Exhibiting Europe in Museums: Transnational Networks, Collections, Narratives, and Representations 9781782382911

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Exhibiting Europe in Museums

Museums and Collections Editors Mary Bouquet, University College Utrecht, and Howard Morphy, The Australian National University, Canberra Editorial Advisory Board Chris Gosden, University of Oxford Corinne Kratz, Emory University, Atlanta Susan Legêne, VU University Amsterdam Sharon Macdonald, The University of Manchester Anthony Shelton, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver Paul Tapsell, University of Otago, Dunedin As houses of memory and sources of information about the world, museums function as a dynamic interface between past, present and future. Museum collections are increasingly being recognized as material archives of human creativity and as invaluable resources for interdisciplinary research. Museums provide powerful forums for the expression of ideas and are central to the production of public culture: they may inspire the imagination, generate heated emotions and express conflicting values in their material form and histories. This series explores the potential of museum collections to transform our knowledge of the world, and for exhibitions to influence the way in which we view and inhabit that world. It offers essential reading for those involved in all aspects of the museum sphere: curators, researchers, collectors, students and the visiting public. Volume 1.  The Future of Indigenous Museums: Perspectives from the Southwest Pacific. Edited by Nick Stanley Volume 2.  The Long Way Home: The Meaning and Values of Repatriation. Edited by Paul Turnbull and Michael Pickering Volume 3.  The Lives of Chinese Objects: Buddhism, Imperialism and Display. Louise Tythacott Volume 4.  Colonial Collecting and Display: Encounters with Material Culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Claire Wintle Volume 5.  Borders of Belonging: Experiencing History, War and Nation at a Danish Heritage Site. Mads Daugbjerg Volume 6.  Exhibiting Europe in Museums: Transnational Networks, Collections, Narratives and Representations. Wolfram Kaiser, Stefan Krankenhagen and Kerstin Poehls Volume 7.  The Enemy on Display: The Second World War in Eastern European Museums. Zuzanna Bogumił, Joanna Wawrzyniak, Tim Buchen, Christian Ganzer and Maria Senina Volume 8.  Museum Websites and Social Media: Issues of Participation, Sustainability, Trust and Diversity. Ana Luisa Sánchez Laws

Exhibiting Europe in Museums Transnational Networks, Collections, Narratives and Representations

W K, S K  K P Translated from German

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2014 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2014, 2016 Wolfram Kaiser, Stefan Krankenhagen and Kerstin Poehls First paperback edition published in 2016 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kaiser, Wolfram.    [Europa ausstellen. English]    Exhibiting Europe in museums : transnational networks, collections, narratives and representations / Wolfram Kaiser, Stefan Krankenhagen & Kerstin Poehls ; translated from German.      pages cm.    Includes bibliographical references and index.    ISBN 978-1-78238-290-4 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-78533-260-9 (paperback) — ISBN 978-1-78238-291-1 (ebook)   1. Museum cooperation—Europe. 2. Museums and community—Europe. 3. Culture and globalization—Europe. 4. Europe—Cultural policy. 5. Museum exhibits—Europe. 6. Museum techniques—Europe. I. Krankenhagen, Stefan. II. Poehls, Kerstin. III. Title.   AM40.K3513 2014   069’.5094—dc23 2013041906 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-78238-290-4 hardback ISBN: 978-1-78533-260-6 paperback ISBN: 978-1-78238-291-1 ebook

C Acknowledgements

vi

Abbreviations

vii

Introduction. Exhibiting Europe? Europeanisation as Cultural Practice

1

Chapter 1. Musealising Europe: Compensation, Negotiation and the Conquest of the Future

15

Chapter 2. Governing Europe: State Institutions and European Cultural and Museum Policy

33

Chapter 3. Networking Europe: Societal Actors in the Europeanisation of the Museum Field

52

Chapter 4. Collecting Europe: Strategies and Challenges in Transnational Collection Practice

77

Chapter 5. Narrating Europe: The Story and Stories of European Integration

113

Chapter 6. Crossing Europe: Migration and Mobility in Museal Spaces

154

Conclusion. Exhibiting Europe: The Practice of Europeanisation in Museums

184

Appendix 1. Interviews

197

Appendix 2. Museums and Exhibitions

200

Notes

203

Bibliography

207

Index

231

Figures follow page 112.

A O         museums and meetings of museum organizations as well as to interviews with directors and curators in museums, historians on advisory boards and politicians engaged in cultural policy, all of which are listed at the back of the book. This extensive research was made possible by a Research Council of Norway grant (187908/V20) that also gave us valuable time writing the book. In the course of the three-year research project we organized four workshops in Trondheim, Wroclaw, Manchester and Wassenaar/Amsterdam and a final conference in Oslo. At these events we received valuable input from many interlocutors, including museum practitioners who cannot possibly all be listed here, but whom we would like to thank collectively. We are especially grateful to the other members of the project team for their valuable insights: Leonore Scholze-Irrlitz from Humboldt University in Berlin and the two Ph.D. students Steffi de Jong and Torgeir Bangstad from NTNU Trondheim. In the context of the larger research project, Steffi de Jong worked on the role of eyewitnesses in the musealisation of the Second World War and Torgeir Bangstad on the Europeanisation of industrial cultural heritage. Kerstin Poehls would also like to thank Denny Chakkalakal for his support with the literature search and manuscript revision. Finally, we would like to thank Keith Tribe for his assistance in the translation. Portsmouth / Hildesheim / Hamburg, December 2013

A CDU

Christian Democratic Union

CNHI

Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration, Paris

COMCOL

International Committee for Collecting

Commission

European Commission, European Union

DHM

German Historical Museum, Berlin

EC

European Community

ECEC

Entrepreneurial Cultures in European Cities

ECSC

European Coal and Steel Community

EEC

European Economic Community

EMA

European Museum Academy

ENM

European Network of Museums

EP

European Parliament

EPP

European People’s Party

ERIH

European Route of Industrial Heritage

EU

European Union

FRONTEX

European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union

GDR

German Democratic Republic

HEH

House of European History, Brussels

IAMH

International Association of Museums of History

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A

ICMAH

International Committee of Museums and Collections of Archeology and History

ICN

Collections Institute of the Netherlands

ICOM

International Council of Museums

ICOM Europe International Council of Museums Europe ICOMOS IOM INP MEK MEP MNATP

International Council on Monuments and Sites International Organisation for Migration Institut national du patrimoine Museum of European Cultures, Berlin Member of the European Parliament Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires, Paris

MuCEM

Museum of Civilisations from Europe and the Mediterranean, Marseilles

Musée

Musée de l’Europe, Brussels

NATO

North-Atlantic Treaty Organization

NEMO

Network of European Museum Organisations

NGO

Non-governmental Organisation

OMC

Open Method of Coordination

SIS

Schengen Information System

SME

Small and medium-sized enterprises

UMP

Union for a Popular Movement

UNHCR

United Nations High Commission for Refugees

Introduction

E E Europeanisation as Cultural Practice E   . I  J C’ EUROPERA   the Frankfurt Opera House. For this piece the American composer used both familiar and unfamiliar parts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century operas: ‘For 200 years the Europeans have sent us their operas. Now I am returning them all to them’ (Beyst 2005). Indeed, Europera consists of ‘ready-made-music’. Not one phrase was composed by Cage himself. Instead, the different arias were put together by a randomiser, and so robbed of any formal or substantial coherence. Cage aimed to eliminate any context that would make Europera a coherent work. For the listener – at least, a listener with an untrained ear – the experience is no pleasure. The work that Cage had by 1991 extended to five Europeras does, as a whole, sound too disordered and multi-voiced, too broken and complex. But when treated as representing the idea and elaboration of European culture, the piece becomes something different. From Cage’s perspective as an American composer, Europe’s culture seems a national cacophony. Ravel, Liszt, Strauss, all together and all at once – that is Europe’s culture. Cage’s work does not attest to a common, ordered, European cultural identity, but instead to a permanent, self-renewing coincidence, or a conscious lack of focus in the sense used by Edgar Morin (2009 [1990]: 210): ‘Europe is a concept with many faces that cannot be superimposed one upon the other without creating a blurred image’. Europera is an acoustic simile for this blurred image of European culture, which arises anew, and differently, each time the opera is staged. By contrast, some politicians and leading European Union (EU) officials describe Europe’s cultural roots not in terms of coincidence, but as an ordered diversity. They imagine Europe as a space with a common history and experience, whose very extent and expanse supposedly capture the specific nature of the Continent. As Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the

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European Central Bank, put it (2004): ‘Although not all of us are necessarily aware of it, all Europeans exist in a unique cultural atmosphere that is jointly influenced and inspired by the poetry of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Baudelaire among many others. An atmosphere that is also shaped jointly by the thoughts of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Erasmus, Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Kant, Kierkegaard’. This outline of a political ‘unity’ within a cultural ‘diversity’ recruits the poets, writers and philosophers invoked here to supposedly homogeneous national cultures, which when added together form ‘Europe’. Out of the aleatory play of Europeras emerges the ordered and ordering image of a European ‘unity in diversity’, an imagined property of Europe as a legitimation of its present and future political composition. It is in this context that the power – and the impotence – of the concept of Europeanisation begin to unfold. Europeanisation has become in part a politically loaded and normative slogan whose varied and repeated use is largely driven by the EU’s growing influence on socio-economic relations in Europe. Accordingly, in the academic study of Europe the term Europeanisation has been from the outset, and continues to be, a guiding concept of the political sciences. Here we find Europeanisation generally conceived as the outcome of the politics and policies of European institutions and of legislation applied to member states: ‘its predominant connotation stems from the process of Europe’s contemporary political integration: since the early 1990s, Europeanization has been most often associated with new forms of European governance and the adaptation of nation-state legal and administrative procedures to the pressures associated with EU membership’ (Hirschhausen and Patel 2010: 1). Studies of public policy in particular employ the concept of Europeanisation chiefly in terms of a process of convergence through European legislation (Lehmkuhl 2007; Featherstone and Radaelli 2003). The predominant question concerns, above all, the role the EU plays as a catalyst in the process by which the convergent organisation of national formal and informal institutions is furthered through integration (Börzel and Risse 2003). However justified it may be to treat many processes of Europeanisation as outcomes of legislation, administrative decrees and introduction of general norms and EU standards, this perspective nonetheless remains conceptually and analytically limited. This form of Europeanisation seems detached from the long-term historical and cultural influences, which go back far beyond the foundation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951–52, and of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957–58. Public policy research is moreover preoccupied with Brussels as a site of processes of political transformation, barely recognising

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that Europeanisation results from mutual processes of exchange and negotiation that transcend frontiers, sometimes involving regions and member states below the EU level. Ultimately this line of research is fatally fixated on the state, concentrating on the EU and national state institutions, and largely failing to register that Europeanisation is a social phenomenon. It does not take account of the people who have very often given significant impulse to processes of Europeanisation and then carried them onward (Kaiser 2008: 31): ‘not just small decision-making elites, but also European citizens affected by EU politics and involved to differing degrees in the slow process of forming a European society’. In this book we wish to counter the schematic conceptualisation of Europe found in the political sciences by proposing that Europeanisation is a process of making something European, contributing to shifting forms of individual and social identification in Europe. Such a broad understanding of Europeanisation as making something European necessitates an interdisciplinary approach. Our study has had to integrate different processes and influences that go far beyond politics and policy conceptually, methodologically and analytically. We therefore need to properly account for both the state and the social and individual actors involved in the various processes of Europeanisation. These different actors not only respond to the pressure of cultural conformity arising from the political and economic integration of the EU (Caporaso, Cowles and Risse 2001) but also act on their own initiative, driving the process of Europeanisation on, modifying it or hindering it. Our consideration of the processes that make Europe therefore takes into account the interweaving of different constructions of Europe, examining the manner in which different actors use and reshape them in the process of Europeanisation. Only in the complex synchronicity of its historical, cultural, social and political relationships does the concept of Europeanisation find its analytical relevance. Europeanisation cannot be considered in isolation from the economic and political integration of Europe since the Second World War any more than it can be entirely identified with this process. In all the forms Europeanisation assumes, there is instead a continuous ‘blending of an “idea of Europe” with the cultural-political project called the EU’ (Poehls 2009: 10). And from this, temporal dislocations necessarily emerge within Europe. Specific to generations, they concern social or individual experiences of Europeanisation. Geographically, they relate to ways everyday experience and institutionalisation connect with Europeanisation. They pertain historically to national, regional and local narratives of memory, and their possible convergence within and through Europe. Culturally, they stem from differing ethnic preconditions for Eu-

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rope; institutionally, they entail the substantive and structural power of European institutions. Hence in this book we conceive and study Europeanisation as a cultural practice that first of all takes place in the context of the economic and political integration of the EU. Secondly, in so doing it brings together conceptions of Europe drawn from the history of ideas, and from culture, society and politics. Thirdly, this process is conducted by very different actors within a broad field of action. Explicitly or implicitly this also includes the articulation of conceptions of a common European historical and cultural space. Europeanisation is a cultural practice, and can be described as such to the extent that the central emphasis of the analysis is the production of a specific European culture and history that underlies the ambivalences and aporia noted above, and that is intended as a general contribution to the creation of new forms of individual and social identification in Europe. This view that making Europe is a cultural practice enables us to introduce Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘field’ into our interdisciplinary approach. Europeanisation happens in a field made up of diverse actors, different contexts and networks of relationships whose (provisional) outcomes are constantly negotiated and culturally produced. Bourdieu’s sociological concept has been widely used, and often overused. But we think that its use here is justified, since it is centred upon the ‘act of construction of the object’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 40) and thus of relevance to our theme – Europe as a product of actors, strategies and actions. The actors involved in Europeanisation do not form a homogeneous group, although they might share some social characteristics. The strategies of Europeanisation are not always directed to Europe as such. It is more usual that they turn on the concept of Europe. The field concept requires an object of investigation. In this book we deal with processes of Europeanisation occurring in museums, exhibitions and collections. In this way we develop an applied concept of both contemporary Europeanisation and an ongoing process of musealisation (putting something in a museum context): two concepts, distinct but very much reacting to each other. Our initial question is as follows: what happens when the unfocused image of European history and culture, ambivalently charged by the concept and processes of Europeanisation, encounters the museum as an ‘identity factory’ (Korff and Roth 1990a)? We are interested in the extent to which processes of Europeanisation currently taking shape in different social spheres, and with different degrees of intensity, are reflected in exhibitions, influence the planning of new museums or transform their collections; which objects are selected to represent which Euro-

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pean history, and how these then circulate; what master narratives of the history of integration are developed and then compete for attention with each other and with existing national and regional narratives; and how the discursive and material boundaries of ‘Europe’ are defined through museal representation. To do this our analysis of contemporary tendencies of Europeanisation must necessarily direct itself to specific museums. The museums, exhibitions and collections described and analysed in this book are overwhelmingly historical – whether national, regional or local – and ethnographic or sociocultural in character. We see the treatment of European motives and narratives in these kinds of museums as more obvious than in, for instance, those devoted to art and technology, since historical or local anthropological museums are drawn necessarily into a definition of the conception of nationality (or regionality, or locality) that underpins these museums’ own history and present. Museums devoted to history, cultural history and ethnography were and are now platforms of national self-representation. This is a quite contemporary issue. Klas Grinell (2010: 178), curator of the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, has drawn attention to the way in which very many nationalist projects are being re-evaluated, and museums themselves possess very few all-embracing representational powers, thanks to the growing ethnic and cultural diversity of society. Our research is based on a wide-ranging analysis of relevant literature from the social sciences, contemporary history and cultural and museum studies, supplemented by a selective media analysis of the planned Europe museums, which are reviewed in chapter 1. In addition we visited and analysed a total of ninety-five relevant museums and exhibitions in twenty European countries. Most of this work was focused upon Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Great Britain and Norway; but we also included institutions in Northern and Central Europe (Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Austria and Switzerland), South-western Europe (Spain) and South-eastern Europe (Slovenia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia, Greece and Turkey). In these museums and other institutions we conducted semi-structured interviews with museum directors and curators, representatives of various museum organisations, academics (mostly historians) and politicians. This amounted to a total of sixty-eight interviews, listed in an appendix along with a second appendix with the museums and exhibitions visited and analysed for the project. The interviews were directed to general themes in the Europeanisation of the museal field as well as to the particular topics dealt with in the individual chapters. Upon this basis we seek to discuss the ‘silently advancing, but fundamental transformation’ (Mazé 2008: 110) of Europeanisation in the museal

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field. We ask what happens when processes of musealisation run up against processes of Europeanisation. ‘The process of Europeanisation is looking for a museal form’, as Claus Leggewie (cited in Assmann at al. 2008: 78) has stated. Georg Kreis has expanded upon that (2008: 9): ‘That had to come – a museum for Europe!’ That this ‘had to’ come about has to do with political, economic and cultural integration since the Second World War, which formed a challenge to the concepts and categories of the nation state and in part superseded it. This is especially true of the museum, an institution central to the public self-representation of European (nation) states. Since the idea of the nation state and that of the museum are closely related both historically and structurally (Anderson 2000 [1983]), it seems only logical that different actors participating in Europeanisation processes would turn to, and seek to instrumentalise, the museum as an ‘identity factory’. But as Susan Pearce (1992: 2) made clear when the Maastricht Treaty was ratified, it is also the museum that reacts to, or is supposed to react to, political and economic integration: ‘As the Europe of the Single Act comes into being, with its new legal, commercial and cultural climate, museums must be in the forefront of interpreting we [sic] Europeans to ourselves’. This declaration does not so much look back on the history of the museum as a product of the European Enlightenment (Nielsen 1993; Pomian 1987) but is instead more of a declaration about the future. And in this book, this is how we understand the museum as a cultural institution – something that can be so varied (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998) – primarily as an arena for the negotiation of future social orders. This perspective enables us to place the processes of Europeanisation and musealisation in a productive analytic relationship. The public position of the institution of the museum has been strengthened by its historically acquired credibility, and also, since the 1980s, by the so-called museum boom (Baur 2010; Towse 2007; Korff 2007b). This has placed the museum in a position from which it gives the impression – or should convey the impression – that it can resolve social problems. Steven Conn (2010: 9) has observed that ‘[museums] have a responsibility to fix the situation’, referring chiefly to those situations in which museums seek to mediate daily politics. Museums, instead of providing a point of reference in changing times to compensate for the losses of industrialisation and modernisation (Marquard 2001; Lübbe 1989), have themselves become actors in change. Processes of Europeanisation influence this transformation in and around the museum; they accelerate it, catalyse it or bypass it. In this book we wish to investigate the reciprocities between the discursive practices of Europeanisation and its materialisation in museums, exhibitions and collections in Europe. Both elements – the analysis of Eu-

