1 The Construction of Europe in the European Heritage Label at the Macro and Meso Levels
The EU’s most recent flagship heritage action, the European Heritage Label (EHL), contributes to the politics of belonging in EU cultural policy by seeking to form ‘a community of Europeans’ with an emphasis on common values and a shared past in Europe. As the EHL was developed with the aim to strengthen “European citizens’ belonging to the Union”, heritage sites have been awarded the Label on grounds of their “European significance” and contribution to Europe’s history and development (see EC 2010, 2; EC 2011, 6; EP&C 2011, 3; Lähdesmäki 2014; Čeginskas 2018). The discourse of the EHL action emphasizes the European dimension of heritage, and instead of approaching heritage in terms of conservation, protection, and aesthetic or architectural quality, it treats it as a political instrument that serves identity-building purposes and expectations of economic benefit and sustainable development in the EU (Lähdesmäki et al. 2020). In this respect, the EHL approach corresponds to the recent EU cultural policy of approaching ‘Europe’ as a brand, promoting a sense of shared unity, commonality, and the benefits of EU membership in terms of ‘products’ to be mediated to the wider European public.
As one aim of the EHL action is to highlight Europe’s cultural diversity, each labelled site has a different thematic context, and visitors interpret the history, heritage value, and meanings of the sites, including their European dimension, in different ways. The heritage sites vary in size, status, and structures depending on their functions as museums, exhibitions, archives, or historical sites, as well as their modes of cultural and educational engagement, practices, and activities. Therefore, the EHL sites manifest a broad temporal, geographical, and cultural variety that mediate events and process from different times, ranging from Roman archaeological remains and reconstructions at Carnuntum Archaeological Park, Austria, to an exhibition of EU integration and institutions in the European District of Strasbourg, France (see Annex 2 for an overview of the EHL sites). At first, it may therefore seem difficult to define any common denominator of ‘European’ heritage and Europe’s past. However, our research shows that by recognizing only heritage sites (e.g. cultural monuments, cultural landscapes, memorials) and intangible heritage associated with a place that symbolizes European integration, common European
Embedded in the EU’s multilevel governance, the EHL is based on an interaction between what we call the macro and meso levels of European discourse. The macro level is formed by the EU institutions and the civil servants of the European Commission who shape the EU’s discourse on the EHL, and thereby on Europe, with their textual and visual materials, such as policy documents and websites. The main creators of the meso-level EHL discourse are professionals working day-to-day at the awarded EHL sites who formulate, interpret, and put into practice the ‘European significance’. As our research shows, they
Alcide de Gasperi House Museum in Italy, an EHL site.
PHOTO: EUROHERIT
Camp Westerbork in the Netherlands, an EHL site.
PHOTO: EUROHERIT
Franz Liszt Memorial Museum, part of the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Hungary, an EHL site.
PHOTO: EUROHERIT
The Carnuntum Archaeological Park in Austria, an EHL site.
PHOTO: EUROHERIT
Our analysis of the EHL data shows that the European Commission and the awarded heritage sites both try to promote ‘European’ values in terms of social and moral mindsets rooted in political ideals that connect cultural heritage with the promotion of unity, a sense of belonging, and democratic participation (see Lähdesmäki et al. 2020). In the process of constructing European narratives, the EHL discourse mixes local, national, and European scales (Lähdesmäki 2016; Kaasik-Krogerus 2019, 159). As the EHL action involves actors from 18 EU member states and diverse physical and cultural settings (e.g. urban and rural), we argue that the EHL discourse develops from and reveals different perceptions of how ‘Europe’ and ‘the European’ are imagined at various levels.
