Search results for "media_common.cataloged_instance"

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…

Multilayered perspectives on language policy in higher education : Finland, Estonia, and Latvia in comparison

2016

This article analyses language policies in higher education (HE) in Finland, Estonia, and Latvia, as well as the European Union (EU). We take a multilayered approach to language policies in order to illuminate the intertwined nature of local, national, and international language policies in HE. We are particularly interested in the construction of national language(s) and the language(s) of internationalisation in our case countries. Finland, Estonia, and Latvia share common features as relatively small non-Anglophone countries in the Baltic region, while simultaneously having somewhat differing political and cultural histories. The results of our discursive analysis indicate that while the…

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…