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

Abstract

Concerned about the EU's apparent lack of cultural legitimacy, EU institutions have increasingly engaged in the transnational politics of history to enhance European identity and foster EU legitimacy. The House of European History museum project in Brussels marks a high point in the European Parliament's history politics. Based on document analysis and interviews, an analysis of the project's origins and evolution highlights the narrow limits of cultural engineering from above by EU institutions, however. The constraining dissensus in EU politics has forced the European Parliament to rely entirely on the curators and professional historians to legitimize its museum as one that conforms to prevailing curatorial and historical standards. As a result, the first permanent exhibition differs markedly from the original plan. Its narrative has become East Europeanized and the history of European integration proper has been marginalized.

Into the Contact Zones of Heritage Diplomacy: Local Realities, Transnational Themes and International Expectations

“…As Kaiser (2017) argues in his analysis of the HEH project, and the querelles it fomented with Eastern European governments, when we look at the prevailing narratives displayed, we see in fact how the potential of the HEH was sacrificed by the 'core' European states who may have, seen cultural policy and history politics as a weak field of little material significanceand in this sense as a suitable playground for Eastern European history politics activism that could help deflect criticism on the EU's periphery of its prevailing informal power relations. (Kaiser 2017) This indicates how heritage can be instrumentalised in broader power relationships; we must be wary that culture in general remains a sideline of European power, perhaps one that may be used to distract from broader inequities within the European project. In this respect then, we need to scrutinize whether the EYCH's value as a tool for charismatic heritage diplomacy may diminish its promise as an instrument of social change.…”

European unification as lived memory: Shared and diverse representations in textbooks of six countries

“…For example, EU citizenship is generally discussed less than agricultural or security policy. The narrative thus remains rather abstract and elite-driven-it does not serve as a moral charter and may not be the most powerful narrative to legitimate the EU in the eyes of textbook readers (e.g., Kaiser, 2016Kaiser, , 2017.…”

Whither Politics, Whither Memory?

“…Eventually, this historical narrative -or variations of it -has been embraced at the level of transnational European institutions such as the EU and the Council of Europe (Neumeyer 2019). It is, for example, the narrative proposed by the House of European History in Brussels, the EU-funded museum that opened in 2017, which caused Wolfram Kaiser (2017) to speak about the 'East Europeanization' of the project and of its historical representations of the Second World War and the Cold War. 6 Memory discourses about communism interpreted as the embodiment of evil, discourses constantly (re-)emphasizing the need to break with the past, have been deployed in order to delegitimize attempts to critically engage with contemporary neoliberal policies and their attendant body of thought, the latter constituting the main paradigm informing the post-1989 social, economic and political evolutions in the region (Chelcea & Druță; see also Appel & Orenstein; Mark; Ther).…”