Heritage diplomacy; an afterword

Back in 1995, I travelled to Kiev to stay with a Ukrainian friend that I had met in England. Complicated visa requirements, along with copious amounts of vodka, made it very clear that I had left Europe and entered a country navigating major social and political change in the wake of a collapsed Soviet Union. I was surprised then to hear war correspondents in 2022 describe Ukraine as lying at ‘the heart of Europe’. But in noticing that it was only ‘Western’ media outlets that used this terminology, I was reminded of how, and why, geocultural imaginaries such as Europe are contingent, fluid and constantly being remade, in this case by a military invasion and the analytics of its wider geopolitical consequence. Back in the mid-1990s, the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia meant that Europe’s frontiers were being defined around those countries located to the southwest of Ukraine, in the Balkans and Mediterranean. But then, as now, the idea of Europe was not merely geographical, but wrapped up in questions of civilisation, religion, values, and peoples.

It was with such issues in mind that I read with great interest the articles presented in this special issue. Across a number of the papers we see how Europe as a concept is in constant flux and production, whether it be through webs of documentation that make up policy and bureaucracy, or through the valorisation of particular cities, the language of shared heritage oriented around certain values, or through efforts to build cultural and political ties with countries in other parts of the world. The two additional papers here nicely complement this analysis in their respective examination of China’s Silk Road engagements with Central Asia, and the role of UNESCO’s conventions in shaping ideas about heritage as a ‘public good’ at the global level.

In reading the papers, I was reminded that they straddle two overlapping, yet distinct ways of approaching heritage diplomacy. The first is to frame it as a domain of practice, something that governments do as part of their ‘soft power’ strategy. Here, we can draw a parallel with those institutes for cultural diplomacy that have sprung up around the world in recent decades. Academic or think-tank, these institutes tend to view cultural diplomacy as an arm of government policy, and thus discuss it in terms of strategy, trends, innovation, or, perhaps, the loftier goals of peace and reconciliation. It is possible to think of heritage diplomacy in such ways, either as a separate, or sub field of the cultural.

The second approach is to see heritage diplomacy as a conceptual framework, one that holds distinct critical purchase. Today, both terms, heritage and diplomacy, are used multifariously. This means that attempts to reduce this conceptual frame to a single sentence definition risks inadequately capturing the various ways it can be developed over time to interpret a multitude of events and contexts. Recent scholarship on diplomacy, for example, emphasises the need to move beyond state-centric analyses and instead incorporate other actors, namely non-governmental bodies, professional groups and for-profit organisations.

I have always seen heritage diplomacy in this second way, given that, like the authors here, I see heritage as a socio-political process that codifies and orders, preserves and exhibits, reconstructs and erases, and serves as a medium through which ideologies are both advanced and resisted. For cultural heritage, it is also important that critical theory starts by challenging the everyday language of past, present and future as separate ontologies, and instead grapples with the ways in which each is continually remade by the other(s). It is in this space that we find the political, the ideological, the negotiation of power. With such thoughts in mind, the idea of heritage diplomacy then draws our attention to processes of representation, communication, and the building of collaborative relationships through negotiation and consensus. But while such themes provide the empirical focus, conceptualising heritage diplomacy involves incorporating broader bodies of theory and scholarship, as deemed appropriate.

More specifically, it’s about understanding what’s going on in situations where the production of heritage involves exchange, cooperation, and where a language of dialogue, partnership, or shared heritage carries some form of political or strategic weight. Of course, all analyses of heritage might be generically viewed through a lens of cooperation, whether it be formal or informal, and the idea of shared heritage is somewhat of a misnomer given all heritage is, by definition an expression of the collective, and thus shared. Greater analytical specificity then comes from tying the concept to those situations where the production and circulation of ideas about heritage involve the ideological and the ideational, the performative and the symbolic, and where relations between groups of people, institutions or nations are mediated through forms of power that are both historically constituted and open to redefinition as larger structures shift and alter.

Given its broader connotations, the term diplomacy suggests any discussion of partnerships, dialogue and such like is interpreted through a Westphalian political world of nation-states. Orienting work around borders and the inter-national provides a natural starting point for conceptualising heritage diplomacy. But it is critically important the focus shifts away from ideas of top down versus bottom up, wherein the state and ‘community’ are treated as autonomous entities, towards constellations of actors, and interpretations of where and when, why, and to what end competing discourses and practices overlap, stabilise and mutate via arrangements or combinations of consensual agreement, violent imposition or negotiation. I see heritage diplomacy as a conceptual frame for understanding the ways in which heritage has become a space where experts, policymakers, bureaucrats, scholars, public servants, entrepreneurs, and corporations all interface with the technologies of state and non and intergovernmental agencies. For my own research, I have also come to understand the value of interpreting present day events through an historical lens, one which conceptualises the emergence of heritage discourses in the modern era in relation to both nationalist and internationalist imperatives and the ways in which ideas about race, civilisation and history have stabilised through revolutions, conflicts, or empires and their aftermath. I also concur with Stefan Groth’s observation here that critiques that only see conduct as intentional or strategic leads to those actors who unwittingly advance or reinforce existing social structures and worldviews being left out of the analysis. To cite one example, we might ask how representations made by scholars, consultants or heritage NGOs unwittingly advance the value clusters of liberalism or neoliberal development.