The EHL has a clear educative objective and according to its criteria, designated EHL sites should design pedagogical activities aimed specifically at young European citizens to support the process of European cultural and political integration. According to the EU documents, the designated sites are supposed to promote their European dimension and to ‘bring to life’ the European narrative (EC 2010, 2; EP&C 2011, 3; EC 2017). The heritage sites seek to follow these criteria by concretizing the European narrative from their specific perspective, in line with the thematic narrative of the heritage site. However, the views on the ‘European’ at the meso level do not always meet the views held by the actors at the macro level. This may lead either to candidate sites
In this chapter, we approach the EHL action as a means of pursuing politics of belonging. The explicit aim of positively influencing public perception of the EU and strengthening a sense of belonging to it and Europe, in particular among young European citizens, is at the core of the action (EP&C 2011). As part of this practice, an idea of a common European cultural heritage is formed and used to construct a particular European narrative (Borgmann-Prebil and Ross 2010; Lähdesmäki, Kaasik-Krogerus, and Mäkinen 2019; Čeginskas and Kaasik-Krogerus 2020). In this narrative Europe is constructed as a distinctive political, cultural, and economic entity that enables people to identify as Europeans and feel a sense of belonging to Europe (Sassatelli 2002, 436; Kohli 2000, 118). As regards politics of belonging, communities, in this case first and foremost ‘Europe’ and the EU, are continuously (re)imagined. ‘European significance’ as the key criteria of the EHL offers a good example of this process of (re)-imagining.
The promotional videos that introduce the EHL sites and their ‘European significance’ to the wider public exemplify how the entanglement of the macro and meso levels is enacted in practice in the EHL action. The videos are available on the website of the European Commission, which functions as its public forum to communicate cultural meanings related to Europe. Sixteen of these videos are fully or partly in English, the rest are in various national languages with English subtitles (see also Lähdesmäki, 2017). The videos focus on the respective site’s ‘European significance’, whereas in them, practitioners at the sites commonly evoke an ‘imagination’ of three, partly overlapping communities: ‘we’ as contemporary Europeans, ‘we’ as a nation, and ‘we’ as a community of heritage professionals (Kaasik-Krogerus 2020).
However, the EU officials and European panel members at the macro level and the sites and heritage practitioners at the meso level are not the only actors involved in politics of belonging. We argue that the visitors to the EHL sites participate in ‘doing’ European cultural heritage and imagining Europe at the micro level. In this chapter, we therefore analyze imagining Europe at the micro level in the EHL action, i.e. the visitors and their engagement with the Label. We explore how visitors to the EHL sites engage with the specific EHL discourse on Europe in terms of a ‘politics of belonging’ on the one hand and, on the other, how visitors perceive ‘Europe’ in this process. The interviews
In what follows, we first introduce the research data and methods used. Then, the empirical analysis consists of three parts: Europe of people; Europe of nations; belonging to Europe. We finish with conclusions on the multiple constructions of Europe and (non)belonging to it in the EHL context.
2 Analyzing Europe from Below in the EHL Action: Research Data and Methods
Our research is based on fieldwork at the EHL sites, which included visits, observations, and interviews with both visitors and heritage practitioners working there. In this chapter, we focus on the interviews with the visitors, examining 271 visitor interviews from 11 EHL sites located in ten EU countries, which were conducted between August 2017 and February 2018 (see Chapter 1; Annex 1; Lähdesmäki et al. 2020). The interviews covered various topics, including the visitors’ understanding of cultural heritage in general, European cultural heritage, ‘Europe’, European identity, and feeling European. The great number of interviews and the variety of interviewees make it possible to analyze how visitors from both EU and non-EU countries, and across different age groups, imagine, understand, and engage with Europe. Their responses help us to explore their personal views of Europe, of what constitutes the ‘European’ for them, and to interpret what specific experiences and attributes they relate with Europe. The qualitative interviews from the different sites enable us to analyze Europe from below, since they form discursive practices and subject positions in which people mobilize identities and a sense of belonging to explain, contest, or question the world around them (see also Wetherell and Potter 1992, 78; Siapera 2004, 131).
