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.

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Whether stemming from rising inequality, economic stagnation, or technological disruption, global processes of transformation are changing European societies. With distrust in EU institutions at an all-time low, a perceived absence of a European demos or polity is attributed in part to the nonexistence of a European public square, a forum for direct communication between EU institutions and EU citizens. So-called ‘hearts and minds strategies’, such as Citizens’ Dialogues and the European Citizens’ Initiative, aim to go beyond the rhetorics of convergence criteria, stability mechanisms, and bailout packages that dominate weekly news cycles. In contrast with liberalist discourses of idealisation and universalisation, a reactionary populism fetishises a return to an age when fiscal and migration policy were the sole province of national capitals. This paper critically analyses discourses surrounding ‘dialogue’ and ‘better communication’ inside the European Commission in Brussels, drawn from extensive ethnographic fieldwork carried out within its office spaces. Through participant-observation and in-person, semi-structured interviewing with civil servants, it explores the ways in which they seek to fill the dialogical spaces currently occupied by populist voices in order to reaffirm the legitimacy underpinning the existence of the EU and of a supranational, imagined community of Europeans who identify with and belong to it. Its findings suggest that the achievement of ‘better communication’ with citizens by the European Commission is made all the more intractable by its struggle to define an institutional European identity that is inclusive, coherent, persuasive and distinct.