The papers gathered together in this special issue help take us in such directions. Read together, they demonstrate how a conceptual frame of heritage diplomacy can help reveal how imaginaries such as Europe, the Silk Road or the global are constituted in performative and bureaucratic ways involving multiple actors. This scale of analysis helps move the discussion beyond the methodological nationalism that continues to orient so much scholarship. As the essays by both Katja Mäkinen et al. and Viktorija Čeginskas and Tuuli Lähdesmäki rightfully note, understanding the diplomatic dynamics of Europe involves reading the ways in which domestic and international processes often coproduce each other. Indeed, Europe – whether it is defined in terms of physical geography, as an economic bloc, or as a cultural imaginary – poses significant analytical challenges. Several of the papers here indicate how ideas about heritage feed into this. We know that Europe has been pivotal in shaping the norms and discourses of heritage in the modern era. What we learn from this special issue though is how the language of heritage forms part of claims about and over Europe, and what diplomatic affordances it offers in relation to such processes. As the discussions on the EU’s attempts to foster international cultural relations here clarify, this is not merely an internal dynamic, but arises from building heritage diplomacy ties with countries in other regions.

These arguments build on studies by Yapp (2016) and others, which critically examine discourses of shared heritage used by European countries when engaging with former colonial territories. Not surprisingly, this has led to productive questions around neocolonialism, as programmes of collaboration typically valorise European histories and their material culture legacies. Building partnerships that reverse this and instead foreground the ways in which Europe was, and continues to be, constituted by the non-European would be a productive way of decolonising heritage imaginaries. By this, I mean recasting discourses of Europe and European around the external, and understanding how transcultural, transregional flows and connections are constituents of the region’s history, culture and identity.

One of the key insights from this issue is the importance of understanding heritage as an arena that advances value based discourses. Stefan Groth’s article documents the project to redefine Europe less in terms of identities, and more as a region of ‘shared values’, notably fairness, equity, social cohesion and inclusion. Indeed geocultural imaginaries such as Europe, or the West, have long been constructed around the metanarratives of freedom, democracy or liberalism. This makes the analysis of the European Capitals of Culture programme by Cristina Clopot particularly notable. Her analysis confirms the analytical leverage that comes from studying those countries that lie at the frontiers or meeting points of regions. As she notes, Lithuania, Estonia, Czech Republic and Croatia proclaim to hold certain values, notably a commitment to democracy, in order to assert that they ‘belong to Europe’. This raises interesting questions about coloniality and decolonisation for those post-socialist countries now looking to integrate themselves into a European project that some critics have argued remains neo-imperial in nature (Langan and Price 2020; Odijie 2022).

Similarly, the papers by Katja Mäkinen et al. and Viktorija Čeginskas and Tuuli Lähdesmäki point to unity and social cohesion respectively as core values which purportedly define Europe, and other authors here indicate how cultural heritage is being mobilised to enact this aspiration. The paper by Hanna Schreiber and Bartosz Pieliński opens up the scale of discussion still further, via an examination of the moral claims underpinning notions of humanity and heritage as a public good. In referencing conference delegates discussing how such claims should be enacted in policy, the authors highlight the strategic value delegations from Morocco and United Arab Emirates gain from pursuing UNESCO’s concern to be globally ‘representative’. One of the core tenets of international diplomacy is recognition, and their paper is a reminder that the international policies crafted to be more representative continue to be both inclusionary and exclusionary. To clarify this point, the agenda of addressing ‘representation’ at the nation-state level is only the first step to dealing with those forms of exclusion, intentional or otherwise, that continue to occur at the sub-national level in multilateral heritage policy frameworks. We also need to constantly ask how the diplomatic and bureaucratic nature of international heritage policy actively contributes to these problems.

Indeed, as Johanna Turunen and and Sigrid Kaasik-Krogerus correctly note, the process of demarcating, refashioning and claiming certain histories as heritage can equally work against a politics of inclusion. By juxtaposing colonialism, communism and the Holocaust, they nicely open up the concept of difficult heritage. To date, this term has largely referred to sites of atrocity, mass violence, incarceration and such like. But as the paper demonstrates, the complex legacies of colonialism and communism also pose intriguing bureaucratic and diplomatic challenges, and thus firmly sit in the space of difficult heritage at the level of the EU. As we know, the process of making representations about the past in the name of reconciliation or peace, can, in certain instances, form part of a strategy to assert exclusive, and thus divisive, claims over past events, or rewrite histories in ways that create new forms of violence in the present. And to add further complication, such representations might also form part of regional and international forms of dialogue and cooperation, which typically rely on overly burnished, nostalgic depictions of past events and actions in order to facilitate cordial relations and symbolically confer respect and recognition to other parties. Extending the discussion of Turunen and Kaasik-Krogerus in such directions is among the ways in which the literatures on difficult heritage and heritage diplomacy can find productive points of convergence (see: Lee 2019).