The visitors whose interviews are analyzed in this chapter include both EU citizens (n = 225) and non-EU citizens (n = 46). With the exception of one Russian, two Swiss, and two Ukrainian visitors, the non-EU visitors were not from member countries of the Council of Europe (see Annex 1). The EU visitors represented 19 nationalities, and we interviewed slightly more women visitors than men. Divided into three age groups, we had 98 younger visitors aged between 18 to 35 years, 112 visitors represented the middle-aged group (aged 36 to 65), and the group of older visitors (aged 66+) numbered 61 interviewees. The majority of interviewees had a higher (university) education, but others held diplomas from middle school, high school, college, and vocational school (see Annex 1). At some EHL sites, we interviewed many local visitors who lived
We conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with the visitors. Depending on the length of answers, the interviews lasted from seven to almost 40 minutes. Since several researchers conducted the interviews at different sites, we agreed to keep the overall structure of the interview unchanged. However, depending on the interview situations, the actual order of the topics and themes varied from interview to interview, and sometimes required additional questions. In our analysis, we went through all the visitor interviews and focused on topics and themes related to interpreting European cultural heritage and European identity at the sites and in the exhibitions, and then analyzed the visitors’ understandings of Europe, their (non-)belonging to Europe, and their feeling of being European. We used close reading and a qualitative content analysis of language use and discursive meaning making in our data. Consequently, our interpretations stem from our subjective readings and contextualizations of the data, which we addressed in joint discussions and intensive exchanges of views within our team of researchers.
The interviews engaged with people’s perceptions of both the site and the notion of European heritage, which we understand as a dialogic process of meaning making between the visitors and heritage sites. We enquired how the interviewees engaged with the EHL and in this context perceived Europe and the EU (see also Lähdesmäki et al. 2020). The similarities and differences depicted in the process of close reading formed a basis for organizing the answers into specific categories (about the method, see also Kvale 1996, 192) for further analysis. The background questions about age, education, and nationality were mainly intended for constructing the social profile of the interviewees. In our analysis, the visitor interviews (V) appear with a specific code that indicate the respective heritage sites (S1–11), where the interviews were recorded, followed by a number that expresses the chronological order in which the interviews were conducted. For instance, VS3/11 refers to the eleventh visitor interviewed at Camp Westerbork. A more detailed overview of the EHL sites and their codes can be found in Annex 3; information on the social, educational, and ethnic backgrounds of the visitors to the sites is in Annex 1.
The EHL logo, photographed at Camp Westerbork, the Netherlands.
PHOTO: EUROHERIT
Collage of information brochures, flyers, and promotional material from various EHL sites and in multiple languages.
PHOTO: EUROHERIT
Various scholars have pointed out how the term ‘Europe’ is continuously ‘owned’ and used by the EU, its institutions and representatives, and they have explored how Europe is constructed in EU policies as a synonym for the Union (e.g. De Cesari 2017; Lähdesmäki et al. 2020; Turunen n.d.). The EHL is a good example of this common overlapping usage and understanding of the two
3 Europe of People: Europe Starts with You
I mean, why would I want to juxtapose myself with others, instead of bringing them closer to me? Well, that’s indeed a problem, I want everyone to be involved… It’s rather “We are Europe”, and we drive through Neustadt an der Weinstraße – of course, coincidences don’t exist – and there, in the church, we experienced European youth playing music together. It was spectacular! There you could say “Europe starts with us” or “within us” – or something like that.
I don’t like the idea. We love discussing in the Netherlands about our identity. I think it’s a dangerous idea of trying to formulate an identity on the level of a nation or the level of a continent.
Because the name, the word, ‘identity’ sounds to me like something that is inclosing people, that is just, you know, yeah, closing doors. It is ‘MY identity’ and if we need a ‘common identity’ – it means that we have to accept people in, or they are out. And that is something that is quite sad. While culture is not like that. Culture is like a common ground.
Besides identity, the concept of Europe(an) as a fixed and closed entity was criticized by some visitors, since it “is not good to create divisions”, as a young Polish woman put it (VS8/19). These interviewees defied clear boundaries of what and where Europe is or why Europe has to ‘start from here’ (e.g. VS3/29; VS3/30; VS2/2). For instance, a man in his early fifties of Belgian origin, who had lived and worked for many years on other continents, elaborated at the Mundaneum: “Where does Europe end? Humanity is arbitrary anyway. So, where does Asia begin, where does Europe begin? Well, there is an ocean next to it, but I mean, it’s a continent” (VS9/27).
