Introduction : Europe, Heritage and Memory-Dissonant Encounters and Explorations

The introduction to Dissonant Heritages and Memories in Contemporary Europe theoretically grounds the book’s various problematizations of heritage and identity struggles in Europe today, including the heritage policies of the EU and other intergovernmental organizations, struggles over ethnographic and historical exhibitions, activist practices, and dissonant memories. By discussing these struggles and their problematizations, the introduction connects the book to a wide range of ongoing debates across the humanities and social sciences. At the same time, it discusses how convergences and divergences within and between the volume’s chapters foster new insights regarding the concepts of diss…

Politics of memory and oblivion. An introduction to the special issue

This editorial sets the context for the special issue on memory and oblivion and introduces the contributions. By interpreting the contemporary uses of the past, the editorial underscores the relevance of the study of memory and oblivion in today’s heated and antagonistic debates. The politics of memory and uses of the past often coincide with efforts of reducing the past to legitimize the current authorities and tend to create new gaps in memory that contribute to the polarisation of societies. The special issue consists of six articles that scrutinise the consequences of the intertwining of memory, oblivion and political power in European countries. Based on two main approaches, the contr…

Politics of Mobility and Stability in Authorizing European Heritage : Estonia’s Great Guild Hall

AbstractKaasik-Krogerus scrutinizes the European Heritage Label (EHL) as an authorized heritage discourse (AHD) in the making. She analyses how the discourse is formed in a politics of mobility and stability between the local, national, and European scales resulting from the interplay of europeanization (of the national and local) and domestication (of the European). The chapter asks how this politics of mobility and stability is conducted to manage the scalar dissonance in one of the sites, the Great Guild Hall in Tallinn, Estonia. Kaasik-Krogerus argues that the politics conducted in the exhibitions works in two controversial ways: legitimizing mobility and stability as natural and simult…

Dialogue in and as European heritage

In this article, we scrutinize the use and institutionalization of the concept of ‘dialogue’ in the cultural politics of the European Union. Our focus is on how dialogue is understood in the context of the European Union’s flagship heritage action, the European Heritage Label, that aims to strengthen citizens’ sense of belonging to the Union. Since heritage has gained increasing prominence in the European Union international relations, we also discuss how ‘dialogue’ is institutionalized in the European Heritage Label as part of the European Union’s heritage diplomacy. We approach dialogue in the context of the European Heritage Label as a floating signifier; an ideal seldom explicitly defi…

Europe from Below : Notions of Europe and the European among Participants in EU Cultural Initiatives

In this book, Tuuli Lähdesmäki, Katja Mäkinen, Viktorija L. A. Čeginskas, and Sigrid Kaasik-Krogerus scrutinize how people who participate in cultural initiatives funded and governed by the European Union understand the idea of Europe. The book focuses on three cultural initiatives: the European Capital of Culture, the European Heritage Label, and a European Citizen Campus project funded through the Creative Europe programme. These initiatives are examined through field studies conducted in 12 countries between 2010 and 2018. The authors describe their approach as ‘ethnography of Europeanization’ and conceptualize the attempts at Europeanization in the European Union’s cultural policy as po…

Struggle and banality of belonging to Europe. Cultural Europeanization from the perspective of the Central and East European citizens

The European Union (EU) has developed cultural policy initiatives that seek to promote cultural Europeanization with the purpose of constructing European identity narratives and facilitating citizens’ sense of belonging to Europe and the EU. The article focuses on the citizens’ perspective to cultural Europeanization through ethnographic research on one central action in the EU cultural policy, European Heritage Label (EHL). We analyse the interviews conducted in selected EHL sites with Central and East European (CEE) citizens who were visiting the sites as well as with cultural heritage practitioners working at three EHL sites located in CEE countries. We ask how the practitioners and the …

Genealogy of the Concept of Heritage in the European Commission’s Policy Discourse

This article investigates the genealogy of the concept of heritage in the European Commission’s (EC) policy discourse from 1973 to 2016. Based on conceptual analysis of 2,412 documents gathered from the EUR-Lex database, the uses of the concept in the EC’s policy discourse were categorized into seven thematic areas: nature, environment, and biodiversity; human habitats; economy and employment; agricultural products and foodstuffs; promotion of societal development and stability; audiovisuality and digitalization; and European identity and integration. In the EC’s discourse, the concept of heritage develops in the context of intertwined phases of EU integration and cultural Europeanization. …

Presidential speeches and the online politics of belonging : Affective-discursive positions toward refugees in Finland and Estonia

