): 1182–1202; Annabelle Littoz-Monnet, “Explaining Policy Conflict across Institutional Venues: EU-level Struggles over the Memory of the Holocaust,” Journal of Common Market Studies, forthcoming.
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© 2013 Oriane Calligaro
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Calligaro, O. (2013). Using and Negotiating European Cultural Heritage. In: Negotiating Europe. Europe in Transition: The NYU European Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137369901_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137369901_3
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