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ropeanisation and, more importantly, museal practice – require an interdisciplinary perspective. Museums are complex cultural and aesthetic fields. Gottfried Korff (2007a: ix) is convinced that ‘there is hardly any other field in the cultural and historical sciences which is more internationally networked, or which is more open to public scrutiny, than the activities and theories of museums’. But while regional, national and global perspectives are common in museum studies, especially in works on industry and world exhibitions (Färber 2006; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2006a), study of the link to Europe in the museum has been quite marginal to date. In this spirit we also seek to stimulate greater cooperation among the disciplines involved in the study of Europe and also between these and the work done in museums. This book is intended as both a theoretical and an empirical contribution to this end. Our interdisciplinary approach builds upon existing work and writing in different disciplines, although certain specific limitations apply with respect to our interest in the processes of Europeanisation and of musealisation. The historical sub-discipline of contemporary history can provide some support for understanding the processes of Europeanisation in a transnational and global context. As Jan Palmowski notes (2011: 656f.): ‘It is difficult to see how contemporary history could be written without a clear notion of how the contemporary nation-state and its localities are entangled with outside influences in the spheres of politics, law, commerce, consumer society, finance, communication and the environment’. Up until now contemporary history has contributed little to the study of Europeanisation from this perspective. Comparative historical study in modern history has long addressed itself to the study of self-contained nation and welfare states, making structural comparisons. Only recently has research into the phenomenon of cultural transfer (Espagne 1999) opened modern history to a transnational perspective, though the initial focus was on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Middell 2000; Paulmann 1998). From the very beginning, the history of integration was itself strongly coloured by a normative proximity to ideas of integration and federation, and was moreover financially dependent upon grants from the European Commission and member states such as Luxembourg (Varsori 2010). To this day it receives little attention in research conducted by contemporary historians. But their work has recently opened up a transnational perspective on European integration since 1945 (Kaiser and Meyer 2013; Kaiser and Varsori 2010; Kaiser, Leucht and Rasmussen 2009; Patel 2009). And the broader field of contemporary history features an emerging emphasis upon the divergent spaces of memory across the continent, especially in respect of the twentieth century (Leggewie 2011; Ostow 2008; Jarausch and

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Lindenberger 2007a). This more recent work takes a strong interest in the comparative and cross-border dimensions of the (contemporary) history of Europe as a transnational history (Conway and Patel 2010; Patel 2008). Even if we see political science as linking the phenomenon of Europeanisation too strongly to public policy research, it has nonetheless opened up relevant questions of convergence. Of course, convergence in the cultural practice of the museum can at most be encouraged, given the merely subsidiary competences of the EU in cultural politics (Schwenke 2010). Here European grant programmes can play a role, but this says nothing about the success of such financial promotion (Vos 2011). Ultimately, it is the sociologically inspired political science research that offers conceptual and analytic ideas of interest for our book. This relates above all to research on networks (Kaiser 2009; Sørensen and Torfing 2007), which has also proved very useful for analysing exchange relationships in historical perspective (Kaiser, Leucht and Gehler 2010). These networks often initiate new lines of financial support for projects requiring European cooperation, or major new museal projects. The concept of (transnational) networks is compatible with that of the field of the museum. In our work, the concept of network is applied to cross-border relations of exchange between individual and institutional actors; meanwhile the concept of the museum field emphasises the common, often contested construction of the object ‘Europe’ through individual and institutional actors, and in so doing enables us to question it. Since the mid-1990s, sociology and European ethnology, together with social and cultural anthropology, have discovered processes of Europeanisation and made it their own research field. In so doing they have reacted to the formulation and practice of a European politics of culture and identity, noticeable since the 1970s and reinforced since 1992, when the Maastricht Treaty put an end to the external presentation of the EU as nothing but an economic and political project and shifted the emphasis to an ‘unprecedented and successful social and cultural project’ (European Commission 2007) that could look back on a series of cultural-political initiatives, conceived in the broadest sense. Since Maastricht the EU has pursued a cultural policy whose central building block is the claim that there is one shared European culture and history. The source of this unity, from which Europe draws its identity, is allegedly the variety of cultures. The political snares in such a construction of European cultural unity, although they have been thoroughly criticised by cultural studies and anthropology, are there for all to see in the plans for national museums that countries such as France, the Netherlands and Poland have developed or are now developing. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy conceived

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his idea of a national historical museum in response to the French crisis of identity that he and others have diagnosed; the purpose of the new museum was ‘to reinforce national identity’ (Chrisafis 2010). In 2004 the Dutch social democrat Jan Marijnissen argued similarly when suggesting the foundation of a national historical museum for the Netherlands as a counterweight to the loss of social cohesion (Interview Byvanck). In his analysis of the cultural-political and symbolic interventions in Europe since the 1980s, Cris Shore (2000: 50–53) identified three particular features of the new European iconography. Firstly, it is teleological and thus indebted to the historical imagination of the nineteenth century. Secondly, the symbols of the new Europe simply replicate those of the old nation-states. Thirdly, they lead into a paradoxical situation in regard to the construction of a European cultural unity, which both already exists and has yet to be created. Susan Sontag (cited in Morley and Robins, 1995: 88) once said of this process that it involved ‘the Europeanisation not of the rest of the world, but … of Europe itself ’, in which a common European culture and history becomes both condition and aspirational result of EU cultural policy. In addition to the features noted by Shore, there is the danger of implicitly excluding specific ethnic and social groups (such as migrants or religious minorities) through a possibly ethnocentric conception of European history and identity (Balibar 2005; Eder 2001; Stråth 2000; Bhabha 1998). ‘Unity in diversity’ – the EU motto reflects the circularity of the European self-image. Whoever today writes about, exhibits or analyses Europe deals at the same time with the EU. The contemporary construction of homo europaeus (Schmale 2001) in this sense cannot be evaded, as cultural studies and anthropology have lucidly demonstrated. Since the concept of Europeanisation has to operate with historical ideas and historical images of Europe to legitimise the current processes of future transformation of the political and economic organisation of member states, the reasons, course and aims of Europeanisation cannot be separated analytically (Beck and Scholze-Irrlitz 2010: 5, italics in original): ‘Homo europaeus here turns out to be a self-creating archetype, an imaginary construct, presupposing model European discourse, politics and knowledge while at the same time being impelled by these’. John Borneman and Nick Fowler (1997) developed their analysis around this circularity, and an extensive literature in cultural studies and anthropology has emerged in response. It firstly investigates the processes of Europeanisation in the form of comparative regional studies in the context of European integration (Kaschuba 2008; Johler and Mitterauer 2002; Holmes 2000). Secondly, it goes on to adopt the analytic perspective em-

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ployed in studies of everyday and consumer culture, examining how the processes of Europeanisation can be experienced in different social spaces and contexts (Hess 2005; Murphy-Lejeune 2002). Thirdly, it places the political field of the EU itself at the centre of its analysis, investigating for example European elites (Georgakakis and Weisbein 2010; Seidel 2010a; Poehls 2009). Accompanying these developments, sociologists, together with sociologically inclined political scientists, have increasingly taken interest in the production and development of European identity (Risse 2010; Fligstein 2008; Favell 2005). Using a metaphor coined by Thomas Risse (2003: 491), this can be conceived as more of a ‘marble cake’ than a congruent unity: ‘Europe and the EU become enmeshed with given national identities leading to rather diverging identity outcomes’. Recent research on European identity has a stronger constructivist perspective, which from our point of view is an advantage. This perspective no longer unilaterally presents the material advantages of integration as the catalyst for the process of identification with ‘Europe’ or the EU but is open to the influence of cultural factors. Sharon Macdonald (2003) and Rosmarie Beier-de Haan (2005) have discussed the concept of transnational identity as a way to connect Europeanisation in the context of late (or second) modernity with current museal forms of presentation. They begin with the question of how (historical) museums react to the challenge presented by the emergence and development of transnational spaces. Whereas Beier-de Haan (2005: 92) leaves unanswered the question ‘what could and should be the categories through which a transnational European perspective can prove itself in the future?’, Macdonald draws attention to the dangers of new ideologies of identity, whether migratory (Clifford 1997), multiple (Turkle 1997) or hybrid (Modood and Werbner 1997): ‘One problem that has been is that the notion of “hybridity” (as with related conceptions such as “syncretic” or “creolised” identities) seem to presuppose pre-existing “pure” or “noncreolised” cultures’ (Macdonald 2003: 9). Ayse Caglar (1997: 180) has proposed a possible methodological way to keep from constructing new or old myths via their deconstruction, by adopting a clear apprehension of the museal object: ‘By plotting the networks of interconnected practices surrounding objects, and the sentiments, desires and images these practices evoke, we can avoid the need to define collectivities in advance’. In studying the materialisation of Europe in museums, exhibitions and collections, this practice could well sharpen our understanding of the cultural processes of Europeanisation. Sociology, anthropology and ethnology are central to the attempt to make Europeanisation intelligible as a reciprocally instituted demarca-

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tion between local, national, transnational-European and extra-European spaces and practices, self-descriptions and descriptions by others. Analysis of migratory processes is especially important for cultural and social anthropology and European ethnology, since migration as a political practice highlights the extent to which Europe needs an ‘outside’, an ‘other’ to define and conceive itself (Hall 2003). At the same time, migration – understood as an ideal-typical shorthand and independent of whether it is migration within Europe or migration to Europe – represents a model for the process of European integration. Ideally, migration creates what is required of homo europaeus: mobility, interculturality and changing identities. The present book, chapter by chapter, crosses the above research perspectives on Europeanisation and musealisation. We expect the concepts and literature drawn upon in the following chapters – from political science, sociology and anthropology to contemporary history and cultural and museum studies – will help clarify present processes of Europeanisation in the field of museums. Chapter 1, ‘Musealising Europe’, on the concept and history of musealisation, devotes special attention to the elevation and organisation of institutions in the course of nineteenth-century national integration processes. We consider three planned museum projects (only some of which have been partially realised) that seek to explicitly represent the history of European integration – the Musée de l’Europe in Brussels, Bauhaus Europa in Aachen, and the Museum of Civilisations from Europe and the Mediterranean in Marseilles – and examine the extent to which Europe as a museal theme is used to productively sidestep nationalist, essentialist and homogeneous imputations. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the Europeanisation of the museum field as a central precondition for Europeanisation as cultural practice. Chapter 2, ‘Governing Europe’, investigates how various state actors influence European cultural and museum policy. In contrast with social science research’s strong orientation to Brussels, this chapter makes clear that various EU institutions, such as the European Commission and the European Parliament, operate with different ideal models and pursue different strategies of cultural integration. Institutions of member states and sub-national regions also play an important role in the Europeanisation of the museum field. Chapter 3, ‘Networking Europe’, again extends our survey of actors contributing to the Europeanisation of the museum field. We argue that existing research has focused excessively on the state. Using different examples, we show that societal actors launch many initiatives that contribute to long-term cultural integration. These are not always dependent on

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state support, though they may benefit from it in different ways. In this chapter we investigate the role of nongovernmental organisations, historians, museum practitioners, museum organisations, many structural and functionally very diverse networks, and cultural entrepreneurs in the Europeanisation of the museum field. Chapter 4, ‘Collecting Europe’, links Europeanisation as a cultural practice to current collection strategies in cultural, historical and ethnological museums. Whatever shape Europe might assume, it has to be collected before it can be exhibited. Right at the beginning of the chapter, we show that there currently is no ‘European’ collection policy. Hence we direct our analysis to the manner in which Europeanisation as a cultural practice intervenes in arguments over the status and treatment of objects and collections. Using the concept of relational objects, this chapter covers all the processes of imputation and interpretation that, by making it possible today for museal objects to represent moments of participation, movement and exchange, become templates for Europeanisation processes. In this chapter the idea and conception of relational objects lead to an extension of the notion of actor: borrowing from Bruno Latour (2001), we treat museal objects as acting subjects in a network that produces meaning. The lack of canonised European objects makes it difficult for museums, exhibitions and collections to narrate European history up to the present as a common history. Chapter 5, ‘Narrating Europe’, considers the form European narratives take in new grand projects such as the House of European History (HEH) in Brussels, and the ways diverse aspects of the history of European integration are inscribed in museums and exhibitions. In this chapter we demonstrate that a museal narrative of European history is academically defensible, and plausible from the perspective of the visitor, only if new master narratives are eschewed. Grand projects such as the HEH have in any case only a limited scope. Much more important for Europeanisation as a cultural practice of historical narration is the selection of those aspects of European history that can serve as a common history: how they are selected, and how they are inscribed in national, regional and local museal narratives. A variety of options come into play here, among them a resort to biography: the histories of so-called founding fathers, or citizens of the EU who are still alive, recounting their transnational experiences. Chapter 6, ‘Crossing Europe’, turns to an issue that marks presentday European societies, involves a crucial EU policy field and represents a significant trend in the European museal field. Exhibitions devoted to migration connect migration to mobility in the ongoing process of Europeanisation. In this respect, the exhibitions we deal with do not necessarily

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make any explicit connection to Europe and the EU, but they all address the relationship between the physical and geopolitical borders of Europe and the symbolic differentiation of one’s own from the foreign. Migration here appears to be less an exception than a social constant. A Europe of nation states based upon the idea and norms of settlement seems of dubious merit. The exhibitions on migration offer an image of Europe that consists precisely in the wiping away of older ideas of Europe and the symbolic geography of the continent. The conclusion brings the volume’s central aspects and arguments together, taking up the questions prompted by the research and suggesting possible issues for further work. Quite fundamental to this is that we, as authors of this book, count our own transnational experiences as part of the processes of Europeanisation that we analyse. Our book is itself a product of Europeanisation as a cultural and interdisciplinary practice. Because processes of musealisation and of national integration are historically so closely connected, and because at present many actors use European cultural and museum policy as a means to strengthen the legitimacy of the EU, it seems important to us to maintain a clear view of the normative pitfalls of our perspective on Europe in the museum.

Chapter 1

M E Compensation, Negotiation and the Conquest of the Future O M (: )      ‘   that the modern concept of progress and the first museums’ were formed. Like Hermann Lübbe (1989), Marquard understands the development of the idea of the museum to be a compensatory history. The turn to the old, that is, to the observation of past times, materials and practices, is a form of compensation for the loss of a lifeworld overwhelmed by industrialisation, economisation and the progressive acceleration of life. According to Lübbe (1989: 25), the museum is, ‘to begin with, a means of salvaging cultural remnants from processes of destruction, a mechanism exposed irreversibly to whatever the present process of reproduction selects out in the process of cultural evolution’. The turn to history in general, and to the museum as its cultural institution in particular, is thus understood as a response to the paradoxes of progress. Hence the institutional history of the modern museum has been embedded within the production of history and historicity since the eighteenth century. As Niklas Luhmann (2000: 131) notes in respect of the museum, ‘one needs institutions of mourning, of the “nevermore”’. In this way musealisation stands revealed as a social process that reaches beyond the museum as an institution (Zacharias 1990; Baudrillard 1983). This is one reason for the continuing actuality of the museum. What was true for German-speaking countries during the 1970s (Lübbe 1989) is confirmed by present-day research that talks of an ‘astonishing rate of growth’ (Korff 2007a: ix) and of a ‘general museum boom’ (Baur 2010) across Europe (Merritt 2008; Macdonald 2006; Towse 2002). For example, the European Group on Museum Statistics has identified almost 20,000 museums in the twenty-seven European states it covers.1 This qual-

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ity of preservation and conservation in museums has remained, right up to the present, one driving force behind their social success, as Simon Knell observes (2004: 11, italics in original): ‘Museums were invented to capture and keep against a background of change, not to change’. Historically speaking, museums played a decisive role in the course of national integration during the nineteenth century because every instance of preservation involves selection. Museums are part of a standard repertoire in the creation of national identity, alongside memorials, monumental architecture and national contributions to world exhibitions. Their narratives are intended to form a collective memory, reinforcing the social and political sinews of nation and state building. As Sharon Macdonald (2003: 3) writes: ‘Museums, already established as sites for the bringing together of significant “cultural objects”, were readily appropriated as “national” expressions of identity, and of the linked idea of having a history’. Ernest Renan (1994 [1882]) referred to the ‘spiritual principle’ of the nation, and Benedict Anderson (2000 [1983]) has argued that it must be understood as an ‘imagined community’. In these terms it becomes decisive for a nation and its history to be materialised and made actual. Museal collections concretely express the idea that nations possess a common history, and that this history is significant and worth exhibiting. The idea that history is possessed and can be displayed (Kittsteiner 1999) has many implications. According to C.B. Macpherson's analysis of possessive individualism (1964), since the Enlightenment the idea has spread that a free self is primarily a possessing self. A person is thought to be free to the degree that that person is in possession of him- or herself and others, or other things. James Clifford (1994: 259) draws a clear parallel to the act of collection: ‘Macpherson's classical analysis of western “possessive individualism” traces the seventeenth-century emergence of an ideal self as owner: the individual surrounded by accumulated property and goods. The same ideal can hold true for collectivities making and remaking their cultural “selves”’. In the early phases of modern museums, cultural and historical property was laden with national significance and made into a common heritage. Culture and history were condensed into a thing, the museal object (Handler 1988; Pomian 1987; Stewart 1984). This ensured the museum’s preserving and simultaneously canonising function into the twentieth century, as Flora Kaplan (1994: 4) and others (Pearce 1995; von Plessen 1992; Karp and Lavine 1991) have shown: ‘Museums and museum systems are treated as instruments in defining self and nation’. National museums were composed of national collections and at the same time created them, as shown by recent studies of the foundation of European museums in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Knell et al.