Against this criticism of defining clear territorial boundaries of Europe, many of the interviewees consistently pointed out that the experience of
I mean, I have the impression that I benefit from the way in which Europe is today, that’s how I experience it. For example, I can freely move across borders, or these small everyday advantages, like the common currency, which is really very useful here in the borderland. […] So, I find it very useful in everyday life, especially if you live here. I find it very nice that it is in general possible to move from one country to another without problems.
It is to be able to speak with English people, Germans… lots of countries of Europe. And to have common things in the sense that we all belong to the European Union. We can freely travel from one country to another without necessarily crossing any real border. That’s it. It is freedom of exchange, of expression between all the member countries. And to know that we are, so to speak, ‘allied’. We are all together reunited around the EU.
Yeah, first, we have this partnership, he is Flemish, I am German. I have Finnish roots; my mother is Finnish. So, it was always about different cultures and identities at my home, however, rather European-American.
Once we go beyond, as I said, Europe, and we get to, be it in Asia… or the United States, America. North America, South America: You travel enormously, you see at once that they have another identity, another culture.
if the culture that passed on to your parents is of European roots, then that’s European heritage. So, it doesn’t have to be only Europe, within the continental European mass, but it could be maybe from somebody from Australia that might have identity with us. […] Because I was raised with very strong Spanish values, and always reminded in Chile, being a country, which is itself multiracial, I was always reminded that this is your background, it’s… mostly, mostly Spanish, yeah.
As these quotes show, mobility was largely understood as positive: the vast majority of the visitors related it to the wider context of modernity and their
4 Europe of Nations: Europe Starts Here
The interviewed visitors frequently interpreted the EHL slogan ‘Europe starts here’ in both spatial and temporal terms. Their understanding that Europe was linked with certain personalities and started with a specific event or at a particular geographical point corresponds to how the EHL action and the awarded sites present Europe and European cultural heritage. These interpretations had one thing in common: understanding Europe as an entity consisting of bounded geographical areas with cultural characteristics considered as ‘European’. At sites like Alcide de Gasperi House Museum or Robert Schuman House, visitors mentioned the role that its ‘Founding Fathers’ had played in the establishing the EU. Similarly, the visitors to Carnuntum – a site that is dedicated to the Roman past – created a connection between the Roman Empire and contemporary Europe (e.g. VS2/1). Some visitors explained their European belonging by referring to the towns or regions where they lived; others perceived themselves as European as their “country is European”, as a Slovak visitor to Carnuntum simply put it (VS2/1). The visitors interviewed in Tallinn, Estonia, and Sagres, Portugal, referred to the specific geographical location of both sites at the ‘spatial edge’ or political border of the EU (e.g. VS6/2; VS11/8). Similarly, visitors to sites that were situated in national border areas often emphasized the meaning of borders and the experience of transgressing them, as for instance at Hambach Castle (Germany), Mundaneum (Belgium), Carnuntum
Hence, these visitors contextualized Europe by entangling local, regional, national, and European scales, which allowed them to claim belonging to Europe alongside sensing belonging to their home country, nation, region, and town. In this respect, the visitors’ sense of belonging closely resembled the ‘marble cake’ model, in which culturally diverse states constitute ‘Europe’, and their community within the EU determines and conditions citizens’ belonging to EUrope (Risse 2004, 251; see also Breakwell 2004). However, the role of the individual citizen is rather limited in such a ‘Europe of nations’, since their agency is largely tied to, and thus subordinate to, the agency of the state. This means that Europe is imagined as a normative community (the EU) with specific ‘rules and regulations’ that bind together different states and thus the people who live there. However, the normative character neither abolishes existing controversies between European countries or cultural communities, nor renders ‘Europe’ uniform. As the interview data from the EHL sites shows, visitors from both within and outside the EU alike imagine such a ‘Europe of nations’ as a culturally diverse community united by shared values.
