Building Bridges over Troubled Waters

Seamus Montgomery

doi:10.3167/ajec.2021.300108

Abstract

This Forum contribution presents fragmented accounts of historical narratives collected while conducting ethnographic fieldwork among civil servants in and around the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium. It focuses on the roles that heritage-making practices play in articulating European identity and belonging within these institutional spaces. In the ongoing debates over ‘bridges’ and ‘walls’, Commission officials advocate building the former and tearing down the latter. The European heritage narratives they enact tell the story of a supranational community formed from the expansion of external borders and the elimination of internal ones. Through the transcendence of borders, both physical and cognitive, geographic distances and social differences are made increasingly irrelevant. Their efforts in this regard are nonetheless hindered by futurist temporalities that orient Europeanness in opposition to the past.

Highlights

This Forum contribution presents fragmented accounts of historical narratives collected while conducting ethnographic fieldwork among civil servants in and around the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium
Bridge builders are the ‘anywheres’ or ‘nowheres’ (May 2016), ‘whose hearts lie in Paris or London, whose money is in New York or Cyprus, and whose loyalty is to Brussels’ (Krastev 2017: 56)
This Forum contribution analyses certain ways in which civil servants working in the European Commission position themselves in these debates while invoking a shared supranational European heritage

Summary

Introduction

This Forum contribution presents fragmented accounts of historical narratives collected while conducting ethnographic fieldwork among civil servants in and around the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium. European Commission, EU integration, heritage-making, temporality, Brussels The social bubble is a professional and epistemic community of foreigners who understand their disinclination towards national borders as a direct consequence of working to foster cultural exchange on a European scale.

Results

Conclusion