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2010; Raffler 2007). The collection and display of these nationally defined objects operated as a catalyst for identity and an apparent civilising superiority (Baur 2010: 26): ‘that which had at one time documented the power and passion for collecting on the part of princes now became evidence for the “inner depths” of the nation’. Hence the prospect of the alien – alien property, alien people and alien objects – was an important factor in the nationalisation of the museal perspective, as is clear from Anderson’s classic study of the function of cultural objects in the processes of nation-building and colonialisation during the nineteenth century. Using the case of British colonial policy in South-east Asia, Anderson (2000 [1983]: 181f., italics in original) highlighted cultural tactics of European rule that were primarily strategies of categorisation and classification: ‘The old sacred sites were to be incorporated into the map of the colony, and their ancient prestige (which if this had disappeared, as it often had, the state would attempt to revive) draped around the mappers. … Museumized this way, they were repositioned as regalia for a secular colonial state’. The concept and process of musealisation can therefore be thought of in two ways. The act of preservation involves a ruling disposition over the object. James Clifford (1994: 265) held that in the course of centuries, this symbolic rule over (alien) culture and history became an expression of Europe’s cultural superiority: ‘The value of exotic objects was their ability to testify to the concrete reality of an earlier stage of human Culture, a common past confirming Europe’s triumphant present’. For example, Berlin’s ethnological collection, created at the end of the nineteenth century, had not a single object from Europe; its director (cited in Laukötter 2005: 200) commented that ‘the “primitive” … was only to be found outside Europe’. This disposition over alien objects expresses a rationalistic human dominion of culture and history. Right up to the present, this works through the scientisation of museal collecting and its techniques of representation (Hooper-Greenhill 1992). This process of musealisation has been summarised by Lynn Maranda (2009: 257) as follows: ‘Musealization, therefore, is undertaken to serve and satisfy knowledge, and the museum is the repository for the knowledge of objects’. Thus equipped with symbolic dominion, the museum is no stranger to the concrete hegemonic practice of subordination. This Janus-faced stance of musealisation is most clearly apparent in the so-called Jewish Central Museum in Prague, whose collection consisted of private valuables and possessions of the murdered Jews of Eastern Europe (Rupnow 2000). This museum, housed between 1942 and 1945 in a deconsecrated synagogue, performed a task no different from

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that of most cultural-historical museums: it was intended as a record of a vanished world, that of East European Judaism. In this case, however, the collectors themselves had murdered this world into oblivion. The museum (also) developed through the process of destruction, as in the nineteenth century, when, as Krzysztof Pomian (2007: 18) has put it, it acquired ‘its objects with the help of the army’. Understood in this way, the museum as a ‘place of modernity’ (Laukötter 2005: 218–27) has, right up to the present, made its way ‘to the centre of … civilized society’ (McClellan 2008: 1). The social success of this bourgeois invention (Fliedl 1996) prompted Jean Baudrillard (1983: 15) to refer in the mid-1980s to the museum as being everywhere now, ‘like a dimension of life itself ’. To have a history has become an individual experience, and history itself has become a commodity produced by the culture industry, weaving through the field of public history among theatrical reenactments of history (Bagnall 2003), a bazaar of contemporary eyewitnesses (de Jong 2012) and popular feedstock for television programmes (Korte and Paletschek 2009; de Groot 2009). Nonetheless, the modern museum has at the same time performed an important function of democratisation (Carrier 2006; McClellan 1994) and popularisation (Moore 1997; Bennett 1995). The latter has led to increasing public participation in the creation of new museums and promoted new discourses imbued with ‘massive moral claims’ and deeply embedded in ‘a governing structure that secures the political correctness of exhibitions’ (Imhof 2008: 60). In the winter of 2009, for example, the German Historical Museum (DHM) in Berlin and Minister of State Bernd Neumann at the German Chancellery, who was also so-called Representative of the Federal Government for Culture, were accused of censorship when a critical explanatory text relating to European immigration policy was revised shortly before the opening of the exhibition Strangers? Images of ‘Others’ in Germany and France since 1871. Critics (Schulz 2009) drew attention to the way this historical museum was developing a service function, becoming dependent on politics. Not only is controversy over the relationship between museums and politics rooted in the structural transformation of the public sphere (Habermas 1962), but since the late 1980s it has also assumed a much greater discursive and politicised presence thanks to the cultural turn in museum curation. Peter Vergo’s New Museology (1989) lent this a programmatic basis, and the ‘politics of museum display’ (Karp and Lavine 1991) has marked academic discussion of the museum as an institution ever since (Baur 2010; Nayar 2006; Message 2006; Beier-de Haan 2005; Preziosi and Farago 2004; Bhatnagar 1999; Macdonald 1998). The prime objec-

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tive of every museum – to collect, conserve, investigate and exhibit objects – lost its innocence at the time of the publication of The New Museology, at the very latest. As Pramod Nayar (2006: 137) wrote: ‘The museum … functions as the space of guardianship and first interpreter. The issue of authority – and of power and the politics of interpretation – is thus never far from the very idea of a museum’. The field of social power within which museums move has become the dominant interpretive framework, first introduced into writing on the theory and praxis of museums by Tony Bennett (1995), drawing on Michel Foucault’s critique of representation (1974). Conn (2010: 4) has properly emphasised that Foucault wrote little about museums, and that the parallels drawn between museums and domination, culture and politics are in some cases overblown: ‘That there is a relationship between culture and politics is a truism, but much of this scholarship makes the two virtually synonymous. They are not’. Especially in the case of history in museums, representation involves an act of legitimation on the part of political and social elites, and is perceived as such (Wahnich, Lášticová and Findor 2008; Pieper 2006; Krankenhagen 2001). More than ever, the museum today is a central site where imagined communities present themselves. It occupies a neuralgic position in the public negotiation of historical and cultural identity, given the increased awareness of the way museums and exhibitions foster identity politics. Moreover, state institutions play a far greater role in the creation of new museums than they did in the nineteenth century (Hartung 2010; Maddison 2004). The museum today occupies a position it had already begun to assume in the nineteenth century as a ‘central power of the cultural economy’ (Kravagna 2001: 7). So far we have deliberately talked of ‘the museum’ in the collective singular. This was not a failure to discriminate between the various types, forms and traditions of museum that perform different functions and thereby lend broad diversity to the museum landscape (Baur 2010; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998); rather, the purpose was to highlight the functional parameters of the museum in the history of ideas. The different impact these parameters had on each museum generated a particular path dependency in the form of a memory trace. ‘The museum’ can hence be conceived as a site in which the social order of modernity is constantly renegotiated under changing conditions. ‘The museum’ secures the visibility of this order. It publicly conveys and represents ideas of culture and knowledge; individuality and identity; past, present and future. ‘The museum’ is thus located at a fracture point in the politics and culture of modernity, whose dialectic shapes these institutions’ strengths and weaknesses.

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Whether or not museums’ impact is exaggerated nowadays, the foundation and legitimation of museums plainly constitute a political forum for reacting to the present that should also point to the future. The compensating function of the museum does not alone explain its sustained prominence as an institution. Today museums react to new structures of education and leisure. They position themselves as learning and social spaces capable, in principle, of responding to the growing heterogeneity of society. They occupy new areas of public space, and are constrained to keep up with an ever-shrinking attention span by introducing popular special exhibitions, designing striking new buildings, or even simply arranging new hours of operation. The current rhetoric and practice of museums has detached itself from the image of an institution oriented to the past and has instead become a catalyst of cultural transformation. Here we are interested less in the reasons for this shift than in its consequences. Although the museum boom has had its casualties (Sola 2004), perceptions of the institution as a whole have altered. The museum has transformed itself into a successful social agent, an abstract ‘model of the twenty-first century museum’, which Simon Knell described, not without irony, (2004: 8) as ‘focused, businesslike, friendly and pluralisticallyfunded, yet preserving its collection and research identity’. Marquard, as already noted, observed that the idea of progress and that of the museum emerged at precisely the same time. Nonetheless, the theory of compensation describes the museum in terms of a search for a lost time and hence as a backward-looking reaction, whereas here we treat the museum as an active arena for the negotiation of current and future social themes. Kurt Imhof (2008: 49, italics in original) sums this up nicely: ‘Museums are as institutions a contemporary instrument for the realisation of the present, but oriented to the conquest of the future’. The idea of a common Europe involves the question of a common conquest of the future, now being posed with increasing political urgency. Today, every museum or exhibition that deals with Europe, and especially with the post-war integration of Europe, contributes to the renegotiation of Europe by both representing and reproducing the historical and current common properties and frontiers of the Continent and of the EU. Krzysztof Pomian (2009: 10) has emphasised that ‘A historian can say what the identity of Europe is in the descriptive sense of the term, a cluster of stable distinct features. … The real controversy, however, lies elsewhere. It concerns identity not in its descriptive but in its prescriptive sense. The debated question is: given who we are, what of our past and our present is worth preserving?’ Pomian treats European identity as a given, although in fact this identity is continuously negotiated, and

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Europe as the EU and its institutions, in its current political form, is deficient in symbolic representative power (Imhof 2008; Schmale 2008). It therefore looks as though those few museums that have sought explicitly to orient themselves to the representation of Europe and its history remain unsuccessful. In the following, three of these projects will be presented: the Musée de l’Europe in Brussels (Musée), the Museum of Civilisations from Europe and the Mediterranean in Marseilles (MuCEM) and the Bauhaus Europa in Aachen. All three have either sought in the past, or still seek, to employ the formula of Europe for differing approaches to the future. In Brussels, Marseilles and Aachen, this formula proved relatively unpersuasive for various reasons. Examining these failed processes of attempted Europeanisation has potential to contribute meaningfully to the study of Europeanisation as a cultural practice.

The Musée de l'Europe: A Teleological Narrative… In 2001 at a conference in Turin, Secretary General of the Musée de l’Europe Benoît Rémiche (quoted in Mazé 2008: 119) stated: ‘We want to be entirely clear about our intention: our aim is to create a museum capable of shaping identity’. The plan for the Brussels Musée, which to date has not actually been realized, had long been the most visible project in the musealisation of the history of Europe. To begin with it was only a general association, founded in 1997, that organized four exhibitions in conjunction with the exhibitor Tempora. The first two, in 2001 and 2006, had clear cultural historical intent, being devoted respectively to the Europe of the nineteenth century and the World’s Fairs (La Belle Europe. Les temps des expositions universelles, 1851–1913) and to European religious diversity (Dieu(x), modes d’emploi). The third exhibition (C’est notre histoire! ) was held in Brussels in 2007–08, and then in Wroclaw in 2009. The fourth exhibition (America – it’s also our history! ) was staged in Brussels in 2010–11. The Musée association was headed by prominent members of the Belgian and EU social and political elites. The founding members included the socialist Karel van Miert, then competition commissioner in the European Commission, and the liberal Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Antoinette Spaak, daughter of one of the so-called founding fathers of today’s EU, Paul-Henri Spaak. The Musée association planned a museum in and for Brussels as Europe’s informal capital city. Rémiche (2001) gave three reasons for the initiative: the absence of interest in shared democratic debate in Europe,

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the limitations of a political Europe confined to the EU framework, and the growing importance of tourism for Brussels. From these aims of the museum’s planners, it was clear that they sought to negotiate the political crises of European integration in a cultural domain and, possibly, compensate them. The funding sources for the association and its exhibitions remained both private and public, with both the Belgian state and the Brussels municipality contributing. The European Commission never itself directly supported this plan for a museum, but Tempora nonetheless applied for support to the EU and in this way gained some EU financing (Interview Benoit). In addition, since 2000 the Musée association has been a member of the European Network of Museums (ENM), in which more than twenty national museums exchange information and plans about themes and forms of exhibitions with a European perspective. The planning of the museum and its exhibitions is coordinated by an academic board headed by the Franco-Polish historian and museum academic Krzysztof Pomian. The Musée association is quite openly pro-European, reflecting the composition of its founding members, its combination of private, national and European funding, the museum network it helped found and the perspective it takes on the history of ideas. The planned museum should become a European ‘place of memory’, as was the case with the exhibition C’est notre histoire! whose opening in Brussels in October 2007 commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Treaties of Rome. The exhibition on the history of integration was intended to form the core of the planned museum. Generally, the museum is conceived as presenting the history of Europe as a widespread process of integration, characterised by both ‘periods of unity’ (centuries of shared religious belief, the humanist epoch and the Enlightenment, and political integration after 1945) and ‘periods of schism’ (the Reformation and religious wars, nationalism, totalitarianism and the world wars).2 The decisive factor, from the standpoint of the curators engaged in planning the prospective museum’s permanent exhibition, is the way in which both positive and negative experiences have furthered the creation of a common culture. According to Pomian, the idea of the cultural unity of Europe has prevailed since the Enlightenment and thus precedes the political and economic integration of Europe in the twentieth century: Moreover, among the lasting results of the second cultural unification was the idea of Europe as a cultural reality, shared since the eighteenth century by a significant part of the elites of a majority of European nations. These elites became more and more convinced that this cultural reality had to be completed by an economic reality, and even a political one. (Pomian 2009: 8)

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Hence the plan for a museum in Brussels presents the history of Europe as a teleological narrative. The roots of a common heritage lie not only in Europe’s common history and humanist tradition, but also in conflict and war, all of which came together in the process of political and economic integration after 1945. The Musée association has been criticised for this essentialist and potentially transfiguring representation of Europe (Kaiser and Krankenhagen 2010; Krankenhagen 2008; Mazé 2008). At the same time, the project’s definition of Europe provides a firm basis for an answer to the question of the nature and identity of the Continent. In contrast to the rhetoric of EU elites, through its exhibitions the Musée association describes and defines which cultural unity is meant, and in what kind of diversity. In this way it develops a master narrative of European history that has long been subject to vigorous criticism in philosophy (Lyotard 1986) and history (Jarausch and Sabrow 2002a; Megill 1995; White 1973). Nonetheless, the fact that the Musée plan and the exhibitions it has staged expose moments in the construction of ‘Europe’ is precisely the attraction of analysing them here. The activities of the founding members and curators, the networks and the partner museums, collections policy and the stock of objects, and not least the exhibitions of the Musée itself – these all become part of a cultural practice of Europeanisation open to academic study. Chapter 5 will deal in greater detail with the way museal representations of the history of Europe reduce the complexity of historical circumstances and so integrate opposing lines of narrative into something accessible to a broader public.

…and Its Failure At the same time, the Musée plan is an example of a failed attempt to represent the history of European integration as one of its internal unification in a museum. The realisation of the Musée project was fatally undermined as of 2007, when the European Parliament (EP) initiated its own project for presenting the history of European integration. The HEH arose upon the initiative of the Christian Democrat Hans-Gert Pöttering, then EP president. Like the Musée, its intention is to promote European identity. Currently planned to open in Brussels in 2015, it partly assumed the role of the Musée, which still does not exist as a museum following the use of the site originally envisaged by the EP for a visitor centre that finally opened in the autumn of 2011. As chapter 3 will show in greater detail, the HEH – a project run by EU political elites – is expressly intended to fill the democratic deficit in the process of integration. An internal note

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circulated in 2008 during the HEH’s planning phase argued that ‘While European integration is praised world-wide as an example of exceptionally successful economic and political advancement … scepticism spreads in all Member States … [and] the historical narrative is missing from the current political discussion’.3 The idea, according to the project’s initiators, is that the history of Europe should help future visitors understand the present state of the integration process and recognise it as their own history. The HEH is modelled on a German institution, the House of History of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn, which also is the outcome of political will. Helmut Kohl instigated its founding when he became chancellor in 1982, and it finally opened in 1994. Underlining the close conceptual connection between the two museums is the fact that the director of the House of History in Bonn, German historian Hans Walter Hütter, served as the first chair of the HEH Committee of Experts. Likewise, the conceptual approach informing the project in Brussels will blend the histories of politics and of everyday life while forming a contemporary historical collection of its own. One of the earliest planning memoranda states that the exhibition should focus upon ‘European history from the First World War to the present day … particular emphasis will be placed on the era of peace Europe has enjoyed since the end of the Second World War’.4 The guidelines the Committee of Experts presented in 2008 for a permanent exhibition, however, were so vague that they conveyed the impression of a merely additive historical narrative. From the influences of ancient Egyptian culture to the accession of Bulgaria and Romania as EU member states in 2007, there was space for everything that either began in Europe or had an influence upon it. The outcome could conceivably be a visual parallel to John Cage’s Europera. Though it has already been called a ‘terrible cacophony’ (Gnauk 2008), it nonetheless will most likely be realised, whereas the Musée plan’s future is unlikely to unfold. The failure of the Musée project does, however, present an interesting form of Europeanisation. Mazé (2008: 119) suggests that the problems that have emerged reveal a ‘gap between the cultural policy of the EU and its member-states on the one hand, and the independent initiative on the part of Museum specialists in seeking to found “European museums” on the other’. The merely subsidiary cultural competences of the EU preclude any intervention in the member states’ sovereignty in this policy field, as shown in chapter 2. All the same, the initiators of the Musée plan had from the outset involved a range of political, national and social actors in Belgium and beyond, and so made a real contribution to processes of Europeanisation.