The visitors commonly understood Europeanness in terms of a strong sense of spatiality, which enabled them to feel a sense of connection to and draw a distinction between different places at the same time. The majority of the visitors greatly valued the cultural and national differences inside the EU and regarded them as worth preserving. Several visitors claimed: “When I think about Europe, I think about all different kind of cultures everywhere. That it’s actually good” (VS6/13, Dutch man under 25); or argued: “I mean there are different cultures, too, in parts of Europe and in knowing that it’s still Europe, so it’s important to keep this parity” (VS11/28, young French woman). Some visitors emphasized that Europe created a common cultural space consisting of differences based on the diversity of culture and heritage in the various European countries (e.g. VS9/16, Belgian woman under 25; VS8/18, Polish woman in her early thirties). Hence, different languages, peoples, cultures, states, and landscapes are viewed as decisive and defining aspects of Europe, as outlined for the ECC project in Chapter 5. In the words of one visitor, Europe is both “multicultural” and “rich” (VS10/9, French man in his fifties), and unites diverse elements: “As if Europe is one, but it consists of different elements, regions that have their own characteristics” (VS8/18, young French woman). Visitors from both EU and non-EU countries described Europe in similar ways as being different, diverse, manifold, progressive, possessing common goals, and a place where no animosity existed between neighbors (e.g. VS11/32; VS11/33), thereby often overlapping with the EU narrative. As a visitor from Canada claimed:
In some cases, the discussion of Europe’s cultural richness developed into admiring its perceived cultural uniqueness. Eurocentric views emphasized the superiority of Europe, too. Visitors from both inside and outside the EU held these views. Visitors from the USA, Canada, and Australia, in particular, tended to construct an “Old World” discourse that underlined the Europe’s cultural richness, long history, and great cultural heritage compared to their home countries. After her visit to the EHL site in Hungary, an American woman in her mid-eighties described Europe as the “predecessor to the new world. We all come from here, although some come from Asia, but the majority come from the whole Europe, to America, to the new world” (VS5/13). Another American man of the same age, interviewed at the Great Guild Hall in Estonia, explained: “We in America look at anything 300 years old is really, really old. Really old. In fact, I happen to live in one of the oldest towns in America. We were founded in 1638. For you that stuff is all over the place here, it’s twice that old” (VS6/9). The visitors’ discourse contributed to reinforcing the narrative of Europe’s cultural diversity and historical cultural richness at the expense of the cultural richness of other cultures and communities, such as the native first nations in the USA and Canada or the Aborigines in Australia.
I think Europeans, no matter where they are from, from the West or from the East, we all have… well, history has basically moved across the whole continent through all centuries and millennia. And in my opinion what makes us today European, is that – that we fought for our freedoms, for tolerance, equality of women, and religious freedom.
Several interviewees also referred to the EU as a peace-project, creating thus a close link between Europe and the EU, like a young male visitor at the Alcide de Gasperi House Museum (e.g. VS1/13). The same young Italian visitor also cautioned that we should not take these values for granted due to Europe’s past conflicts, including World War II, the time of the Iron Curtain dividing Europe into ‘East’ and ‘West’, and before the creation of the EU. In his opinion, “the aim of Europe” is based on “equal principles: that of freedom, of guaranteeing culture, of guaranteeing healthcare, and therefore the theme of citizens’ rights” (VS1/13), which need to be safeguarded. Many visitors at different sites repeated the EHL rhetoric of learning from the past and stressed that it was important to ensure that ‘these times will never come back’. This reference to the past arose again when some visitors discussed the future of Europe in terms of maintaining what ‘we have achieved’. This type of rhetoric is a good example of identifying with EUropean narratives and connects to the issue of dual loyalty between the national and European: whether a person identifies more strongly or frequently with local, regional, national, or international (including European) communities (see also Hermann and Brewer 2004, 12).
Yeah, I think it can’t work with all these different cultures, different languages to have one Europe, like being one country… It’s good that there is a European community for sure, ‘cause we never had that long time of peace, I think. So, it’s good to, that it’s there, but it’s not… you cannot understand it as being one country.
