Search results for "European Heritage Label"
showing 10 items of 11 documents
Dialogue in and as European heritage
2022
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…
EU heritage diplomacy : entangled external and internal cultural relations
2022
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…
The Added European Value of Cultural Heritage. The European Heritage Label
2018
Europe’s cultural heritage plays a strategic role in European Union (EU) politics. Heritage is viewed as a shared resource and common good that eventually can produce a broader acceptance of the EU. This article focuses on the exploration of European heritage in the context of the European Heritage Label (EHL), a recent EU heritage action. It first gives an overview of the EHL action and examines the significance attributed to the European dimension of heritage. Next the article discusses the added value of the EHL network of heritage sites for the promotion of European heritage in the context of the European Year of Cultural Heritage (EYCH) 2018. The two initiatives share similar approache…
Challenges for Creating Visibility of European Cultural Heritage : A Case Study of the European Heritage Label
2019
The European Heritage Label (EHL) is a recent flagship heritage action of the European Union and focuses on the European dimension of Europe’s history and heritage as part of the Union’s cultural policy. One of the central concerns of the EU’s cultural policy is to generate a sense of belonging and identity among European citizens. While efficient promotion of the visibility of the EHL among European audiences could be expected corresponding to the political objectives, the EHL continues to struggle with broader public recognition. Based on fieldwork findings, the article discusses the visibility of the EHL action as a network of heritage sites that challenges national narratives by promoti…
Politics of affect in the EU heritage policy discourse : an analysis of promotional videos of sites awarded with the European Heritage Label
2017
European cultural heritage is discussed with affective rhetoric in current European Union (EU) policy discourse. How does affect contribute to the meaning-making of a European cultural heritage and how are the workings of affect used by the EU to promote certain meanings of heritage and effect thereupon? The analysis focuses on recent promotional videos of sites awarded with the European Heritage Label by the EU. In the videos, affective textual, visual, audible, and narrative tropes intertwine with the tropes of EU policy rhetoric, increasing its capacity to impact and ‘move’ the receivers. The ethos of a European cultural heritage in the videos is based on a paradox: the history of the se…
Cultural heritage : Connecting people?
2020
Constructing social Europe through European cultural heritage
2021
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 …
Identity politics of the promotional videos of the European Heritage Label
2019
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. …
Transnational Heritage in the Making. Strategies for Narrating Cultural Heritage as European in the Intergovernmental Initiative of the European Heri…
2014
The idea of a transnational cultural heritage has become topical in Europe because of the new EU heritage initiatives, such as the European Heritage Label scheme. Even though the scheme is administered at the European level, its implementation is transferred to heritage agents in the countries participating in the initiative. How do the heritage agents narrate the labeled heritage sites as European? Using the method of narrative analysis, this article identifies six key strategies of making sense of a European cultural heritage. Even though the scheme includes certain frameworks in which the heritage agents have to interpret and narrate the sites as European, it enables them to interpret th…
EUROHERIT Policy Brief: Optimizing Communication, Multilingualism, and Networking in the EHL
2018
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.