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At least one other factor in the development of the Musée plan is responsible for its probable failure. In projecting itself to the public (Rubercy 2004; Remiche 2001), and also in its exhibitions, the Musée made wholesale use of the teleological pattern of EU rhetoric – without, however, having any representative claim of its own, since it was never intended to be an ‘EU project’ (Interview Benoît). Thus, the exhibition C’est notre histoire! made the following claim about the EU’s founding document: The Treaty of Rome, whose fiftieth anniversary we are celebrating, is not a peace treaty. But the way in which it was negotiated, its very content and its revolutionary method of gradually integrating States into a greater whole, have done more than prevent the return of armed conflicts within the Community and, later, the European Union. For the first time in the history of Europe, the culture of war has given way to the culture of peace. (Tempora 2009: 17)

In its claim to represent a shared history of the European experience, the Musée went further than any other museum project described in this book. Quite possibly it was for exactly this reason that the project came to the attention of EU political elites. Still, it failed to gain the support it needed, and eventually the time seemed ripe for the EP’s own museum project, which eclipsed it. The Musée was no substitute for social negotiation over the purposes and aims of the EU, although it did react to absence of such debate: the exhibition C’est notre histoire! laid claim to – and imitated – a social history written from below, manifested in the accounts of a range of eyewitnesses of Europeanisation (Tempora 2009: 23): ‘27 ordinary citizens from the 27 countries of the European Union, 27 fascinating stories. Each of their individual stories is a piece of the jigsaw that makes up European history. Our history’. But since these twenty-seven stories (Figure 1) almost all represent successes on the part of EU institutions, the claim to an independent European narrative remained empty. The Musée neither developed a voice sufficiently distinct from the EU’s integration rhetoric nor adopted a clear, convincing position on the ambivalences and gaps in the writing of European history that were highlighted in this volume’s introduction. Even so, the Musée can claim to have catalysed the idea of siting a European contemporary history museum in Brussels. Moreover, its approach to resolving discontinuities and conflicts in European history within a museum differed markedly from that of the HEH. Whereas the Musée never shied away from public discussion, much of the planning for the HEH took place behind closed doors. Europeanisation as a cultural practice – if practised, as here, in close agreement with the Brussels political elites – can also mean accumulation of knowledge of the techniques of power privy

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only to the few. When the EP initiated its project, the potential legitimating role of public discussion in such a project was disregarded entirely. One blogger had a striking, though unrepresentative, response to the HEH project’s defensiveness when it came to any public information: What might that mean? Nothing good. It means only that they take a great deal of trouble to keep from us citizens of the EU any information about the progress of the project. Possibly for good reasons. Just prevent all discussion. Otherwise the project will collapse again. In much the same way that it failed in Aachen years ago. Or am I wrong about that? (Borchert 2010)

The Bauhaus Europa: An Interrupted Story The above blogger’s reference to the failed project in Aachen is justified, since the Bauhaus Europa was one of the most ambitious of the various projects for a European museum. The planned HEH will be sited in the renovated Eastman Building in Brussels,5 the Bauhaus Europa in Aachen was supposed to be housed in an entirely new structure. This expectation was dashed when the project was halted in 2006 by a local referendum. Nonetheless, consideration of the Bauhaus Europa is instructive, since here the question of what Europe is today intersects with the question of what a museum is today. Every newly constructed museum highlights the idea and history of the museum, defining its role both in the present and the future. Museum architecture therefore has the task of finding a spatial image for Europe. As Gerard Delanty and Paul Jones (2003: 191) have said, ‘Architecture is increasingly becoming an important discourse for the representation and construction of post-national identities’. Their analysis of representative buildings in Europe – like the Berlin Reichstag after its renovation and extension by Norman Foster – does not include any museums, but it describes a claim comparable to that of the Europe museums (Delanty and Jones 2003: 200): ‘It may be more desirable to construct a European identity in such a way that takes account of conflict, crisis and Europe’s turbulent past’. The conception of the Bauhaus Europa adopted this ambiguous, varied perspective on the role of Europe. Its initiators found the design by the architect Wolfgang Tschapeller expressive of this fundamental idea (Fingerhuth 2008: 31): ‘A stage for presentations without a functionallydesigned structure, a large space enclosed by glass … that conveys a sense of transparency’. Paradoxically, it was precisely this attempt to produce a spatial representation of Europe that ultimately led to the failure of the project.

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The Aachen city council originally conceived the Bauhaus Europa in connection with preparations for EuRegionale 2008, and intended it to be less a museum than a ‘place for information, for experience, for participation in a Europe close to its citizens’, as Andrea Mork (2008: 23), curator of the House of History in Bonn and one of those responsible for conceiving the planned permanent exhibition, described the idea. Here we can register a displacement that influences both the museum as an institution and the construction of Europe. Instead of creating what could be considered a representative shared history in the museum, the initiators sought the discursive construction of the public realm, something that so far has been largely absent from the European project (Habermas 2008). Despite its rejection by Aachen’s citizens, the Bauhaus Europa attracted great interest because of the way its conception and spatial organisation drew attention to the present and future history of Europe. Part of this was also its reference to the past. Geographically and spiritually, Aachen is an ideal starting point for presenting European culture as a Christian culture that, thanks to Charlemagne, found its expression in the Holy Roman Empire. The Bauhaus Europa attached itself to this tradition, in that the new building was to be located at a symbolically charged location between the Königshalle and the Cathedral. The architects and curators intended the site’s historical authenticity over the longue durée since the time of the Frankish empire to form a contradictory connection with the abstract new building whose design emphasised a capacity to be remodelled in the future. Much the same could be said of the idea behind its exhibition, which was planned to narrate chronologically how Europe became constituted as a result of European self-perceptions and the way it was seen by others. In this sense the planned representation of the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire was paradigmatic of the substantive conception of Bauhaus Europa. This historical moment condensed both repulsion and exchange between the Christian Occident and the Islamic world, a process that has deeply influenced the modern self-understanding of Europe (Mork 2008). In Aachen it might have been possible to pursue Derrida’s (1992: 29) idea of Europe ‘that consists precisely in not closing itself off in its own identity and in advancing itself in an exemplary way toward what it is not’, for Bauhaus Europa did not presuppose the existence of cultural unity in Europe but instead deconstructed it as a political idea with a shifting history. The architectural design could have contributed to this by conceiving Europe as ‘a gigantic folded map, a kind of infinite document’. The architect presumed that history could be inscribed in the design of the building, as with the Libeskind building for the Jewish Museum in Ber-

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lin: ‘The nature of its surface reacts to important historical events. Surface fixtures, recesses, angles and openings shape the story. … History is the object’.6 The design of the new building opened up a symbolic bridge to a nonessentialist conception of Europe and was praised (Assmann et al. 2008: 77) for its presentation of a productive ‘blank space’. This blank space of Europe could not, however, be conveyed to the citizens of Aachen, who defined the museum as a local space. The new museum envisaged a confrontation on the Karlsplatz between a historical longue durée and a fractured European conquest of the future, but this met with so much local opposition that a large majority rejected the project in a local referendum of December 2006. Its financing was almost completely assured, the city council supported the project, and its director, Marie Paule Jungblut, had already been selected; however, the backers were not able to win over enough of the public to realise the project. In historical perspective the museum has a role in the evolution of an enlightened public (Imhof 2008: 57). But in Aachen, reconciling an enlightened local public with the planned European framework proved impossible.

The Museum of Civilisations from Europe and the Mediterranean: A Larger Story Current museal practice is not solely devoted to plans for new museums. More important is a discursive reorientation within traditional historical, cultural history and ethnographic museums. The two most familiar projects in this regard are the Museum of European Cultures in Berlin (MEK, previously the Museum für Volkskunde), and the Museum of Civilisations from Europe and the Mediterranean (MuCEM), which was formed from the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires (MNATP) in Paris. Since 1999 MEK has been allotted space in the museum area of BerlinDahlem, which from 2009 to 2011 was rebuilt and extended. However, the latest plan is to move the museum to a more central location near Potsdamer Platz and the Kulturforum, where both the Museum of Commercial Art and the Art Library would be immediate neighbours. MuCEM was moved to Marseilles before it opened in summer 2013. Formed in 2005 on the basis of MNATP, it has now become the first national museum located outside Paris, having languished in uncertainty for several years while cultural policy was being reshaped. The choice of Marseilles and the region of Provence as European Capital of Culture in

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2013 gave powerful impetus to the construction of a new building and the organisation of a permanent exhibition. Designs for the latter indicate a focus on the Mediterranean and the longue durée of cultural and economic exchange. Therefore Europe will no longer be the museum’s explicit theme but, more indirectly, its thematic thread. This also has affected the work of collecting, since the MNATP collection related explicitly to the French nation. Another dimension has arisen beside the existing regional and European dimensions: the urban. MuCEM, located in Fort St. Jean and a new building alongside it, occupies an area totalling 26,000 square metres in an especially prominent position at the mouth of the harbour. For a long time, the new building – one of several in the city’s Euromediterranée rebuilding programme – was a subject of controversy. MuCEM will be judged on how easily the themes the museum adopts sit with the social reality of the city, with its high levels of immigration and unemployment. MuCEM, with its exhibitions, is supposed to be rooted in the locality, including its regional and European connections. This demand was met before the formal opening of the whole museum with the staging of a number of shows, including, for example, Hip-Hop in 2005 and Pierre Plates in 2006 at the museum site, which had long been an urban meeting point and an important part of Marseilles’s social scene. In each case – Berlin and Marseilles – the redefined institution involved a very significant restructuring of national ethnographic museums, which affected collections in the possession of new museums that now had a strongly European orientation (Mazé 2008; Rogan 2003). In both cases the collections held by national ethnographic museums were supplemented with non-European collections. This lent them a particular character from the start. Unlike the projects and exhibitions discussed so far, these museal reformulations in Berlin and Marseilles involved debate within the museal discipline; they were not primarily conceived in response to the issue of a common, or fractured, European history. In fact, both museums were responding to a crisis emerging in Western European national ethnological museums during the 1970s, due mostly to the way that traditional ethnography related to nationalist ideologies (Kudraß 2009) and the growing popularity of ‘regionalism’ in ethnology and historiography (Mazé 2008: 113). As Bjarne Rogan (2003: 47) has shown, the idea of MuCEM arose as a way of registering a shift from national to European and transnational narratives and conceptions: ‘on the one hand the supranational and European, and on the other the regional (the Mediterranean): in either case, a turning away from the national’.

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All things national were stigmatised in museums, especially in Germany. In 2003 the DHM in Berlin staged the exhibition The Idea of Europe – Designs for ‘Perpetual Peace’ (von Plessen 2003). This was itself deeply symbolic, following in the wake of German reunification, the reconstruction of the building and the addition of a new building designed by I. M. Pei. Despite significant differences between historical and ethnographic museums, ‘Europe’ serves as a transitional means, a substitute narrative, a politically correct vocabulary of modernisation that enables museums and their collections to be rethought. In most instances so far, however, the contradiction between objects and narratives with a local and/or national connection and a new programmatic national claim remains unresolved. So, for instance, an exhibition at the MEK in Berlin (2008: 7) entitled Discover Europe sorts objects from the MEK’s collection into seven themes as ‘everyday objects’. Here Europe serves primarily as a geographical framework for an exhibition focused on the narrative value of the objects displayed, which are then in turn related to ‘connections and networks in Europe’ (2008: 12). Europe is ultimately defined as the sum, and partial intertwining, of local and national cultures (Krankenhagen 2010). Clearly, the newly defined ethnological museums with their link to Europe seek to avoid the trap of an essential and homogeneous interpretation of Europe. This follows from their own painful experience, something emphasised by Michel Colardelle, the former project director of MuCEM: One naturally seeks to open the eyes of the public, but there is always the danger that in so doing one will make use of a closed system. That, by the way, is why I never wanted a Europe Museum, because it would have probably quite quickly been pushed to adopt a clear political position within Europe as it is developing today. (Colardelle quoted by Mazé, 2008: 120)

In other words, Europeanisation is part of today’s museums’ own cultural practice, which seeks to locate Europe within a broader geopolitical context extending beyond its borders so that, as in the case of MuCEM, the significance of a European dimension in urban everyday life can be addressed. At the same time this European framework is apparently either too small or too big to shape the new, restructured ethnological museums, since Europe today finds itself stuck between regionalisation and globalisation. As Klas Grinell has observed: ‘The power of nation states is eroding. There are an increasing number of issues whose solution is beyond the reach of nation states. Great events are transnational, questions of the environment and climate are independent of national frontiers. Regionalisation is a response to this’.7 Evidently MuCEM has selected the greater Mediterranean area, rather than Europe, as the context for its future exhibitions.

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Europeanisation as Cultural Practice As the foregoing examples demonstrate, Europeanisation as cultural practice in many cases describes less what exists than what should exist but cannot (always) be realised. Claus Leggewie (cited by Assmann et al. 2008: 78), for example, has emphatically responded to the question whether there is any need for a Europe museum: ‘In thirty years we will have needed it!’ The formula ‘Europe’ remains therefore an idea projected into the future. For this reason Europe museums have to be conceived as ‘museums of the future’ (Imhof 2008: 59). But this could be asking too much of museums. Here the project of a political Europe bisects the utopian substance of the museum, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2004: 189) has noted: ‘The museum is thus not simply a place that represents a utopia, but one in which a utopian imagination can be exercised’. If the European utopia is to publicly develop its full potential in the museum, then a greater proportion of the public has to become involved. The examples of Brussels and Aachen, and to some extent Marseilles, show that so far it has not been easy to present Europe as a site of a common past and a common future. Europe and European integration take place via the museum, but seldom explicitly and only in select locations, to date. Not coincidentally, it is museums in the so-called core Europe – the six founding members of the ECSC and the EEC (Germany, France, Italy and the Benelux countries) – that are in the vanguard of a museal process of Europeanisation. Belgium and Luxembourg are already well suited to the task of symbolically representing European integration, given their central role as sites of EU institutions. The corollary to this is that many museums on the geographic periphery, as seen from the standpoint of the core, have so far played either a limited role in the Europeanisation of national narratives, or none at all. Meanwhile, understanding Europeanisation as cultural practice allows concealed, often implicit references and strategies of adaptation in diverse institutions to be analysed as the interaction and negotiation of European motifs. Such interaction can in turn acquire significance for Europe far beyond its core. These implicit European narratives will come into play in chapters 4 and 6, which will analyse the museums’ collection policies and their discussion of migration and boundaries of Europe as concealed but effective dimensions of Europeanisation. We will trace how, and to what extent, Europeanisation stands for different forms of modernisation in the museal domain, in the way clarified here by the examples of Aachen, Brussels and Marseilles. These first examples demonstrate that Europeanisation should not be thought of as a cultural practice that uniformly and synchronously

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fashions originally national narratives into one European narrative. The contemporary museal landscape is characterised by processes of innovation and restructuring that run parallel to and also overlay each other, and that are only tangentially linked to Europeanisation. Tendencies of globalisation, individualisation and representation, which have been summed up as the ‘second modernity’ (Beck and Grande 2007; Beck, Giddens and Lash 1996; Giddens 1990), have furthered these processes, which should also be understood as reactions to a new regionalism in historico-cultural, ethnographic and municipal museums that has developed since the 1970s (Walgenbach 2010; Mazé 2008). At the same time they also react to the new technical possibilities of digitalisation and the representation of museal objects, and to the increasing influence of social media (Mairesse 2010; Parry 2010, 2007). Thus the Europeanisation of national narratives in such museums catalyses regional, national, transnational, European and global modes of narration in museums, setting the narratives in relation to one another. Museums can thereby become new forms of individual and social identification in Europe, something that Neal Ascherson (cited by Morley and Robins 1995: 89) thought foreseeable: the European Community ‘will travel from the western Europe of nation-states via the Brussels superstate to the Europe of Heimats’. Exactly who takes part in this journey from Western European nation states through the EU institutions in Brussels to new local homelands is the subject of the next two chapters.

Chapter 2

G E State Institutions and European Cultural and Museum Policy G       ,   begin with culture. This remark is often attributed to Jean Monnet, the first president of the ECSC High Authority, whenever the issue of culture in the social, economic and political integration of the EU arises (Wistricht 1989: 79). But there is no convincing evidence that Monnet actually said this, and moreover, the idea that a cultural community should form the core of a future European federation runs entirely contrary to Monnet’s functionalist perspective on integration. Monnet’s perspective originated intellectually in interwar Europe (Kaiser and Schot 2014), was theoretically developed after the Second World War by a neo-functionalist political science (Haas 2004 [1958]) and powerfully influenced postwar integration. The integration process was supposed to be guided by experts who, free of national and domestic pressures, were competent to find common solutions for transnational problems that were mainly socioeconomic in origin. To this end, newly created supranational institutions, endowed with the competence to reach their own independent decisions, would promote the transnational organisation of political and social actors who would, in turn, promote further Europeanisation. Integration would then spread from one economic sector to another and stimulate stronger political integration, and at the end of this ‘process’ would stand a European federation. To the extent that alternative visions played a role in the early days of European integration – for example, within the networks of European Christian Democrats (Kaiser 2007) – the leading conception involved the parliamentarisation of the emergent supranational political system on the model of the member states. Here there was no discussion of culture, whether high or popular, at all. A European cultural policy – for instance,

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in the form of European museums or common rituals of remembrance – may have had some aesthetic and social influence upon the interpretation of past, present and future. But for the founding states of today’s EU, a cultural policy of this kind seemed neither desirable nor achievable. Instead they limited themselves to inserting a paragraph in the treaty creating the EEC stipulating that national cultural objects of especial artistic, historic or archaeological value be excluded from the principles of free trade embodied in the customs union (Theiler 2005: 56). To be sure, this initial limitation of today’s EU to economic and political integration does not mean that in the early post-war years there were no proposals for a European cultural policy or moves to lend these ideas an agreed institutional basis. As early as May 1948, the European Movement, at its congress in The Hague, discussed issues relating to cultural integration alongside measures for economic and political integration (Guieu and Dréau 2009; Vermeulen 2000). Following this meeting, in December 1949 a conference at Lausanne was exclusively devoted to cultural matters (Vardabasso 2010). The same year saw the establishment of the Council of Europe, which actually created an organisational framework for cultural matters. In 1954 the Council of Europe’s members signed the European Cultural Convention, and in 1961 they institutionalised today’s Comité Directeur de la Coopération Culturelle (Haigh 1974: 215). In addition, the Council considered the issue of museums, supporting, for instance, projects aimed at easing loans between museums and at developing a teaching function for museums (Blanke 1994: 87). It still supports the European Museum Forum, which confers the prestigious annual European Museum of the Year award. Despite its greater geographical extent and its strictly intergovernmental organisation, the Council of Europe has often cooperated with the EU in cultural initiatives, such as organising the European Years of Music, and cinema and TV projects during the 1980s (Forrest 1994: 14). Cross-border cultural cooperation in the post-war years has not been furthered solely by organisations other than the EU – whether the Council of Europe or the European Broadcasting Union, which in 1956 introduced the Eurovision Song Contest (Degenhardt and Stautz 1999). Individual Western European countries have supported bilateral cultural cooperation, as France and Germany did with the 1963 Elysée Treaty, which had a strong European orientation (Pfeil 2007; Baumann 2003). More than many other political fields, European cultural policy is characterised by the presence of numerous state and societal actors that seek to influence the political agenda; develop discussion about culture, identity and democratic legitimacy; arrange transnational and pan-European exchange and

