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Macro-regional strategies of the European Union, Russia and multilevel governance in northern Europe

2017

The European Union’s Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR): improving multilevel governance in Baltic Sea cooperation?

2017

ABSTRACTMacro-regional strategies – such as the ones for the Baltic Sea, the Danube, the Ionian-Adriatic, and the Alpine regions – constitute new elements of European Union (EU) Cohesion Policy and territorial cooperation. In a nutshell, these strategies aim at building functional and transnational ‘macro-regions’ involving the EU, its member states, as well as partner countries within the EU’s system of multilevel governance (MLG). As the oldest macro-regional strategy, the EU Strategy of the Baltic Sea Region has been in operation since 2009. Drawing on the theory of MLG, this contribution assesses the effects on the political mobilization and interplay between international, intergovernm…

The “Big Bang” of the populist parties in the European Union: The 2014 European Parliament election

2018

A significant number of voters are turning their backs on traditional parties. The stability of European party systems is being defied by a growing number of (new) radical parties, whose presence i...

The nested games of the UK’s EU referendum: ruptures, reconfigurations and lessons for Europe

2021

The 2016 decision by the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union was a seminal one for both parties. In this special issue, we consider the extent to which the inter-penetration of the national and the European arenas produced significant opportunities for recasting political action. The nesting of these two levels matters firstly in allowing for the politicisation and mobilisation of domestic actors around European issues and secondly in explaining why seemingly sub-optimal or counter-productive actions are taken. The tensions this generated reached a critical juncture with the referendum, a rupture that highlights the extent to which a nominally second-order vote can have funda…

Politics of Cultural Marking in Mini-Europe: Anchoring European Cultural Identity in a Theme Park

2012

Mini-Europe—a theme park in Brussels morally supported by the European Commission and the European Parliament—consists of around 350 models of different buildings and heritage sites from all the member states of the European Union. In addition the park includes an exhibition named the Spirit of Europe. The article explores how the European cultural identity is constructed and ‘sold’ in Mini-Europe, and how history, geography and local and regional traditions are intertwined into a politics of cultural marking, an ideology of European integration and a creation of shared symbols. European cultural identity has often been generated through appeals to an ancient or classical past, which is pro…

Rhetoric of unity and cultural diversity in the making of European cultural identity

2011

The fundamental aim of the cultural policy of the European Union (EU) is to emphasize the obvious cultural diversity of Europe, while looking for some underlying common elements which unify the various cultures in Europe. Through these common elements, the EU policy produces ‘an imagined cultural community’ of Europe which is ‘united in diversity’, as one of the slogans of the Union states. This discourse characterizes various documents which are essential to the EU cultural policy, such as the Treaty of Lisbon, the European Agenda for Culture and the EU’s decision on the European Capital of Culture program. In addition, the discourse is applied to the production of cultural events in Europ…

Challenges for Creating Visibility of European Cultural Heritage

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 histo- ry and heritage as part of the Union’s cultural policy. One of the central con- cerns of the EU’s cultural policy is to generate a sense of belonging and iden- tity 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 recog- nition. Based on fieldwork findings, the article discusses the visibility of the EHL action as a network of heritage sites that challenges n…

Narrativity and intertextuality in the making of a shared European memory

2016

The latest wave of European integration process, cultural Europeanization, includes complex processes, such as the attempts to create a shared European memory that would transcend national interpretations of the past. The cultural Europeanization can be perceived as a narrative operation: in it the EU, Europe, and Europeanness are given meanings and made sense of through narrativization. The article investigates the EU’s attempts to create a shared European memory by analyzing the exhibition narrative of the Parlamentarium, the visitors’ center of the European Parliament. The analysis indicates how the construction of an official shared European memory is operationalized through textual and…

Defining “National Treasures” in the European Union. Is the Sky Really the Limit?

2019

The main objective of this article is to analyse the scope of EU Member States’ right to determine national treasures for the purpose of Directive 2014/60/EU on the return of cultural objects. While investigating the issue at the EU, human rights, and constitutional levels, the authors argue that the right to define what constitutes national treasures is not an absolute right. The definition of this particular category of cultural objects cannot be used to circumvent the rules on the free movement of goods and to hamper this freedom in an unjustifiable and arbitrary manner. On the human rights and constitutional levels, Member States’ right cannot interfere with the right to enjoy one’s pos…

Discourses of Europeanness in the reception of the European Capital of Culture events: The case of Pécs 2010

2012

Europeanness has been determined in various ways in academic, political and everyday discussions. The concept has become profoundly current in European Union (EU) policy during the past few decades: the EU is paying more and more interest in creating cultural coherence in Europe. The EU has various cultural instruments, such as the European Capital of Culture programme (ECOC), which aim to produce and strengthen Europeanness and cultural identification with Europe among its citizens. The ECOC programme creates an ideological frame for an urban cultural event: the frame directs the reception and experiences of the festivals, exhibitions and performances in the ECOC. Pécs – a city in souther…