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

ABSTRACT

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 visitors engage with European identity narratives and elaborate their European belonging. We especially scrutinize how everyday encounters and experiences, such as mobility, shape identifications with ‘Europe’ and perceptions of what is ‘European’. The interviews are interpreted in the theoretical framework of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ European. This framework indicates a centuries-long liminal position of the Central and Eastern Europe. It enables us to scrutinize CEE citizens’ sense of belonging to Europe in an intersection of dual Europeanization, i.e. cultural Europeanization and ‘Europeanization’ of the CEE countries to overcome this liminal position and become ‘true’ Europeans.

KEYWORDS:

• Europeanization
• belonging
• identity
• ethnography
• cultural heritage

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The project has been reviewed and approved by the Human Sciences Ethics Committee of the University of Jyväskylä. The ethical review of the Committee is based on the guidelines of the Finnish Advisory Board on Research Integrity.

2. In addition to these interviews, our data gathering encompassed interviews with key EU heritage officials and a representative of the EHL selection panel (n = 7), photos taken by the interviewed visitors at the EHL sites; a survey of national coordinators of the EHL in the selected ten countries; and informal discussions with guides and various stakeholders of the sites. The data also included multifaceted observation of these sites (e.g. their exhibition narratives) collected as videos, catalogues, photographs, audio recordings, and notes in field journals and site memos, as well as diverse (multimodal) textual material, such as websites, promotional and educational materials. We asked all 38 EHL sites which were labelled before 2018 to share their EHL applications with us and received 16 applications. Our data also included 8,299 official EU documents based on a search for the word ‘heritage’ in the EUR-Lex database.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Academy of Finland [330602]; European Research Council [636177]