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co-operation programmes; finance cross-border projects and realise such projects. The EU still has very limited subsidiary competences in cultural policy, which means that its cultural initiatives, programmes and related financial instruments are all quite fragmented. As the EU is a multilevel political organisation, cultural policy with European features can be found at all levels (Tömmel 2009; Conzelmann 2008; Hooghe and Marks 2001). However, the research on European cultural policy that has been done by political scientists (Staiger 2009, 2008; Littoz-Monnet 2007; Theiler 2005) or by sociologists and anthropologists (Shore 2000; Abélès 1993) has been almost exclusively directed to the EU level and the role of various state actors (Sassatelli 2009: 68–73). This very narrow perspective often leads to the conclusion that EU cultural policy is merely ‘top-down symbolic dynamism’ that is only beginning to engage with the creation of a ‘bottom-up’ process capable of promoting cultural identity (Theiler 2005: 4). Cris Shore has strongly criticised what he sees as an attempt to create a stronger common European identity based on a larger feeling of cultural belonging. This involves a ‘characteristically top-down, managerial and instrumental approach to “culture building” and its assumption that “European identity” can somehow be engineered from above and injected into the masses by an enlightened vanguard of European policy professionals using the latest communication technologies and marketing techniques’ (Shore 1999: 63). As this and the following chapter will show, European cultural policy is very much shaped by both competition and cooperation across state and societal actors, organised through networks spanning a spectrum from institutionalised to informal. This domain is also under the influence of social elites who are increasingly oriented towards the transnational and European. To this extent European cultural policy is structurally comparable with nineteenth-century processes of national integration. According to Eric Hobsbawm (1992: 171), these processes were already marked by the formation of a ‘strategic cadre of intellectuals and administrators … a new elite composed of the professional, and above all, educated, middle classes who were to become pioneers of “national” consciousness’. Similarly, today’s transnational and European-oriented elites use their own resources, along with the structures of the European, national and regional state institutions that are under their political control or influence, to provide a cultural underpinning for processes of political and economic integration. This chapter first briefly overviews European cultural policy since the 1973 Declaration on European Identity, following with an account of the roles various state institutions have played in the museal field within the

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EU as a multilevel governance system, that is, in ‘Brussels’, the member states, and especially at the sub-national level. The European basis of cultural and museal policy is especially important for regions in federal or decentralised Western European EU member states. In fact, the analysis of the different state institutions’ activities illuminates the degree to which the museal domain is becoming Europeanised despite the very restricted EU competences in cultural policy.

From the Declaration on European Identity to the Lisbon Treaty The present-day EU cultural policy is usually thought to have been initiated with the Declaration on European Identity, made on 15 December 1973 at the end of the Copenhagen summit of heads of state and of governments of the then European Community (EC). Hagen SchulzForberg and Bo Stråth have even seen this as a ‘decisive turning-point’ (2010: 40–43; Stråth 2000), since this declaration lent integration a normative and cultural dimension while avoiding what they call the ‘social question’. Nonetheless, the declaration was not primarily directed at the domestic European audience. Up to the end of the 1970s, a constantly growing ‘permissive consensus’ in all member states implied many citizens’ consent to integration in general, coupled with widespread lack of interest in the form it would actually take (Down and Wilson 2008). This also held for the new member states Great Britain and Denmark, whose governments were more Eurosceptically inclined. Moreover, since the early 1960s the EEC had taken the normative foundations of integration into account, above all in its discussions on the possible association or even full membership, of non-democratic states like Spain. In this light, the Copenhagen Declaration was mainly a reaction to the question that third parties put to the EC regarding the (external) identity of ‘Europe’. U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, for instance, had unilaterally declared 1973 the ‘Year of Europe’ and demanded a single European telephone number at which he could discuss world issues with the EC and agree a common policy (Del Pero 2010; Horne 2009; Hanhimäki 2004). Hence the Copenhagen Declaration primarily indicates that third parties (in this case, the U.S.) have always been important as external federators in the process of European integration and identity, and that initiatives in European cultural policy by no means always come from supranational institutions, but sometimes (as in this case) originate with member states, or are at least supported by them.

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The EC’s first initiatives in cultural policy after the Copenhagen Declaration were a response to a ruling by the European Court of Justice. In 1979 the Luxembourg judges ruled in their landmark Cassis de Dijon judgement that all products lawfully made in a member state could be sold in all other member states. This and other, related judgements spurred the free movement of goods and paved the way for the later creation of the internal market. In other, less well-known judgements, the court also refused to exclude cultural goods such as films or books from EC competition policy, despite the wishes of the more dirigiste governments of member states. As Annabelle Littoz-Monnet (2003) has demonstrated, the court’s liberal interpretation prompted France in particular to put forward proposals for a European cultural policy whose principal aim initially was to minimise competition in the cultural domain. However, on this count France remained almost entirely isolated in the EC. By the mid-1980s the EC had begun to develop its own promotional programme, along with elements of supranational political symbolism beyond the obligatory group photo shoot following meetings of heads of state and of governments (Manners 2011). Within two years – 1985 and 1986 – the EC announced a number of initiatives, although the associated financial support was limited. They included the European Capital of Culture (Sassatelli 2009: 77-139; Mittag 2008), the European Sculpture Competition, the designation of transnational cultural routes and a programme providing young people with easier access to museums (Littoz-Monnet 2007: 53). In 1986 the EC heads of state and of governments designated 9 May Europe Day, adopted the format of twelve stars on a sky-blue field, used by the Council of Europe since 1955, as the European flag and made Beethoven’s Ode to Joy from the Ninth Symphony the European hymn (Foret 2008: 175–214; Buch 2003; Shore 1996; Abélès 1993). Although the EEC Treaty contained no articles relating to cultural policy, up until the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 the EC Council of Ministers agreed on thirty decisions, resolutions and conclusions relating to cultural policy (Littoz-Monnet 2007: 58). The introduction of Article 128 on culture in the Maastricht Treaty thus institutionalised an already established political practice. In the Amsterdam Treaty this became Article 151, and when the Lisbon Treaty came into force on 1 December 2009 it was Article 167. It has been modified only minimally since the original Maastricht formulation. Upon its adoption in the Lisbon Treaty, the unanimity rule was replaced by qualified majority voting, as in most other policy sectors. Article 167 refers not to a ‘European culture’ but instead to a ‘common cultural heritage’, and stipulates a limited and subsidiary EU competence. It specifically excludes

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harmonisation through European legislation (Forrest 1994: 17), instead restricting EU activities to ‘promotion’, ‘support’ and ‘complementarity’ (Holthoff 2008: 92; Schmahl 1996: 198). According to the article, the EU should, among other things, contribute to the ‘improvement of the knowledge and dissemination of the culture and history of the European peoples’ and to the ‘conservation and safeguarding of cultural heritage of European significance’. Given this new formal basis, in 1996 the EU initiated the Kaleidoscope programme to promote cross-border cooperation among cultural institutions, and in 1997 the Ariane programme for the translation of European literature and the Raphael programme for the protection of cultural monuments. All three were then integrated into the Culture 2000 programme. However, financial support for culture is not limited to this programme alone. Since then the EU has continued to support cultural projects through structural and cohesion funds such as Interreg III and IV, and the seventh Research Framework Programme and its successor, Horizon 2020, which fund applied collaborative research across Europe. In the meantime the new EU programme Culture 2007–2013 was drawn up. This and other cultural programmes such as Europe for Citizens are administered by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency, an administrative agency in Brussels. Accepting the European Commission so-called communication A European Agenda for Culture in a Globalising World in November 2007, the European Council also introduced a new approach, called open coordination that derived from the Lisbon 2000 strategy and intensified intergovernmental cooperation on policy, exclusively employing the competences of member states, or relying primarily on them. Among the related initiatives is a structured dialogue with culture interest groups including museum organisations (Singer 2010: 15). Governments have in addition formulated three strategic goals for cooperation in the cultural domain: the promotion of cultural diversity and of intercultural dialogue; culture as a catalyst within the framework of the Lisbon strategy, according to which the EU should, (originally) by 2010, become the most globally competitive economic space; and culture as part of the external relations of the EU, which has also since the Lisbon Treaty had its own international diplomatic representation. The plan formulated by the European Council clearly left museums with much to gain from the programme that ran until 2013. This especially involved the promotion of cultural access, for example through the digitalisation of objects, cultural tourism and the greater mobility of art collections. It also included the so-called cultural and creative industries, which involve primarily small and medium-sized firms. In this regard the European Agenda for Culture is strongly marked by conceptual and seman-

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tic transfers from the Anglo-Saxon world, where all support for culture has to be argued for in terms of its contribution to economic growth and welfare (Hesmondhalgh 2009; Galloway and Dunlop 2007; Garnham 2005). In fact, the economic and financial crisis since 2008 has resulted in a ‘very hard turn to the economic impact agenda’ (Interview Kish). In this way the EU has managed to significantly extend its cultural activities and their financial support, despite its continuing very limited formal competences. The financial picture, however, is so fragmented that even the European Commission is unable to estimate the share of the EU budget devoted to projects and programmes relevant to culture. The Culture 2007–2013 programme was allocated €400 million for this entire period, a sum representing only 0.05% of the annual EU budget or, put another way, 13.5 cents per EU citizen (Gordon 2010: 112), roughly as much as the entire budget of the Munich state opera in the same period. Nonetheless, during the same period the European Commission spent more than €6 billion from the cohesion funds for cultural activities and infrastructure, and for promotion of the cultural and creative industries. This amounts to 0.7% of the EU budget. The construction of the new Museum of Polish History in Warsaw will receive €64 million from these sources, for example (‘Glashaus’ 2009). But it is not only programmes and financing that are fragmented. The various state actors in the multilevel governance system of the EU pursue different goals and agendas in regard to cultural policy, and these agendas influence their museum policies – whether they concern financial support for a newly planned museum, or for societal networks active in the museal field.

European Commission: Competition, Symbols, Memory Since the 1970s the European Commission has played a central role in the development of new policy fields. After the Copenhagen Declaration, this was also true of cultural policy. However, as a supranational administration with many quasi-governmental functions, the European Commission is a pluralistic institution, not a unitary actor (Littoz-Monnet 2007: 33). Within the European Commission, different commissioners and directorates have divergent preferences and are responsible for different lines of funding. During the 1970s the Directorates General for Competition and the Internal Market still dominated discussion of the cultural aspects of European integration. Their priority was to press on with the economic integration of the EC. This is visible in the Commission’s 1977 communication, Community Action in the Cultural Sector. Here the major preoccupations were the harmonisation of copyright and support for the

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free exchange of goods and persons in the cultural sector. The 1982 communication, Stronger Community Action in the Cultural Sector, extended the European Commission’s market-oriented perspective only marginally with the addition of its own cultural programmes, related in particular to the European film industry and the protection of cultural heritage. A substantive and rhetorical connection of cultural policy to the economy and competition survives in the European Commission’s policy statements right up to the present. An increase in economic strategies’ importance for justifying cultural initiatives has recently become apparent, prompted by debates over economic reform within both member states and the EU. In its European Agenda for Culture, the European Commission defines the common cultural heritage of Europe as a ‘source of creativity’ that in turn is held to be a ‘driver of growth, competitiveness and jobs’ (Schwenke 2010: 374–380). This economic principle coincides with the aim, itself functionalist in character, of defining the legitimacy of European integration primarily in terms of the quality of the ‘output’ of EU policy – that is, by its results, and principally in terms of its contribution to growth and economic welfare. Only from the 1980s on did the European Commission become open to the idea that the EU’s legitimacy could also be generated through political and cultural means, and perhaps in the long run would need to be so generated to support the development of a more supranational political system, from the Single European Act to the Lisbon Treaty. The Maastricht Treaty’s rejection in the 1992 Danish referendum and its own institutional crisis with the resignation of the Santer Commission in 1999, along with the defeat of the Constitutional Treaty in French and Dutch referendums in 2005, have together led the European Commission to place greater emphasis upon ‘input’ legitimacy, that is, the quality of political decision-making processes, in which civil society organisations and individual citizens should participate (Levy 2006; Tsakatika 2005). In this context the Commission has lent culture a stronger role as ‘a site or space for social actors to mobilize and interact’ in developing European forms of ‘citizenship’ (Staiger 2009, 2008: 73; Eder 1999). Since its 2001 European Governance: A White Paper, the Commission has engaged in various initiatives for stronger involvement of civil society actors, including museum organisations, and also sought to encourage EU citizens’ direct involvement in political decision-making through electronic media (Hüller 2010a, 2010b). Nonetheless, the legitimacy of the EU and its institutions seems to be in decline. Populist Euroscepticism is widespread in many member states, and citizens’ affective and emotional bond to the EU generally seems weak.

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Thus the European Commission has, like other EU institutions in the last few years, increasingly considered how the EU can counterbalance its accumulation of competences and power since the Maastricht Treaty by increasing its symbolic power (Theiler 2005: 6). Officials in the Directorate General for Education and Culture may remain genuinely convinced by their mantra ‘unity in diversity’, but many studies demonstrate a need to generate far more ‘unity’ (Theiler 2005), particularly via the evolution of Europeans who are more than ‘an objectified category of passport-holders and “citizens”, but, more fundamentally … a category of subjectivity’ (Shore 2000: 29–30). To this end the European Commission has turned to cultural institutions, especially museums, as a means of reinforcing the EU’s cultural legitimacy (Karaca 2010: 123). In 1977, when no such legitimacy agenda had been developed, the European Commission proposed that all large national museums in the EC should create a space devoted to EC integration (Theiler 2005: 58). But this idea was clearly too much for some governments, especially the Eurosceptical governments of Great Britain and Denmark, and the Council of Ministers rejected the proposal as evocative of the national integration mechanisms of the nineteenth century. In 1986, when governments introduced Europe Day, the European flag and the European hymn, the European Commission initially focused on supporting their wide-reaching, supranational use. On the occasion of the first raising of the European flag, for instance, the then President of the European Commission Jacques Delors expressed the hope (cited in Theiler 2005: 1) that it would become ‘a symbol for Europeans of endless hope nurtured by our ideal and our struggle’. In legal terms, the twelve stars on a sky-blue ground were only an emblem whose use had been agreed among member states at the highest official level, but from the very beginning the European Commission regarded it as a flag like any national flag. The Commission also used its own resources to fund production of some films on EC information policy, including Jean Monnet, Father of Europe, which dealt with the role of the first president of the ECSC High Authority (Theiler 2005: 65). During the 1990s, after the demise of the proposal that national museums set aside specifically European spaces, the European Commission switched to supporting the development and introduction of new technologies for museums, especially digitalisation. Meanwhile, its altered legitimacy agenda prompted greater emphasis on the European networking of museum actors, and the Commission became interested in the contents of museum and temporary exhibition projects, not just the creation of European technology platforms. The seventh Research Framework Programme also included funding for museum projects and initiatives that included

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museums. Here the Commission concentrated on supporting projects that promoted transnational contents and greater European emphasis in museums. When applying and negotiating with the Commission, applicants always adhered to its informal conventions: the involvement of partners on the periphery of the core states, especially those from the new Eastern European EU states, and mantra-like reference to the ‘stakeholders’ who were to benefit from the supposed applied outcomes of research – in this case, mainly museums and their staff. In recent years the Commission has also supported cooperative work outside the seventh Framework Programme that promises to supplement the Commission’s broader agenda for political legitimacy. This has been pursued primarily through long-term, transnational activation and networking of museum actors; coordination of the treatment of cross-border phenomena like migration (discussed in chapter 6); and attempts to stimulate ethnic and religious minorities’ use of museums by more thoroughly integrating these people into national societies as well as the emergent European society. The European Commission’s new strategy of supporting particular substantive orientations of museum projects related closely to the Europe for Citizens programme, which like the cultural programme ran from 2007 to 2013. In this context the Commission initiated Action 4 Active European Remembrance, which supports cross-border dialogue about remembrance and seeks to further a stronger European convergence of collective historical memories. Museums are strongly represented in many of these projects. To promote pan-European remembrance, the European Commission inspired by the initiative of some new Eastern European member states, has adopted totalitarianism as a theme (Littoz-Monnet 2012). The prevailing focus on National Socialism and the destruction of Jews in the Holocaust has been extended to include Stalinism and its crimes, the House of Terror in Budapest being a leading example for integrating the crimes of both the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross movement and Stalinists in one museum. This trend, with its potential to strengthen a common collective memory of the Second World War and its consequences as a history of common suffering on the part of all Europeans, could form part of the founding myth of the EU and is examined in greater detail in chapter 5.

