Constructing social Europe through European cultural heritage

Sigrid Kaasik-Krogerus,Viktorija L.A Čeginskas,Katja Mäkinen,Tuuli Lähdesmäki

doi:10.1080/14616696.2021.1913508

Sigrid Kaasik-Krogerus, Viktorija L.A Čeginskas + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2021.1913508

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Abstract

ABSTRACT The political and economic crises of the recent decades as well as the new changes brought on by globalization and digitalization have contributed to exacerbate social inequalities and injustice and revealed different social realities in Europe. The EU increasingly deals with social issues in its cultural and heritage policy. In this article, we explore the construction of this social dimension and advance the concept of ‘social Europe’ by exploring its cultural aspect based on our analysis of a recent EU heritage action, the European Heritage Label. In this action, the narrations of the European past and the attempts to foster common cultural heritage in Europe function as building blocks to create Europe as an intertwined cultural and social entity and to socialize a new generation of European citizens. We scrutinize the European Heritage Label and its notion of heritage from two perspectives. First, we analyse how the selection reports of these heritage sites construct a notion of social Europe. Second, we examine how visitors to these sites construct social Europe in their qualitative interviews. Key elements in this construction are narratives related to various values, mobility, and diversity.

Highlights

Despite the increasing body of literature on the European Union’s (EU) cultural and heritage policies, the scholarship still lacks theoretical discussions and empirical analyses on the social dimension of these policies
We explore the construction of the social dimension of Europe and advance the concept of ‘social Europe’ by emphasizing its
Our analysis indicates that a notion of social Europe is both explicitly and implicitly constituted in the selection reports in relation to areas like health care, housing, employment, and poverty

Summary

Introduction

In the awards of 2017 and 2019, several designated sites are associated with peace, such as Javorca Church and its cultural landscape, the Former Natzweiler concentration camp and its satellite camps, the Dohány Street Synagogue Complex, Kynžvart Chateau – Place of diplomatic meetings from the nineteenth century, ‘Zdravljica’ – the Message of the European Spring of Nations, a poem written in 1848, the Lieu de Mémoire au Chambonsur-Lignon, and the Site of Remembrance in Łambinowice Their common narrative is that reconciliation and peaceful co-existence have the potential to overcome the destruction of war and hostility and create space for solidarity to grow: after shared experiences of suffering, new wars can be prevented together through social justice, equality, and welfare. This raises the issues of whose mobility, whose values, and whose (and ‘how much’) diversity are fundamental to the social dimension of Europe

Concluding discussion

Notes on contributors