The so-called ‘refugee crisis’ has added urgency to the social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in European societies. This study explores how emotions figure in this politics of belonging by studying their discursive mobilization in Finnish and Estonian public debates on asylum seekers. Focusing on presidential speeches addressing the refugee issue, on the one hand, and their reception by online commenters on popular tabloid news sites, on the other, the comparative analysis highlights both similarities and differences in how emotional expressions are employed in these two countries with very different experiences of taking refugees. Despite employing common discursive elements in thei…

EU heritage diplomacy : entangled external and internal cultural relations

Cultural heritage is an expanding yet contested area of EU policymaking, which has recently been identified as an instrument for EU international cultural relations. In this article, drawing from critical heritage studies and recent scholarship on heritage diplomacy, we see external and internal cultural relations as blurred and deeply entangled in EU heritage policies. Empirically, we focus on the European Heritage Label (EHL), a central EU heritage policy instrument. We explore how heritage practitioners at selected EHL sites and EU heritage policymakers understand and give meanings to international cultural relations and explain the role of cultural heritage in diplomatic endeavours. Our…

Kuvitellut Pohjoismaat Viron presidenttien puheissa

Pohjoismaisuus on ollut oleellinen osa Viron kuulumisen politiikkaa viimeisen parinkymmenen vuoden aikana. Artikkeli analysoi, miten ja missä tarkoituksessa maan kolme presidenttiä asemoivat puheissaan Viroa suhteessa Pohjoismaihin vuosina 1992–2016. Tulokset osoittavat, että pohjoismaisuus saa kuulumisen politiikassa moninaisia muotoja: Pohjoismaihin kuulumisen, sen rajalla tai naapurissa olemisen lisäksi aineistossa uudelleen määritellään myös Pohjoismaat yhteisönä visioimalla Itämeren alueelle sijoittuvaa dynaamista ja kehittyvää Pohjola-Baltia-kokonaisuutta.

Kulttuuriperintö eurooppalaisessa identiteettipolitiikassa

Eurooppa ja identiteetit liikkeessä

Non peer reviewed

Introduction: Europe, Heritage and Memory—Dissonant Encounters and Explorations

AbstractThe introduction to Dissonant Heritages and Memories in Contemporary Europe theoretically grounds the book’s various problematizations of heritage and identity struggles in Europe today, including the heritage policies of the EU and other intergovernmental organizations, struggles over ethnographic and historical exhibitions, activist practices, and dissonant memories. By discussing these struggles and their problematizations, the introduction connects the book to a wide range of ongoing debates across the humanities and social sciences. At the same time, it discusses how convergences and divergences within and between the volume’s chapters foster new insights regarding the concepts…

‘Being’, ‘Becoming’ and ‘Challenging’ European: Subject Positions in the European Heritage Label

This article scrutinises the subject positions of ‘being’, ‘becoming’ and ‘challenging’ European in the context of the European Heritage Label (EHL), a flagship cultural heritage action of the Euro...

Viro 100 : kaiken takana oli Nokia

Sekä Suomi että Viro ovat viime vuosikymmeninä rakentaneet omaa tarinaansa tietoyhteiskuntina ja tietoteknologian edelläkävijämaina. Kilvoittelu on sparrannut kilpakumppaneita ja luonut synergiaetuja. nonPeerReviewed

Docpoint : tarinoita naapurista : Viron luova hetki

Rodeo – Viron villit vuodet avaa itsenäisen Viron ensimmäisen hallituksen taivalta, johon kuului valtion ja yhteiskunnan kokonaisvaltainen uudelleenrakentaminen. nonPeerReviewed

Politics of solidarity in the context of European heritage : The cases of the European Solidarity Centre and Hambach Castle

This article explores the politics of solidarity in the framework of constructing a common cultural heritage of the European Union. The politics of solidarity stems from the notion of solidarity embedded to European heritage. We use critical heritage studies as a theoretical approach that understands heritage as an inherently dissonant social construct, produced by various actors according to political, economic and social interests. The study analyses empirical data from the European Heritage Label (EHL), a flagship heritage action of the EU that communicates shared values and a sense of identification to European citizens. Our empirical data includes ethnographic observation as well as in…

Creating and Governing Cultural Heritage in the European Union

Creating and Governing Cultural Heritage in the European Union: The European Heritage Label provides an interdisciplinary examination of the ways in which European cultural heritage is created, communicated, and governed via the new European Heritage Label scheme. Drawing on ethnographic field research conducted across ten countries at sites that have been awarded with the European Heritage Label, the authors of the book approach heritage as an entangled social, spatial, temporal, discursive, narrative, performative, and embodied process. Recognising that heritage is inherently political and used by diverse actors as a tool for re-imagining communities, identities, and borders, and for gene…