European Parliament: Cultural Deepening and Major Projects Compared to the European Commission, members of the European Parliament (EP) were never so strongly influenced by any neo-functionalist

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conception of integration or so fixated on ‘output’ legitimacy. Long after the first direct elections in 1979, debates in the EP concentrated on the aspiration to parliamentarise the EU along the lines of the member states’ parliamentary systems (Jachtenfuchs 2002). Moreover, the broadly centrist majority in the EP was strongly federalist in orientation and remains so to this day, making the EP keener on integration than the member states as represented in the European Council. This EP majority quickly moved to support stronger cultural foundations for integration (Calligaro 2010: 89). The EP created a Committee for Culture soon after the first direct elections; however, the national ministers of culture have met regularly only since 1984 (Littoz-Monnet 2007: 48). The EP’s preference for stronger cultural integration was expressed in a draft treaty on European Union. Developed in the EP’s Institutional Committee with Altiero Spinelli as rapporteur, this draft was adopted by the EP in February 1984 but then ignored by the Council. It already contained Article 61 on ‘cultural policy’. The introduction of Europe Day, the flag and the hymn two years later resulted from a proposal in the two so-called Adonnino Reports, the outcome of working groups led by former MEP Pietro Adonnino, a federally inclined Italian Christian Democrat (Theiler 2005: 59). Under the Maastricht Treaty, the EP gained extensive joint decisionmaking powers that were then extended by the Lisbon Treaty; through these developments the EP also gained influence over EU policy on culture and history. It brought this to bear by formulating resolutions (Kaiser 2012a) that served as public appeals – for example, by passing the resolution ‘On European Conscience and Totalitarianism’ in April 2009.1 Annual budget negotiations regularly demonstrate that the EP is more generous than the governments represented in the European Council and especially concerned about increasing funding for education, research and other programmes relating to culture. Above all, the EP has its own institutional resources, which were used as early as 1982 when, under its liberal French President Simone Veil, it purchased Jean Monnet’s house in Houjarray near Paris, which it retains to the present day. The house has been open to visitors since 1987, and in 2010 the European Commission first used it for training officials in the contemporary history of integration (Interview Gascard). Since then the EP has put its institutional funds to much greater use in two large-scale projects that, alongside Jean Monnet’s house, are intended to contribute to the musealisation of the EU and its history. The first of these is the EP’s Visitor Centre, which after some delays finally opened in October 2011 (‘Europa gucken’ 2011). The Visitor Centre was the outcome of an initiative by the then EP President Josep Borrell, a Spanish so-

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cialist, who brought the idea back to Brussels after a trip to Washington in 2005 (Interview Kleinig). At the time, construction was under way on the underground Congress Visitor Center, which extends across three quarters of the Capitol’s area.2 On 4 July 2005 the EP Presidium resolved to create its own Visitor Centre, which eventually displaced the project for a Musée de l’Europe by occupying the space originally assigned to it. The Centre is primarily intended for visitors to the EP in Brussels, who currently number some 200,000 annually. In collaboration with the city of Brussels, whose city marketing had previously paid little attention to European institutions (Jansen and Verbeke 2005), the Centre is also marketed as a tourist attraction and is open at weekends. According to its Austrian director, Alexander Kleinig, the Centre should show visitors ‘what the European Parliament does for them’ (Interview Kleinig). Although its prime function is to convey information on the EP and its role in the present-day EU, the Centre does have a historical section devoted to ‘Europe’s visionaries’ at the time of the 1950 Schuman Plan (European Parliament Visitors’ Centre 2011). The multimedia presentation of this historical background does not, however, make use of objects. At the time of writing, the second large-scale EP project, the HEH, was planned to open in 2015. The Presidium expressed its support of the proposal for such a museum on 12 December 2007. Following this it appointed a committee of experts led by the director of the House of History of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn, Hans-Walter Hütter. At this committee’s first meeting on 3 March 2008, the Christian Democrat EP President Hans-Gert Pöttering quoted from his own inaugural address of 13 February 2007: European history is nearly always presented as a national history, represented in national museums. I would like to provide a place of memory and of the future in which the idea of Europe can flourish and develop further. I would like to propose the construction of a ‘House of European History’. This should be no boring, dull museum, but instead a place in which our memory of European history and the work of European unification can be cultivated in common, which is however also open to the future development of Europe’s identity by all present and future citizens of the European Union.3

Pöttering also set an objective for the experts: ‘The House could give a fresh boost to a spiritual dimension for the EU’.4 Once the Committee of Experts had reported, the EP Presidium finally resolved on 16 December 2008 to build the House of European History. On 1 January 2011, Slovenia’s Taja Vovk van Gaal was appointed ‘team leader’. She had previously been director of the Ljubljana City Museum (1997–2006) and then worked for the European Cultural Foundation

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(2006–2009). Her task was to devise plans for the museum together with initially thirteen other colleagues. This large-scale project, which the EP is financing itself and can realise according to its own wishes, represents its first foray into the politics of museums and collective memory. It therefore lines up alongside the European Commission as an entrepreneur for a European cultural policy (Kaiser 2012a) with the declared aim of strengthening a shared collective memory and European identity by musealising Europe’s contemporary history.

Member States: Subsidiarity, Legitimacy, Security One might be tempted to think that these two institutions – the EP and the European Commission – form a supranational alliance for cultural policy against the member states in the European Council. But this is only partly true. Respect for the principle of subsidiarity – the rights of member states and regions – has grown in the Commission as a way to fend off the accusation of ever-encroaching bureaucratic centralisation. Meanwhile, member states are not fundamentally opposed to effective cultural projects that could contribute to reinforcing the EU’s legitimacy. Hence, national cultural institutions often initiate special or travelling exhibitions of great relevance to European integration. Two good examples of this are Construir Europa. Conservar la Pau, which marked the fortieth anniversary of the Franco-German Elysée Treaty; and España y Portugal. Veinte años de intergración en Europa (Asociación 2006), shown in Spain in 2003 and again in 2006, when it marked the twentieth anniversary of EU accession. Member states have also acted on their own multilateral intergovernmental initiatives to symbolically charge the ‘common cultural heritage’ of Article 167 of the Lisbon Treaty. In 2006, seventeen states, including Switzerland as a non EU member state, introduced the European Heritage Label. Germany initially declined to participate in this programme on the grounds that it was insufficiently distinct from that of UNESCO. Nonetheless, in 2010 the European Commission proposed that this intergovernmental programme be extended to all member states, and that a jury annually award at most one cultural monument to each country.5 In May 2011 the member states accepted this proposal.6 All sixty-eight sites that previously received awards had to formally reapply to renew their status as of 2013–14. Most of the cultural heritage labels in the original programme were awarded to monuments dating from antiquity or the late Middle Ages. Some of them have a direct connection to European integration since 1945.

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Hence the Italian island of Ventotene received the award because there, in 1941, Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi wrote their federalist manifesto Per un’Europa libera e unita while imprisoned by the Fascist Italian government. Two EU ‘founding fathers’’ birthplaces – Robert Schuman’s in ScyChazelles near Metz, and Alcide De Gasperi’s in Pieve Tesino, near Trento – have also received the award and use it in their publicity. Most member states are wary of expanding the EU’s subsidiary competences in relation to cultural policy. This is true not only of states like Great Britain and Denmark that have traditionally been Eurosceptical but also of Germany, given the Länder’s responsibility in cultural matters (Klein 2009; Gau 2007). However, this wariness has taken on its own pathdependent dynamic since the insertion of the present-day Article 167 into the Maastricht Treaty as a small element of a larger compromise. On the one hand, any negotiated reduction of existing EU competences would require unanimous agreement by all member states and ratification of a revision to the treaty, something that is generally inconceivable. On the other hand, the EP’s increased influence on the EU budget has led to expansion of the cultural programme since the days of the Maastricht Treaty. In this situation member states are mostly concerned to ensure that their national institutions, including their museums, continue to enjoy access to existing EU resources – a task performed by the national contact points for cultural programmes and the Research Framework Programme. The governments of member states also realise that the legitimacy deficit is a problem not only for the Commission and the EP, but for themselves too. Domestically, pro-European parties in countries such as Great Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, France and Poland are increasingly faced with populist Eurosceptic parties that not only criticise excessive bureaucracy and financial waste in Brussels but to some extent also question the existence of the EU as such. Many national governments therefore desire a greater degree of cultural legitimacy for integration. Within the EU, each member-state has retained a great deal of autonomy as a ‘bounded cultural, psychological and identitive unit’ (Theiler 2005: 3), something neither federalists nor functionalists had anticipated in the late 1940s and early 1950s. However, today some member states are under a great deal of domestic socio-economic and political pressure. Economic crises and structural reforms have led to social protest and unrest. Discourses of regional identity and political demands for increased autonomy facilitate extensive decentralisation, so that some member states are increasingly socially and politically fragmented. Adding to that the actual or supposed constraints that globalisation imposes upon nation states, along with the economic and financial crisis that began in 2008, it is hardly

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surprising that national economic and political elites might look to Europe and the EU as an emotional refuge in uncertain, rapidly changing times and regard it as something worth cherishing culturally.

Regions: Autonomy, Identity, Memory Whereas centrally organised member states are challenged to find a place for a new European narrative of integration, or even to harmonise it with resilient national myths of unification and cultures of collective remembrance that have themselves taken on a life of their own since the nineteenth century, this does not apply to another important state actor engaged in the museal field of European cultural policy: the regions. In some federal states such as Germany and Austria, regions have powers for cultural policy that are, to varying extents, historically rooted and constitutionally guaranteed. Elsewhere, for example in Scotland and Catalonia, so-called historic nations with an ethnic foundation have been ceded new or supplementary competences in cultural policy through decentralisation. Other regions, such as South Tyrol and the Trentino in Italy, enjoy special autonomous status. These sub-national state actors have invested considerable resources in new regional museums over the past twenty years. Among the newly founded institutions are the House of History Baden-Württemberg in Stuttgart, the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Museum of the History of Catalonia in Barcelona, the South Tyrolean Museum of History in Meran and the Museo Casa De Gasperi in Pieve Tesino. As newly founded museums, they have been able to create new collections that in turn allow the use of new technological options and the development of new narratives. These and other museums have taken transnational and European dimensions of regional history into account from the outset, as chapter 5 will show. Embedding regional discourses about history and identity in a broader transnational and European context fulfils four important functions for these regions. First of all, the museums themselves find this transnational-European aspect useful in modernising long established, introverted discourses. The foundation and organisation of the National Museum of Scotland facilitated, in the broader context of a new regional autonomy, ‘a move away from a definition of Scottishness as opposed to Englishness to instead understanding Scotland in larger contexts’ (Interview Daglish). Such modernisation allows national myths dating back to the Romantic era to be replaced by a more contemporary perspective on one’s own national history and identity, characterised by greater openness to various ‘others’, not

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only the English. References to Scotland’s present and past transnational involvement in a ‘Europe of Regions’ through trade and migration serve the reformulation of national identity in a political community that has new institutional forms, and that as a matter of course has its own representation in Brussels and in the EU’s Committee of the Regions. Regional museums are also of use in integrating different, or even opposed, regional cultures of memory. In 1963 the House of Robert Schuman was owned by the General Council of the Moselle Department but administered by the federalist and Christian Democrat–dominated Robert Schuman Association. In 1999 the Department assumed control so that it could finance a full-scale renovation of the building and the creation of a museum (Interview Thull). Philippe Leroy, since 2001 a French senator for the Gaullist Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) and president of the Moselle Department’s General Council (regional government) since 1992, made use of Schuman’s high profile to seek an accommodation between the regionalist and federalist Christian Democrats and the national and intergovernmentalist Gaullist traditions. The reconstruction of Schuman’s home and creation of a new museum devoted to Schuman in Scy-Chazelles were intended to facilitate Leroy’s reinvention of himself as a ‘Gaulliste Schumanien’ (Interview Thull) and thereby position the UMP – whatever the link to de Gaulle himself – in Lorraine, as a mainstream centre-right European political party that has in the meantime also become a member of the European People’s Party (Giblin-Delvalett and Auburtin 2005). Links to Europe and European integration have also served to moderate historical ethnic conflicts through museal means. For instance, the mayor of Wrocław, Poland, brought the exhibition C’est notre histoire! to his city because it presented a narrative of integration that helped defuse and divert the local historical narrative of a permanent conflict between Germans and Poles in Silesia (and by extension, between Germany and Poland) (Pomian interview). And the section of the South Tyrolean Museum of History devoted to contemporary history and housed in the tower of Meran Castle presents explicit links to Austria’s entry into the EU in the mid-1990s. Moreover, the formation of an EU region among the three historical parts of the Tyrol – North Tyrol, South Tyrol and the Trentino (Welschtyrol) – shows how ethnic and linguistic conflicts and frontiers have lost meaning in an increasingly integrated Europe, facilitating harmonious relationships beyond such boundaries. Representing the history of the Euregio is thus meant to function as a ‘symbolic tie’ between German- and Italian-speaking South Tyroleans (Interview Heiss). Where conflicts of this kind appear to be a thing of the past, some frontier regions use their museums to narrate cooperation and ‘friendship’,

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with obvious European connotations. The House of History Baden-Württemberg, for example, devotes its final section to Franco-German relations. But this section is only one dimension of the transnationalisation of museal strategies in Baden-Württemberg, where both Franco-German relations and European integration have been the subject of special exhibitions, for instance in the Europazentrum and in the Land parliament in Stuttgart (Interview Schnabel), as well as decentralised exhibitions such as those staged at seven sites in 1998 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the 1848 Revolution, particularly in areas of Baden close to the French border. Museums can themselves ritualise the representation of cross-border ‘friendship’, or they can attempt to address its political ritualisation. In fact, the House of History of Baden-Württemberg in Stuttgart does so by casting a critical perspective on the sobering social reality of certain twinning arrangements between towns in France and in Baden-Württemberg. Finally, strategies for museal representation of regional history and identity can serve to shore up fragile legal and political autonomy. The transformation of De Gasperi’s birthplace into a museum followed an initiative taken by President of the Trento Province Lorenzo Dellai (Interview Zorzi), who in 1998 founded a regional party that in 2008 was renamed Unione per il Trentino. This centrist, Christian Democratic party sees itself entirely in the tradition of De Gasperi, who as Italian prime minister in 1946 negotiated the autonomy of the united region of Trentino–South Tyrol with Austrian Foreign Minister Karl Gruber (Steininger 2006). Within this region the Italian-speaking population was in a clear majority. Then, in 1992, the two provinces negotiated their own separate autonomy. However, other parties questioned the separate status of Trentino as an almost exclusively Italian-speaking province, for a number of reasons. In this situation the Museo Casa Gasperi helped Dellai and his party consolidate their own stance within a party system that had been in flux since the collapse of Democrazia Cristiana in 1994, enabling them to define their own position more clearly and also providing lasting legitimation of the autonomy of the Trentino province, on a par with the predominantly German-speaking South Tyrol. Regional political forces and regions with their own autonomous rights therefore have different interests in using their own museums to Europeanise their regional narratives of history and identity, modernise them and secure them politically. Granted, for the moment this is mostly a Western European phenomenon, which itself indicates a high degree of regional differentiation in the Europeanisation of the museal field. In the new Eastcentral European member states, by comparison, EU regions are primarily administrative entities and the recent history is markedly different, espe-

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cially in the successor states of the former Yugoslavia. The reactivation of integral nationalism, dating from the end of Cold War and the (renewed) formation of states like Slovakia or the Baltic countries, prevents the formation of regions with any meaningful degree of autonomy and rights such as developed in the Tyrol. Here there can be no recourse to the museal salvation provided by transnational and European narratives of integration as a way of limiting, or indeed overcoming, ethnic conflicts.

State Institutions in European Policy for Culture and Museums As this chapter on state institutions has shown, the constellations of actors in the museal field – as political scientists would put it – are much more complex than the literature of political science and sociology suggests, with its focus on elites and political processes in Brussels. Some member states and sub-national regions with powers in cultural policy have staunchly defended their primary competence in this field. Nonetheless, the article on culture was added to the Maastricht Treaty, and the Lisbon Treaty made majority voting the rule. A closer examination of European cultural policy in the EU as a multilevel governance system, however, shows that there is no simple dichotomy between, on the one hand, the overarching aims of supranational institutions such as the European Commission and the EP, and on the other the defensive posture of national and sub-national state actors seeking the cultural integration of their nation state. Instead, pro-European elites at every level see a cultural deficit in European integration. In particular, regional elites in sub-national territories with strong identities and powers of their own take it for granted that European and regional cultural identities are mutually reinforcing. Strengthening such identities can serve to keep a centralising nation state in check, or to control the centre of a decentralised or federalised member state. It is evident from the way in which member states have increasingly embraced the open method of coordination that they are themselves taking the initiative in furthering transnational cooperation, and ultimately the greater cultural integration of Europe – not least because a deficiency of EU legitimacy poses a danger to the position of pro-European elites in their domestic environment, not just in Brussels. It therefore seems appropriate to understand European cultural policy as a sector where the political and societal differentiation of integration into centre and periphery is especially visible. The centre here, however, is not Brussels as the centre of political decision-making, but rather a kind

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of core Europe in which political and cultural elites feel somewhat more strongly devoted to European integration, work within relatively strong networks and have more knowledge of the EU, its rules and its practices. This central question of centre and periphery will resurface in the following chapters’ analysis of Europeanisation as cultural practice. The EU’s eastward expansion between 2004 and 2007 has highlighted not only the economic but also the cultural difference between centre and periphery in the EU, all the while increasing the sense of need for cultural integration. Viviane Reding, the Christian Democrat EU commissioner from Luxembourg who after 1999 was first mainly involved with culture and education and subsequently with media and the information society, said before the eastward expansion in 2004 that only culture could ‘both here and there create a feeling of belonging to the same community bound by fate’ (Holthoff 2008: 56). This was probably an exaggerated hope, given the very different cultures of memory across an increasingly diverse EU, as will be shown in chapter 5. Examining the role of different state institutions in a multilevel EU, though key, is not the only crucial consideration in gaining greater insights into the governance of European cultural policy. Much more important is to overcome an exclusive focus on Brussels as a decision-making centre and state institutions. As the following chapter will elucidate, societal actors play a very important role in cultural and museum policy as they Europeanise cultural practice from below on the basis of a slowly forming, partly transnational European society.

