From Great Men to Ordinary Citizens? The Biographical Approach to Narrating European Integration in Museums

Abstract

The history of European integration is not easy to tell – in books or, for that matter, in museums. Most importantly, it appears to lack drama. This lack of drama creates a dilemma for museum practitioners who wish to tell stories about the contemporary history of Europe as shared history. In these circumstances, one prominent way of telling stories about European integration history in museums, and the focus of this article, is the biographical approach. Drawing upon research in all of the museums mentioned in this article and many more, and some 60 interviews with museum practitioners from across Europe, this article first discusses three biographical approaches to narrating European integration history in museums. It proceeds to draw out general conclusions about the prospects of mainstreaming European integration in history museums, and about the particular opportunities and pitfalls of the biographical approach and its different varieties

One narrative or several? Politics, cultural elites, and citizens in constructing a ‘New Narrative for Europe’

“…Their varied narratives have drawn on the idea of an allegedly unified medieval Occidental Europe or the Renaissance as the breakthrough of European values. They have sometimes presented the time between 1914 and 1945 as a European 'civil war', which was followed by the golden age of European integration inspired by the 'founding fathers' (Kaiser, 2011). The EU regularly draws on the 'founding fathers' trope in its own self-representation (Kølvraa, 2010;Joly, 2007).…”

“…all potentially controversial references that have featured in more recent debates about European remembrance and the EU. These include, for example, the notion of an allegedly unified (Christian-Catholic) medieval Europe; the importance of the Holocaust(Littoz- Monnet, 2013); the idea of the founding fathers(Kaiser 2011), which the author may have regarded as too closely associated with the continental Western European post-war foundation myth; and demands by East-Central European memory entrepreneurs to prioritize remembrance of Stalinist and communist crimes(Neumeyer, 2015; see also Radonic in this issue). Moreover, in line with a recent trend in European memory politics and museum practice(Kaiser et al, 2014) the declaration studiously avoids any reference to perpetrators and their nationality.…”

Limits of Cultural Engineering: Actors and Narratives in the European Parliament's House of European History Project

“…Moreover, the exhibition largely failed to contextualize post‐war ‘core Europe’ integration in the present‐day EU within the Cold War and decolonisation. Its narrative method drew on the combined strategies of personalisation and personification (Kaiser, ). The first room sought to personalize the origins of ‘core Europe’.…”

A Shape-Shifting Creature Dissected: Political Representations of Jean Monnet in European Studies

“…Peterson and Hellström (2003), Kaiser (2011) and Kølvraa (2010Kølvraa ( , 2012aKølvraa ( , 2012b have shown that the EU is actually in the process of building such a shrine for its founding fathers (the House of European History being merely the latest and the most literal example). Furthermore, the European politics of heroes is publicly supported by media powerhouses like the BBC, which aired a romanticized radio play on Monnet in 2011, and by influential public intellectuals like Umberto Eco (2013), who deems Monnet a suitable candidate for the role of European Asterix, a hero capable of seducing the European masses.…”

“…Official EU attempts to construct, popularize, and exploit the heroic narrative of Europe's founding fathers have been unmasked, dissected, and classified alongside other symbols manufactured as part of EU's identity politics (Shore, 2000;Kaiser, 2011;Peterson and Hellström, 2003;Kølvraa, 2010Kølvraa, , 2012aKølvraa, , 2012b. Ever since the Community abandoned neo-functionalist autopilot mode and became active in the politics of memory, a heroic image of Monnet has posited him as the "lynchpin of [the] European symbolic universe" (Kølvraa, 2012b, p. 83).…”