Various interviewees claimed that they felt national, in terms of being “more Poles than Europeans” (VS8/14, Polish woman) or did not feel European “as
5 Belonging to Europe: From Purposeful Vision to Banal Normality
During the interviews, we asked visitors about their social backgrounds, including their nationality, level of education, country of residence, and age. Distinguishing between non-residents/tourists and EU citizens/residents of EU member states, our data shows that the vast majority of the interviewed visitors sensed belonging to Europe. While the interviews did not include any questions on the EU, the visitors often brought up their – mostly positive – associations with Union. Only a small minority felt negative or a lack of belonging to EUrope. As the visitors engaged in various ways of imagining Europe and constructing belonging and non-belonging, nationality and country of residence did not appear to strongly influence their answers. Similarly, we did not see a marked difference in answers based on the interviewees’ gender. As regards their educational background, our data confirmed that people with higher education (a college degree or higher), had only positive associations with Europe and the EU. However, there is a strong bias in our sample towards higher-educated interviewees (see Annex 1); most of them held at least a college degree or were students. Among those with lower levels of education, both sentiments (e.g. approval/disapproval of Europe; belonging/non-belonging to Europe) were almost equally represented. In short, nationality, residence, gender, and education may have affected some narrations and views on Europe, the ‘European’, and belonging, but were neither the most decisive nor the most conclusive factors in constructing interviewees’ views. However, age proved significant for constructing specific narratives and notions of belonging (see Chapter 7). We divided our data into three age groups: (1) older visitors (aged 66+), (2) middle-aged visitors (36–65), and (3) young visitors (aged 18–35). With a few exceptions, the visitors’ responses on
The visitors belonging to the older generation most frequently referred to peace as the most important motive for sensing and working towards European belonging. As many of them still remembered the destruction and the process of rebuilding society and infrastructure in the decades immediately following World War II, they often claimed to have a personal interest in belonging to Europe for maintaining peace and developing closer collaboration between Europeans.
When I was born and a child during the war, I witnessed the bombings, and if I count back as a historian how many peace gaps were there between each war, then I have to say that Germany, we, never did better, based on this development.
This group of visitors often stressed that people across different European states shared a common vision of creating peace and sustainable development. The visitors explained that they personally believed in and were convinced of the particularly political and economic necessity of the European project, which remained a legitimate way of providing more opportunities and creating a peaceful stability despite the cultural differences and the problems between European nation states. For instance, an older Italian man argued that “at the political level, it’s important to try to reason because divisions are never good for anyone and this is what we learn from history” (VS1/10). Likewise, a French visitor to the Franz Liszt Academy of Music spoke of Europe as a “communed continent, a communauté” making it possible “to build something together, in order to remove the conflict and also in order to be more powerful against the other economic systems”. He continued that when he was young “we were really into it, and now, personally, I’m surprised by the discussion and so on, and including my children” who seemed to be more critical towards belonging to EUrope (VS5/5).
While the experience of mobility was less of a personally decisive factor in their sense of belonging to Europe, the older generation recognized and highlighted mobility as a decisive factor in creating opportunities for younger people to share ideas and practices and to develop a sense of commonality.
- –It’s a mixture of all the people, all these students who go and study in Spain, go on exchanges, the Erasmus programme, and all that.
- –There is a lot of exchange now.
- –There is a lot of exchange…
- –When you see the young people…
- –…at university level and all that. It’s very good.
We are nevertheless anchored in our language, our heritage as well, everything that represents culture, so well… what’s more European for me is the currency. It’s this freedom now… in any case I feel as I do, having known the franc. […] Even if you go over the German or English border, or if you go to other countries, the Euro is accepted and exchanged anyway, but indeed it’s a great freedom, additionally to the freedom of movement.
The group of middle-aged visitors did not witness the reconstruction of states after World War II, but their generation was familiar with the European integration process (e.g. the introduction of a common currency) and their countries becoming part of the European Community and/or the EU. They grew up in a time when the EU focused its efforts on expanding its ideas and policies in the member states and created the motto ‘united in diversity’ to bridge cultural and national gaps. While visitors in this age group shared memories of the transformation from national currencies to the Euro, which for some
Well, I think the European identity is essentially nourished by this diversity. I mean that we have different regions with different traditions, languages, foods, clothing, whatever, and that it combines this diversity. […] Well, I think it [European identity] can only develop for real if everyone had a second, I mean for the most of us a second, additional official language, and nowadays that’s only English.