Chapter 3

N E Societal Actors in the Europeanisation of the Museum Field L    ,     museums during the nineteenth century often followed from the initiative of private patrons, nationally minded associations or groups of citizens (Pomian 2007). Today, on the other hand, construction and maintenance of historical museums is usually considered a state responsibility. Private patrons are more likely to found art museums in anticipation of gaining a greater degree of public recognition (Kessen 2004). Large businesses generally focus their attention on museums devoted to the history of technology and the sciences, when they are not sponsoring art exhibitions. Without the support of state institutions, major projects such as the House of European History (HEH) generally cannot be realised. However, many societal organisations are also engaged in the symbolic and cultural politics of Europe. For example, the International Charlemagne Prize of Aachen is neither financed nor conferred by the city of Aachen. Instead, citizens of the city, who through their own committee still choose the recipients of the prize, have financed it since 1949. Societal organisations and foundations of this kind initiate and finance numerous temporary travelling exhibitions involving the theme of the history of integration. Of course, these do not attract the same attention or the same number of visitors as major national museums, but they do have an extensive geographical range, both within individual member states and beyond their borders. This is, for example, the case with a travelling exhibition staged in 2010 in Spain by the Spanish section of the European Movement and dedicated to the history of this organisation; an exhibition of portraits of Charlemagne Prize winners, organised in 2007 by the Society for the Conferring of the International Charlemagne Prize of Aachen during the German European Council presidency in the Justus Lipsius building in

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Brussels and subsequently adopted by the Council as a permanent exhibition; a more extensive exhibition dedicated to the Charlemagne Prize featuring an interactive stela, first shown in the Aachen city hall in 2009 and then in 2010 in the Robert Schuman European Centre linked to the House of Robert Schuman in Scy-Chazelles, and that is to be transformed into a travelling exhibition; and a travelling exhibition of the Fondazione Alcide De Gaspari in Rome entitled Alcide De Gaspari. Un europeo venuto dal futuro, which has been shown in several Italian cities since 2003 and was in Berlin in 2004. EU institutions create incentives for societal actors to participate in the formulation of European cultural policy and in the wider Europeanisation of the museal field. The European Commission seeks to involve social groups in the development of new political fields and funding programmes to enhance their legitimacy and gain the agreement of the European Council and the EP. These incentives include rapid access to information to ensure societal actors’ successful applications for funding from different EU sources to support cross-border projects; support to assist societal actors in extending their networks transnationally, linking with similar museums in other countries, or gaining the assistance of institutionalised museum organisations; or – for instance, in an advisory capacity as experts – making contact with transnational political elites, and thereby acquiring a distinct social or institutional profile. And societal actors can also, of course, initiate projects of their own inspired by the fact that they share – or reject – European institutions’ normative assumptions and goals of cultural integration.

Non-governmental Organisations: The Politics of Museums and Exhibitions The main societal actors initiating projects are non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which pursue societal aims, often began their activities on a local basis, and build and use networks in Europe and beyond. NGOs have steadily become more involved in presenting their work in exhibitions or museums. A good example of this concerns NGOs that focus their activities on migration. The Europeanisation of external EU border control, launched in 2004 with the foundation of the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union (FRONTEX), prompted the engagement of NGOs with an interest in human rights, which consequently now are active on the geopolitical borders of the EU.1 They not

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only conduct political and media campaigns for refugees from North Africa, the Near East and Asia arriving at the borders of the EU via Turkey or the Mediterranean, but also support these refugees by helping them apply for asylum, move within the countries where they first arrive, or even travel on to other EU countries. This is true, for example, of the local Cologne NGO No One is Illegal and of the European-based No Border Network, a loose association of many local, regional and national NGOs. The socalled border camps sited near the external EU borders are an expression of their common, networked engagement. Academics also collaborate with NGOs to form larger-scale European networks. Hence the network Migration in Europa e.V. places itself ‘at the centre of information, education, counselling, research and networking in Europe’.2 The partners in this network include universities, research institutes, documentation centres, cultural institutions and youth initiatives. The network is supported both by the German Federal Centre for Political Education, and by the EU through the Grundtvig Programme. In 2008 the network organised an international conference around the question of how a museum might represent and debate migration. Both academics and museum practitioners at the conference discussed the institutional constraints and substantive challenges arising from the musealisation of migration. Although the aims, habitus and social milieus of this network and other NGOs vary greatly, they all recognise how useful and effective museal representation can be for their own purposes, as chapter 6 will show in detail.

Historians: Writing History and Histories, and Advising Institutions Historians are also involved in the Europeanisation of the museum field. In the years following the Second World War, some of them rewrote European history with enormous enthusiasm to legitimize the new process of Western European integration. Many of these historians were still influenced by the pan-European ideals of the interwar period, or were strongly Catholic in orientation and rooted in the discourse of Occidentalism (Conze 2005; Schildt 1999), where the medieval period as a lost era of European unity generally functioned as a reference point (Duchardt 2006–07). Even Walter Lipgens, one of the first contemporary historians of post-1945 integration, appears to fall within a Catholic tradition of anti-Prussian historical writing that gained renewed legitimacy after the experience of National Socialism. His political allegiances as a member of

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the federalist Europa Union and a dedicated supporter of Konrad Adenauer’s policy of Franco-German reconciliation and western integration led Lipgens to support integration through his writing (Kaiser 2002). The last major text in this federalist tradition was Jean-Baptiste Duroselle’s (1990) L’Europe: histoire de ses peuples, which was translated into several languages; it presents a teleological story of European history as the victory of reason over nationalism and conflict (Gilbert 2008). The European Liaison Committee of Historians was founded in 1982 with the support of the European Commission (Le Boulay 2010) and since then has organised regular conferences on the history of the EU, and has also, since 1995, published the Journal of European Integration History, whose contents are mostly printed in English. As Antonio Varsori (2010) has shown, in the 1990s this committee became preoccupied with attaining its own independence to keep from making the history of integration’s position in mainstream historical studies any more marginal than it already was. Correspondingly, the European Commission’s interest in this association of contemporary historians declined, and its attention shifted to lawyers, economists and political scientists as more likely allies in tackling problems of European governance. In a third phase of the historiography of integration, professionalisation has become more marked (Seidel 2010b), and the autonomy of historical research has received greater emphasis, which hardly appears compatible with privileged access to selected sources granted by the European Commission or other EU institutions. These were, for example, the basis of a study of the Commission’s own history between 1958 and 1972 that was both initiated and paid for by the European Commission (Dumoulin 2007). Nonetheless, historians retain a presence as experts with an advisory function in large-scale museum projects, including the EP’s HEH, for despite the professionalisation of historical studies, EU institutions regard them as potentially playing a role in the cultural legitimation of European integration. As the British historian Eric Hobsbawm (1992: 3) once wrote about the historian’s role in the nineteenth-century process of national integration, now once more the object of comparative study (Berger and Lorenz 2010): ‘Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin addicts: we supply the essential raw materials to the market. Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past … and historians are the people who produce it’. EP President Hans-Gert Pöttering appointed the German historian HansWalter Hütter chairperson of the expert group whose report Parliament accepted in December 2008. When the presidency passed from Pöttering, as a German member of the European People’s Party (EPP), the largest

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parliamentary group, to Jerzy Buzek, a Polish member of the EPP, the chair of the HEH advisory board likewise moved to a Polish historian, Włodzimierz Borodziej. Although the HEH was originally intended to focus on the history of the EU since 1945, only one historian in the first expert group, Michel Dumoulin, had specialist knowledge of European integration and its historiography, and none of the members of the newly formed advisory board had any such knowledge. Today, of course, few contemporary historians confine their perspective to traditional national histories. Anything transnational, European and global is seen as modern and fashionable, so historians advising national and regional history museums try to open up historical representation in this direction. The EP can at least claim that it wants to orient the planned museum in Brussels to a European perspective. It is not always easy to manage the way historians function as experts in committees, however. The organisers of the Musée de l’Europe (Musée) project and of the exhibition C’est notre histoire! discovered this while working with their own committee. In her interview, Els Witte, now emeritus professor of history at the Flemish university in Brussels, criticised the initiators of the project for their partisan ‘Christian-Catholic’ perspective: ‘it was a kind of history, but it was their history’. Dumoulin, now emeritus professor of history at the Wallonian university of Louvain-la-Neuve, maintained that his role as a historian was chiefly that of a fig leaf for the committee and that ‘no real consultation’ ever took place. The organisers’ plans for the representation of recent European history in C’est notre histoire! and especially of decolonisation, he argued, ‘amounted to those of the Propagandaabteilung of the European Commission’. Because of this he became less and less involved with the work of the committee (Interview Dumoulin). By contrast, most of the historians working in the EP group of experts enumerated their preferences regarding which transnational and European aspects should be taken into account. However, the final report considerably shortened and consolidated this laundry list so that the actual planners of the museum might enjoy the greatest possible leeway in their work, which started in 2011.

Museum Practitioners: Socialisation, Objectives, Norms Museum practitioners – the directors and staff of museums, together with freelance curators – are perhaps more significant than academic historians as potential carriers of Europeanisation of the museum field. Their interest is not, however, necessarily channelled into reinforcing the treatment

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of European integration in national, regional and other museums. This ambivalence on the part of museum practitioners is explained by the fact that the representation of integration as EU integration – rather than as a broader process of transnational society formation – follows a standard format as a history of treaties and institutions, as was evident in the House of History of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn until its permanent exhibit was revised in 2011. This type of integration history has been described as boring and lacking appeal to visitors in respect of both the selected objects and the text that goes with them (Interview Kraus). Museum practitioners are as a rule far more interested in organising both their permanent and special exhibitions around issues such as trade, migration, intercultural relations and cultural transfer (Interview Tietmeyer), which are issues and political domains that the EU in many ways defines or regulates, so that they at least have potential for dealing with integration more indirectly. Several factors determine the museum practitioners’ commitment to the various forms of Europeanisation of the museum field. Two such factors arise from the structural context in which museum practitioners work. The first concerns the funding of the museum, together with the material resources and time at its disposal. The gap between major large museums in wealthy states and small museums in countries with serious budgetary difficulties has grown larger since the onset of the economic crisis, exacerbated in some cases by drastic budgetary cuts since 2008. Of course, variations in levels of funding do not have uniform effects. The level of funding enjoyed by the Swiss National Museum in Zurich, for example, has not significantly changed, and it has even been able to plan an annex devoted to contemporary history. According to one of the curators, Erika Hebeisen (Interview), it thus has little incentive to participate in large-scale cooperation with similar institutions in other countries. The same is true of the Imperial War Museum in London, which – apart from lending material to other institutions – has never cooperated with another national war museum (Interview Charman). In other cases, however, the availability of substantial material resources allows directors and curators to make significant investments in projects they wish to support for their own reasons. This is true, for instance, of the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology in Oslo. On the other hand, a shortage of material and financial resources incentivizes stronger cooperation with other museums and the involvement of additional external funding sources, particularly the EU, to develop networking, staffing and common exhibition projects. The second structural factor is the changing function of the museum, above all in larger cities that attract significant numbers of tourists. The

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expansion of tourism in major cities has meant that national museums, originally conceived as serving a local and national public, have had to adjust their marketing and self-representation to better profit from the increasing numbers of foreign visitors they are attracting (John, Schild and Hieke 2010; Gostmann and Schatilow 2008). Around 40 per cent of the summer visitors to the National Museum of Scotland are from overseas, principally from Continental Europe (Interview Barry). Over 80 per cent of those visiting the South Tyrolean Museum of History, sited in a region that attracts tourists in both winter and summer, come from abroad, mostly from Germany but also from Switzerland, France, the Netherlands and Great Britain (Interviews Heiss, de Rachewiltz). Some institutions are founded primarily with tourists in mind, such as the Touriseum in the Palace of Trautmansdorff near Meran, which deals only with transnational aspects of South Tyrolean history, covering tourism, the growing of apples and the apple trade.3 Rising numbers of foreign visitors have led to a necessary increase in the number of multilingual descriptive texts and audio guides. In addition, curators increasingly face the challenge of presenting their material in a way that is accessible to foreign visitors. This can itself serve as an impulse for increased international cooperation between museums through, for instance, digital networking, and it also creates openings for the transnational and European dimension of national, regional and local histories. Besides these structural conditions, the extent to which curators engage in the various forms of Europeanisation of the museal field depends very much on three important social factors concerning the curators themselves: their socialisation, vocational objectives, and norms or political values. Museums may be hierarchically organised, but curators often still have some freedom to organise their own work, for example to initiate cooperative ventures, or revise sections of permanent exhibitions in a particular way. The first social factor is disciplinary and professional socialisation. In the past, the predominance of a particular disciplinary training could present a significant obstacle to a stronger transnational and European orientation. For example, the National Museum of Denmark, like many other Scandinavian museums, was for many years dominated by curators who had studied local history or ethnology and whose principal interest lay in the Nordic traditions of local and regional ‘popular culture’, which itself was closely connected to national identity and tended to be treated as if it were threatened by external forces (Rentzhog 2007; Rasmussen 1966). It was in this context that Annette Vasström, like most of the other ethnologists in her museum, voted against Denmark’s accession to the European

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Community in 1972, and even for some time afterwards was not especially keen on transnational and European elements in her museum (Interview Vasström). Since then the internationalisation of the training of young curators in higher education and in museums has ‘rapidly gained ground’ (Interview Kraus). The academic discourses of history, ethnology and museum studies have quickly developed a transnational, European and global perspective and content. Furthermore, the many curators who belong to ‘generation Erasmus’ (Murphy-Lejeune 2002) and have studied abroad find it far easier than older curators to engage in cross-border cooperation in a domain that is both intercultural and multilingual. This is especially acknowledged in the new multilateral study programmes for future curators, such as the MA in Museologia Europea of the European Museum Academy. Meanwhile, students often complete practical elements of their training in foreign museums. MA students from Berlin, for instance, work in the National Museum of Scotland during the summer and have been a constant source of ideas for a stronger transnational and European emphasis in the permanent exhibition (Interviews Barry, Daglish). Some museums already oblige trainees to spend a few months in a foreign institution. The House of History in Bonn, for one, coordinates one part of its curator training with institutions in Belgium and France.4 In this respect ‘Europe’ has become an increasingly important part of the daily experience and professional practice of those working in museums, which can in turn increase the regular and positively felt presence of the transnational and European experience (Risse 2010; Risse, Herrmann and Brewer 2004). However, the intensified Europeanisation of study and training can produce new barriers, at least temporarily. All French curators, for example, are still trained centrally in a Grande École, the Institut national du patrimoine (INP). In this way a national, social and cultural elite, closed to the outside world, continues to be reproduced (Allen 2010). This has made it more difficult for French curators to cooperate with their counterparts in other countries as the use of the French language declines in cooperative ventures between museums and in European museum organisations (Interview Jungblut). Nonetheless, the INP has, together with other French elite schools, recently adopted a strategy of internationalisation and now seeks to become a ‘European actor’ (Nadalini 2009). Among other features, this strategy involves systematic, long-term cooperation with European partners that is not limited to bilateral contacts and includes sending trainee curators to foreign institutions for the practical phases of their training. Secondly, curators considering their participation in the Europeanisation of the museum field must take into account the vocational field in

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which they wish to work. For many curators of the Erasmus generation, transnational cooperation and projects have made, and continue to make, national, regional or local museums more attractive as employers. European cooperation in the form of, say, jointly organised exhibitions often demands much more of both institutions and curators because of particular legal, economic and logistic challenges. Such projects might not always be materially worthwhile for institutions, but the curators themselves can find them rewarding at the intellectual, cultural and social level (Interviews Jungblut), perhaps thus strengthening their own affective ties to Europe, if not necessarily to the EU itself. Finally, the third social factor concerns curators’ own norms and political preferences. These are not limited to individual curators’ attitudes to the EU itself or to any given form of its development, since this is usually not the prime axis of their interest. Instead, the majority of curators interviewed for this book see their museums as a cultural bulwark against national populist parties and their demands for an exclusively national narrative of history and identity. This viewpoint shifts the emphasis to representing and understanding the nation not only as pluralistic, but as sharing many features in common with other countries and standing in a reciprocal relationship with them – that is, as an ‘histoire croisée’ (Werner and Zimmerman 2002). For example, a section of the Swiss National Museum in Zurich entitled No-one has always been here deals with current Swiss residents, very many of whom are either Swiss nationals with one or two foreign parents, or foreigners themselves. This initiative is specifically directed against Christoph Blocher and his right-wing populist Swiss People’s Party, demonstrating (Interview Hebeisen) that ‘the ideal-typical Swiss person is really in a minority’. In the same way, the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen does not designate any object as typically Danish or construct any coherent national history. Autobiographical memories of middle- and working-class Danes appear alongside those of an aristocrat, a Greenlander and an immigrant. According to Annette Vasström, no answer is given, either by the permanent exhibition or to journalists, to the frequently asked question of what might be specifically Danish, because the curators wish to oppose the nationalist propaganda of the Danish People’s Party. The same is true of the Museum of Copenhagen, which in 2010 staged the exhibition At blive køpenhavner, which deals with Copenhagen as a city of migration. The National History Museum in the Netherlands was similarly orientated, as from the very beginning its co-directors opposed a national, introverted representation of Dutch history involving a historical canon of key Dutch events and persons (‘Nationaal Museum’ 2009). In October 2010 a centre-

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right government that was courting the support of Geert Wilders’ rightwing populist Party for Freedom cut the financing for construction of the museum; then, in June 2011 the museum plan was discarded altogether (‘Nationaal Historisch Museum’ 2009; ‘Geen subsidie’ 2009).