Constructing social Europe through European cultural heritage

The political and economic crises of the recent decades as well as the new changes brought on by globalization and digitalization have contributed to exacerbate social inequalities and injustice and revealed different social realities in Europe. The EU increasingly deals with social issues in its cultural and heritage policy. In this article, we explore the construction of this social dimension and advance the concept of 'social Europe' by exploring its cultural aspect based on our analysis of a recent EU heritage action, the European Heritage Label. In this action, the narrations of the European past and the attempts to foster common cultural heritage in Europe function as building blocks …

Heritage in flux : Europeanization as identity politics

Identity politics of the promotional videos of the European Heritage Label

During past decades, the EU has responded to a variety of ‘crises’ by promoting a common cultural heritage to advance European identity and belonging. This article analyses identity politics conducted in the framework of the EU’s flagship heritage action, the European Heritage Label. I borrow from ‘banal nationalism’ to scrutinise the usage of ‘we’ and ‘us’ in the promotional videos of the European Heritage Label sites as subject positions offered for identification in this heritage discourse. Analysis shows that the subject positions are constituted by an emphasis on the national level, preservation of the past for future generations and the key role of experts in the process of heritage. …

Poly-space

Europe’s Peat Fire: Intangible Heritage and the Crusades for Identity

Dissonances of ethnic nationalism have in Western cultural policy long been concealed by the universalist discourses of the international treaties on material heritage protection, as framed by the expansive heritage conservation apparatuses of the European nation states. Originally inspired by the 19th century romantic spirit of conservation, they became in the 20th century part of the modern, state-apparatus. Yet parallel with the European enlargements and new kinds of memory debates on the Holocaust and postcolonialism, these authorized heritage regimes have received more and more competition from a transnational counter-discourse on intangible cultural heritage. Like the earlier transfor…

Post-emotionaalisuus, liike ja muutto aikamme merkitsijöinä

Poly-space : Creating new concepts through reflexive team ethnography

In this chapter, we outline the development process of the concept of poly-space – which conceptualizes the entanglement of multiple moments and different spatial, temporal, affective and cognitive experiences in one physical place, the heritage site. The concept was conceived based on the experiences that members of the EUROHERIT project gained while conducting ethnographic fieldwork at 11 heritage sites awarded with the European Heritage Label by the European Commission. We argue that collaborative interpretive reflexivity – a form of affective sharing among researchers that goes beyond traditional conceptualizations of team ethnography – was the key aspect contributing to and enabling ou…

EUROHERIT Policy Brief: Optimizing Communication, Multilingualism, and Networking in the EHL

Efficient communication is important for the sustainability of cultural heritage schemes. Being a rather new action, the European Heritage Label (EHL) struggles with issues of visibility and wider recognition among European citizens, in part resulting from modest communication of the diverse actors within the action. To both increase the visibility of the EHL and promote efficient audience engagement, with an emphasis on multilingual representation of Europe’s diverse cultural heritage, we recommend concrete measures to improve coordinated communication among the EHL actors. Our recommendations consist of three thematic areas: communication, multilingualism, and networking.

EUROHERIT Policy Brief I: Increasing the Benefits and Transparency of the European Heritage Label

The European Heritage Label (EHL) is the EU’s flagship heritage action. It focuses on promoting the European significance of the cultural heritage and a sense of belonging among the European citizenry. The nature of the action and its proclaimed aims in identity politics necessitate wide public engagement, openness, and transparency. Compared to the European Capital of Culture (ECOC) action and the UNESCO Heritage Lists, the EHL application process has poor transparency, as the applications of the labeled sites are not made public or accessible to other heritage professionals, managers, policymakers, researchers, or public audiences. To increase the transparency of the EU heritage policy in…

Extending heritage diplomacy : a dialogic approach to cultural heritage

Heritage diplomacy is a recent concept and a new area of interest in the expanding field of diplomacy. The EU has recently emphasized the role of cultural heritage in its external relations to respond to global challenges and crises within, at, and beyond its borders. This use of cultural heritage runs the risk of underlining Eurocentric notions of heritage and expertise. Principles of democracy, dialogue, and inclusion form the basis of building trust and long-term cultural relations through heritage diplomacy, in EU external and internal relations. These relations should be perceived as deeply entangled.