As a result, many visitors in this age group were skeptical about the possibility of constructing European belonging as, in the words of a Dutch man, “the interests in southern Italy are very different from the interests of northern Norway, just to give an example. The distances are too big” (VS3/12).
I grew up with the Euro, I mean. I think I was like eight, when we got the Euro starter kit and we were all standing around the kitchen like “oooh”. Yeah, but having the Euro, being able to travel, being part of the Schengen
zone, never needing a visa, being able to do Erasmus, these are things that come very natural to me, and therefore I would always intuitively say that I’m European without having to reflect hard or having to adapt to new circumstances. I just grew up in this environment, so it’s part of who I am and how I perceive my environment.
Visitors belonging to this younger age group often referred to bottom-up experiences of being European through participating in longer exchanges and mobility (e.g. the Erasmus Programme), which influenced their perception of Europe and their emphasis on sharing commonalities in Europe despite observing and experiencing cultural differences. Similarly, they did not think about belonging in the same national categories as middle-aged interviewees, tied with language, territory, or nationality. As one young Belgian interviewee explained, “Let’s say that we stay human, no matter what happens. As for the rest, it varies” (VS9/11).
Young visitors often referred to common values when discussing Europe, the ‘European’, and belonging to Europe. As a young Italian student (VS1/11) at the Alcide de Gasperi House Museum explained, Europe constituted “[d]iversity of culture and the respect of culture, liberty, democracy. Differences from a cultural point of view and in particular the respect of other cultures, other people, other nations”. However, for the visitors in the youngest age group, values were not the most dominant aspect of their notions of and relations to Europe. References to values were frequently linked to concrete political provisions and actions – like the Schengen area or the Eurozone – that contributed to constructing a taken-for-granted Europeanness among many of the younger visitors. However, for some, Europeanness was not an individual choice but something they had inherited by birth, as a young French student put it: “Yes [I feel European], after all, we were born in Europe” (VS10/10). Among these interviewees, the conflation between Europe and the EU became obvious. When asked whether and why they felt European, a young Austrian couple (he was a carpenter, she a student), simply answered: “Because I was born here (VS2/15); Yes” (VS2/14). To a certain degree, such answers show how Europeanness may be commonly perceived through contemporariness – as a sense of belonging shaped by interaction with people in the present and in relation to dominant discourses (see Chapters 4 and 5).
The conception of a ‘day-to-day European reality’ or the experience of Europe as a ‘normal entity’, as revealed in the answers of the youngest age group, is the key aspect of a ‘Europe of people’. This conception is formed by the social, economic, and political benefits of EU integration for the individual. Drawing on Billig’s (1995) concept of ‘banal nationalism’, Cram (2009, 110, 114; 2012, 83)
6 Conclusions: United in Plural Europes
According to some scholars (Mummendey and Waldzus 2004, 69), a sense of belonging to Europe may increase commonality and tolerance between Europeans at different levels. The fact that people from outside Europe perceive Europeans as somehow similar and representing one entity, despite their cultural and historical differences, facilitates the construction of a shared sense of belonging to Europe. As our study highlights, there are several ‘Europes’ depending on who you ask, and it is therefore important to consider in which contexts these ‘Europes’ occur and are constructed. At the same time, the concept of Europe is often perceived as vague. In our data, the visitors both from EU and non-EU countries wondered whether the concept referred to a geographical (the continent) or a political and economic entity (the EU), whether Europe had to be understood in cultural terms (referring to the experience and knowledge of historical, cultural, and linguistic diversity), or whether Europe was defined by their personal experiences. When engaging with the politics of belonging of the EHL, Europe, the EU, European identity (least by the fact of EU citizenry), and European cultural heritage all seemed to become intermingled and intertwined.
Visitors referred to cultural diversity as a defining feature of Europe in almost all interviews. The EU motto ‘united in diversity’ hence described the
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