It was with this notion of ‘difficult’ in mind that I read Natalia Grincheva’s paper on the ways in which museums are turning to online broadcasting to make particular representations to geographically remote audiences. Under Xi Jinping, sentiment has been growing in China over the repatriation of cultural artefacts by European colonial powers as part of a ‘cultural rejuvenation’ that, in part, rectifies the wrongs inflicted during a ‘century of humiliation’. As we know, colonial era plundering now constitutes its own form of ‘difficult heritage’, and Grincheva fascinatingly shows how British Museum curators turned to online demonstrations of artefact repair and conservation on the back of pandemic border closures. In other words, in seeking to communicate that highly prized Chinese porcelain and other objects are not merely ‘treasures’ held on to by the museum, demonstrations of conservation and other curatorial practices performatively bestowed ‘respect’ on the objects, and, by association, China itself. What we see then in Grincheva’s analysis is how diplomatic frictions over cultural heritage – whether they be pre-existing cases like the Elgin Marbles or Benin Bronzes, or potential, emergent ones like Chinese artefacts - can lead to objects emerging as non-human actors in the production of diplomatically expedient discourses such as cosmopolitanism or ‘mutual respect’. Britain, after all, might be able to dismiss the overtures made by Athens, but it will be much more nervous about antagonising Beijing.

In such studies we begin to see how this drive to define heritage in terms of values can also be read in relation to wider geopolitical developments, as Europe competes with other regional alliances for broader influence. In tracing the complex pathways the Silk Road followed towards global fame over the course of the twentieth century, I realised the cultural and political work it performs arises out of the values that have been attached to the concept, namely tolerance, harmony, peace and intercultural dialogue (Winter 2022). Its emergence as a form of multilateral heritage diplomacy, championed by UNESCO at the end of the Cold War, was instrumental in this. And it is these values that China picks up today in framing its Belt and Road Initiative as a ‘revival’ of the Silk Roads for the twenty-first century, involving in excess of 70 partner countries. The geocultural imaginary of connected pasts, that is the silk Road, one that spans oceans and continents, is thus portrayed as a heritage of shared values – harmony, dialogue, mutual respect – around which prosperous shared futures, even a ‘shared destiny’ can be built.

In response to China’s attempt to build this transcontinental and transoceanic strategic alliance, Australia, India, Japan and United States developed the QUAD (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue); a regional architecture oriented by the geographies of the Indian and Pacific oceans, or Indo-Pacific for short. In similarly constructing this around a set of shared values, these four countries have sought to define the Indo-Pacific as a maritime geography of freedom (free and open), democracy, liberalism and tolerance. Further to Meskell and Brumann’s (2015) arguments regarding World Heritage and the BRICs and other alliances, these geocultural imaginaries – Europe, Indo-Pacific, and the Silk Roads ‘old’ and ‘new’ - are among the geopolitical configurations that can influence where, and to what end, heritage diplomacy programmes take place. Moreover, as countries seek to influence UNESCO’s policies through funding and leadership appointments, these values normalise within the organisation’s various programmes. The rise of rights based discourses, including LGBTQIA as documented by Viktorija Čeginskas and Tuuli Lähdesmäki here, exemplify this. Today, however, China is among those looking to shift UN discourse towards a language of tolerance, noninterference and mutual respect. It is worth noting that as such values permeate the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and other priority agendas, they also filter down into heritage cooperation programmes framed around conservation, tourism development, infrastructure or community participation. Interrogating these value discourses is thus instructive in making sense of what’s going on in declarations of ‘shared heritage’.

As Iwabuchi (2013) notes, such forms of cultural internationalism, along with ideas of ‘intercultural dialogue’, accentuate an inter-nationalised form of cultural diversity, thereby often reinforcing support for majoritarian cultural forms. Looking outwards from the analyses presented here, understanding what’s at stake, and what forms of sociocultural violence might be embedded in these forms of heritage diplomacy demands careful examination. Giulia Sciorati pursues such themes here, arguing that the language of Silk Road cooperation in Central Asia is leading to Sinocentric representations of history. This is particularly significant because the smaller countries of Central Asia are often depicted as the ‘bridge’ of Eurasia, the meeting point of the ‘civilisations’ of Europe and East Asia; a dynamic that is likely perpetuated by the bilateral and multilateral forms of heritage diplomacy now forming around UNESCO nominations.

Clearly, the papers that make up this special issue are oriented around some specific empirical examples. The themes and issues they raise though, which I have attempted to tease out a little further, add important dimensions to the study and development of heritage diplomacy. They weave together the two distinct ways of seeing the term, as noted above; reading it as a practice and area of policy, and, by contrast, a space of critical enquiry and conceptual development. In this regard, the issue represents a valuable resource for those students and scholars looking to build their own vocabulary and intellectual frame for interpreting what’s at stake when certain discourses, imaginaries and practices of heritage circulate and seem to stabilise in particular settings, formal and informal.