Museum Organisations: Services, Exchange of Information, Lobbying Alongside individual historians and curators, museums and their own European organisations are themselves important social agents in European cultural policy and cross-border cultural practice. As in other EU policy areas, European associations composed of national associations are privileged intermediaries between the Commission and member states in the development of policies and programmes, since they can claim to be highly representative. This is particularly true of Europa Nostra, a large pan-European platform made up of about 250 NGOs from forty-five countries that supports the preservation of cultural heritage and is particularly concerned with protecting national monuments. The declared aim of this organisation is to influence decision-making processes in Brussels and national capitals. Not until 1948 was the globally organised International Council of Museums (ICOM) formed (Boylan 2006: 419). Its regional arm, ICOM Europe, which became active in 2003, is made up of national associations that organise both museums and persons who work in museums or conduct research about museums. According to ICOM Europe, Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century is ‘characterized by strong, but ambiguous attempts to determine its destiny and future role in the world. Together with other European cultural institutions and active members of the civil society its museums can contribute to this process in a very profound way’.5 The organisation’s mission statement draws upon principles, values and issues commonly encountered in the discourse of EU institutions. Migration is described as important for the cultural identity of Europe. Foreigners should be met with empathy. Freedom and human rights are to be strengthened and defended both inside and outside Europe.6 ICOM Europe’s list of activities includes its work facilitating relationships with relevant state and non-state organisations as an ‘ambassador’ for European museums. ICOM Europe is a European regional organisation and part of a global organisation, and has national member organisations throughout Europe, not just in the EU, so it is oriented as much to the Council of Europe as it is

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to the EU. Moreover, ICOM Europe prioritises internal services and functions for national member associations, museums and individual members. Among other aims, the organisation seeks to function as a platform for the efficient exchange of information between national associations, facilitating connections with other regional organisations and promoting ‘good practice’ through exchanges between museums and their employees.7 Within ICOM, the International Committee for the Training of Personnel coordinates common standards in the training of museum employees and in so doing promotes their professionalisation, efforts towards which have become more marked since the 1980s (Interview Gößwald). In contrast to ICOM Europe, the Network of European Museum Organisations (NEMO) was founded in 1992 with the express purpose of influencing the development of EU cultural policy after its integration into the Maastricht Treaty (NEMO 2008). Frank Birkebæk, director of the Danish Roskilde Museum and initiator of the network, cites two principal reasons for the foundation of NEMO. Anticipating the Danish EU Council Presidency in 1993 and having the financial support of the Copenhagen government, he first of all wished to establish an open, inclusive network that would stand as a response to the increasing bureaucratisation of Europe. Secondly, he wished to assemble the existing museum umbrella organisations in a network that would better represent their common interests in Brussels. Like other pan-European organisations, the European Commission played an important role in institutionalising the initial idea. Several founding members of NEMO have noted that their organisation took proper shape only after they had gained the EU’s attention (Interviews Birkebæk, Huovinen, Taylor). The then European Commission director responsible for culture, the Greek Antonius Kosmopolis, extended a form of ‘personal patronage’ (Interview Taylor) to the network. NEMO’s organisation replicates the membership conditions for the EU. Only associations that are linked to EU member states have full voting rights. Organisations from states associated with the EU all have the same status in NEMO and may not vote. In practice, however, the principal obstacle to effective internal cooperation is the fact that the umbrella organisations of North-west and Central European states are well organised and politically influential. Eastern and Southern European states, on the other hand, often lack suitable contact institutions for NEMO, so in many cases these countries are represented by officials from state institutions involved in cultural policy. The statutes of NEMO clearly state that its task is ‘to advise all official EU authorities concerning matters of interest to the museums and the work with the cultural heritage of Europe’.8 Online, NEMO also indi-

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cates that lobbying the EU and its institutions is one of its core activities. Among its tasks it counts making contact and meeting with representatives of the Commission and the EP; taking positions on issues such as copyright, financial initiatives and the societal role of museums; meeting with other state actors, such as representatives of the rotating European Council presidency; and cultivating contacts with other societal organisations and networks with similar interests in the cultural sector. The national organisations within NEMO often, however, lend greater emphasis to their individual members and thus treat NEMO primarily as a conduit for exchanges of persons and information that further the work of their museums. Umbrella organisations like ICOM Europe and NEMO, composed of museum associations and museums, fulfil an important function by facilitating the work of their members. Even if, like NEMO, they depend to some extent on an annual subsidy from the European Commission, they are better placed financially to gather, structure and convey to members information about EU policy processes that relate to cultural matters. In addition, they can represent the interests of museum associations and museums at a European level. Besides serving these ends at the EU level, umbrella organisations of this kind can also help their members gain access to resources such as, for example, the EU’s financial provisions for the self-organisation of museum associations and museums in Europe, or the financing available through the Culture 2007–2013 programme. Like all other groupings of national associations that are active in EU politics (Greenwood 2011), umbrella organisations such as ICOM Europe and NEMO must contend with clear limits to the actual influence they wield. Their prominent role in European cultural policy is based upon their broad membership and representative nature, both of which the Commission and the EP require to legitimate the political process, and upon which they accordingly lay great emphasis. But meanwhile, a broad membership implies that only the lowest common denominator of interests can be effectively represented. Moreover, NEMO’s founding members were anxious for their new organisation to be open and inclusive, in contrast to what they perceived as the hierarchical and exclusive structures in Brussels (Interview Birkebæk). The resulting internal organisation structures are indeed possibly more democratic, but they also make lobbying more difficult. So far NEMO has made little impact in Brussels (Interview Weide), although its accession to the organisation Cultural Action Europe in 2010 was intended to rectify this. For this reason, new initiatives in European cultural and museum policy often originate with actors who work at both national and transnational

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levels. Because they are not organised in a markedly hierarchical manner, they are able to react more quickly and flexibly. Alongside the umbrella organisations, loosely organized networks facilitate exchange and learning in respect of the cultural practice of museums, and smooth cultural transfer.

Micro-networks: Politics, Academia and Culture The EU has only subsidiary competences in the field of culture. Its limited funding is divided among many programmes. Moreover, multiple state and societal actors populate the museum field, so decision-making is fragmented and not very hierarchical. These factors cause cultural policy to be more strongly marked by networks than most other EU policy areas (Kaiser 2009). These networks have significant resources at their disposal, the most important being information about political processes in the EU, about the best means of obtaining funding and about legal and cultural barriers to cross-border cooperation. Besides this, many networks facilitate valuable contacts between politics and culture. Anyone who is not part of such a network or fails to build one is shut out from information and contacts. There are various kinds of networks in the museum field. Among them are micro-networks linking politics, academia and museums that initiate large-scale projects such as the HEH. Others seek to establish new funding lines. Networks between similar museums in different countries open up access to European institutions and funding, or support mutual transnational learning and transfers of personnel through cooperation, or dedicate themselves to the cross-border exchange of museum specialists. Meanwhile, macro-networks offer member museums and curators many informal contacts and have an important networking function. The marked informality of these networks allows some individuals, who are familiar with the structure of networks and able to use their resources optimally, to acquire and exercise a great deal of influence. The origins of the HEH provide a clear example of the way in which an effective, coherent micro-network can link politics, academia and culture. The Musée project, mothballed because it lacked financing and a suitable building, had provided the idea for such a museum. German MEP HansGert Pöttering took the proposal to the EP in cooperation with Ludger Kühnhardt, one of the three directors of the Center for European Integration Studies at the University of Bonn, and Hans Walter Hütter, director of the House of History of the Federal Republic of Germany, also in Bonn. Pöttering, a Catholic member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU),

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was born in the Emsland region, a Catholic area; originally elected to the EP in 1979 as member for Osnabück, Emsland and Ostfriesland, he has since then held his seat continuously. From 1999 to 2007 he chaired the powerful parliamentary party of the EPP, and in 2007 he was elected EP president for two and half years. Since 2009 he has been chair of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, a foundation with close ties to the CDU. Pöttering worked closely with Kühnhardt on the project before announcing his plan for a museum of European history in his inaugural speech. Also a Catholic, Kühnhardt had completed his habilitation at Bonn and then worked for a few years as a speechwriter for the then German President Richard von Weizsäcker before being appointed professor of political science in Freiburg and moving back to Bonn in 1997. From 2002 to 2006 Kühnhardt was also a member of the CDU’s federal Commission on Values. The two men had known each other since 1983 and had jointly written a number of books on European politics (Kühnhardt and Pöttering 1998, 1994, 1991). In some of his later writings, Kühnhardt (2007: 14; 2005: 137) advocated the creation of a Europe museum in Brussels, but this proposal met with no particular response. It was Pöttering’s elevation to the presidency of the EP that enabled the relaunch of the proposal in a suitable institutional context. In March and September 2007, Kühnhardt drafted two papers on the idea of a HEH (Interview Kühnhardt).9 He did not become a member of the expert group, lest the project be perceived as too close to the CDU. He did however arrange a visit to the House of History of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn for several members of the EP Presidium. Hütter took this opportunity to promote his museum, which had been founded on the initiative of the then Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl, as the model for a modern contemporary history museum, whatever its spatial scope. Hütter earned his doctorate in history from the University of Düsseldorf; also a Catholic CDU member, he was active in local party politics in Mönchengladbach until his appointment as director of the Bonn museum. Hütter chaired the group of experts in 2007–08, and has since 2009 been a member of the advisory board of the Brussels project. The core of the micro-network involving politics, academia and culture consisted therefore of three people – all Catholic, and all members of the CDU from the western borders of Germany. Their European orientation was strongly influenced by the federalist tradition and the policy of Western integration fostered by the Catholic German federal chancellors Adenauer and Kohl (Kaiser 2007). From the outset their common aim was to use the museum project to strengthen European cultural integration, thereby reinforcing the legitimacy of the EU. Although the expanded Eu-

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ropean People’s Party retained a federalist character, Pöttering knew from his extensive European parliamentary experience that the project he proposed in February 2007 clearly required a broader political foundation. To this end he worked closely with the Dane Harald Rømer, secretary general of the EP from 2007 to 2009, when he retired and became coordinator of an internal parliamentary working group on the museum project. Rømer also remained in close contact with his successor, Klaus Welle, who for his part had headed Pöttering’s cabinet before becoming EP secretary general; he had also been secretary general of the EPP parliamentary party, and before that of the EPP. Thus he had worked closely with Pöttering for many years and had learned ‘to keep the ball down’ (Interview Kühnhardt) and thereby shield the project from any political party conflict. In line with the EP’s tradition of a de facto grand coalition between the EPP and the socialists, Pöttering used his close contacts with the Spanish socialist and EP Vice-President Miguel Angel Martínez, who has been an MEP since 1999 and was made the special mediator co-ordinating the project on behalf of the EP. Martínez, who speaks German, was president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe from 1992 to 1996 and played a part in the awarding of its 1995 Museum Prize to the House of History of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn.10 It was during this episode that Martínez got to know the Bonn museum and its then deputy director, Hütter.11 Pöttering and Martínez subsequently developed the political basis for the museum project, persuading the former Belgian Commissioner Etienne Davignon and the former Irish Commissioner and Director General of the World Trade Organisation, Peter Sutherland, among others, to join the board of trustees. Both of them had contacts with numerous European and transatlantic elite networks. They were joined by Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth Androulla Vassiliou, as well as representatives of all parliamentary parties, including even Wojciech Roszkowski, a member of the Polish Catholic-conservative Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, the Party of Law and Justice, which is in fact allied with fellow Eurosceptic parties in the EP. The CDU MEP Doris Pack also became a trustee, having led the Parliamentary Committee for Culture, Youth, Education, Media and Sport since 2009; as did two French MEPs: Gérard Onesta of the Greens, and Alain Lamassoure, a member of the Union for a Popular Movement and formerly the French Minister for Europe (1993–95). These last two were both members of the budget committee that would have to approve the construction and maintenance costs of the museum. Appointments to the expert committee and advisory board were likewise made with an eye to political and regional balance. In the process, Pöttering informally solicited suggestions

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from politicians he felt he could trust (Interview Pöttering). Thus, he succeeded in achieving cross-party support for his project. The EP agreed to fund the conversion of the Eastman Building in Brussels, located close to the Parliament, into a home for the future HEH – especially since José Manuel Barroso had, as president of the European Commission, agreed to contribute to the museum’s running costs. Like Pöttering, Astrid Weij, who works for the Netherlands Institute for Heritage in Amsterdam, created her own micro-network to put the idea of the Lending to Europe programme on the EU agenda, which will be discussed in more detail in chapter 4. While working as a political adviser for international issues in the Dutch Ministry for Education, Culture and Science in the second half of 2004, she was asked to develop a cultural initiative for the Dutch presidency of the EU. This initially brought her into close contact with Dutch museums and museum organisations, including the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and its Director of Collections Peter Sigmund. Its Director General Ronald de Leeuw later headed the international group of experts that drafted the report Lending to Europe, which was presented to the Council of Ministers of Culture on 23 May 2005.12 The museum’s Director of Management Jan-Willem Sieburgh was also a key player in matters of insuring loaned objects and collections. Other consequential actors were Antoinette Visser, later head of the Historical Museum of The Hague, but then working for the Collections Institute of the Netherlands, which was part of the Ministry of Education; and Annemarie Vels Heijn, who represented the Netherlands Museums Association in the initial discussions of the planned EU initiative. Having completed internal preparations, Weij contacted the then Permanent Representative for the Netherlands in the EU Julie Mebes (Interview Weij). Mebes’s office first of all helped the Dutch initiators of the project make contact with other member states, as well as their ministries and museum organisations. At the same time it arranged a discussion with Kosmopolis, the European Commission director with responsibility for culture, who henceforth gave his support to the project. Having achieved this, Weij then used the Dutch Ministry for Education to organise a series of conferences on loans among museums. The series extended into the period after the Dutch EU presidency and thereby elicited broad-based support from member states. Finally, various Lending to Europe projects were adopted as part of the Culture 2007–2013 programme, which financed them (Pettersson et al. 2010). At the same time, some member states began to use the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) in the EU to simplify the loan process by reducing legal barriers. Cooperation with European museum organisations such as ICOM Europe and NEMO served, mainly

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during this second phase, to anchor the Lending to Europe programme more firmly in the museum field and thus render it relatively autonomous with regard to EU funding in the future. Nonetheless, effective support from the national government remained important. Although the leadership of the Dutch permanent representation in Brussels has changed several times since the programme was first initiated, Lending to Europe has remained on its agenda as a ‘Dutch’ project (Interview Weij).

Museum Networks: Resources, Mobilisation, Marketplace Even when they were created for other purposes, many networks involving similar museums in different countries become channels through which European funding is sought. One such case is the new network involving four memorials and museums devoted to the so-called founding fathers of the EU: Monnet in Houjarray near Paris, Schuman in Scy-Chazelles near Metz, Adenauer in Rhöndorf near Bonn and De Gasperi in Pieve Tesino near Trento. The initiative behind this network’s creation came from representatives of the new Museo Casa De Gasperi and of the Luigi Sturzo Institute who wished to anchor their museum more firmly in the European museum landscape as a source of legitimacy (Interview Zorzi). In 2006 they invited representatives of the three other institutions to their museum’s inauguration in Pieve Tesino, as well as to a conference in Rome where they could exchange information (Interviews Zorzi, Franz). The Robert Schuman European Centre followed up by organising two conferences to foster academic collaboration in 2007 and 2009. The conference proceedings were published (Bitsch 2010) as part of a project for promoting publications about the four politicians in various languages (Interviews Thull, Zorzi). In the meantime this network became semi-institutionalised: since 2009 it has had a joint prospectus presenting all four institutions and their collaborative efforts, and since 2010 it has had its own website.13 All four institutions enjoy substantial official funding: the EU funds the Jean Monnet House, the federal German government funds the Konrad Adenauer House and the Robert Schuman European Centre and the Museum De Gasperi are funded by the regions where they are located. Nonetheless, in 2010 the four institutions developed another initiative in which they see themselves as ‘points of support’ for ‘political tourism’ involving, for example, integrated coach tours to some of the museums, featuring a programme of complementary activities for either older or younger participants. At a Brussels press conference in May 2010, the four institutions explained their objective of promoting ‘reflection upon the influence of

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the past on the future of Europe’. ‘Transnational tours’ of this kind, they suggested, should lend the motto ‘unity in diversity’ ‘concrete meaning’ (Banks 2010). They intended the new initiative primarily to attract attention to institutions outside the main tourist destinations and increase the numbers of visitors. As in the case of the Lending to Europe project, the directors of these institutions also hoped to gain access to EU funding by getting their conception included in the EU’s new cultural framework programme launched in 2014. Another network of similar museums that has existed since 1991 is the International Association of Museums of History (IAMH), a formal global organisation of historical museums. Founded in Paris, the IAMH was dominated by French museums and their staff for many years. Around 180 museums worldwide are now in the IAMH, and whereas its office remains in Marseilles, its executive committee has become more plural (all members are still European, however). ICOM Europe and NEMO resemble networks and offer their members museum-related services alongside their main function of political representation, but the IAMH defines itself exclusively as a ‘network of personal and institutional contacts’.14 The organisation has several working groups that deal with both the theory and the practice of museums and musealisation; it also holds conferences and sporadically publishes material relevant to museums. Its 2010 Berlin symposium, which was jointly organised with the German Historical Museum (DHM) and its associated Flucht, Vertreibung, Versöhnung foundation, was titled Flight, Expulsion and ‘Ethnic Cleansing’: A Challenge for the Work of Museums and Exhibitions Worldwide.15 Rosmarie Beier-de Haan, curator of the DHM and treasurer of the IAMH, conceived the purpose of the conference as a contribution to controversy in both Germany and Poland over the creation of a Centre for the Documentation and Memory of Flight and Expulsion in the Deutschlandhaus, Berlin-Kreuzberg. The IAMH also served as the platform for a network within a network: the so-called European Network of Museums (ENM) founded in Turin in 2000. Its aim was to bring together ‘all museums dealing with Europe’ and to ‘formalize the exchanges with those institutions’.16 Among the members of this network were the DHM and the Berlin Museum of European Cultures, the House of History of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Museum of Civilisations from Europe and the Mediterranean in Marseilles, together with the Jean Monnet House and the Robert Schuman European Centre. Musée project initiators affiliated to the exhibition organiser Tempora intended to use this network not only to increase Europe-wide cooperation among museums that had hitherto been strongly national in orientation, but also to gain support for their plan for a museum of Eu-

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ropean history in Brussels. However, as Camille Mazé (2008: 114) has pointed out, ‘the lack of involvement of East-Central European museums, as well as the limited participation of representatives from southern and northern Europe, meant that ENM created the impression that it “lacked unity” and was “incomplete”’. Another transnational network, the European Museum Academy (EMA), is even more informally organised than the IAMH. Founded in 2009 and based in the Netherlands, it is oriented to the cross-border exchange of curators and museum teachers and is, as a foundation, dedicated to ‘European museum expertise’. The EMA was initiated by experienced museum practitioners whose cooperation arose from their close relationship and collaboration with the late British museologist Kenneth Hudson, especially in the context of the European Museum of the Year Award (Interviews van der Weiden, Negri).17 Among this foundation’s prominent founders and committee members are Wim van der Weiden, an important player in the Dutch museum organisation, ICOM and the European Museum Forum; and the Italian Massimo Negri, who has designed numerous museums with European features and curated many special exhibitions of this kind, and who was director of the European Museum Forum from 1999 to 2009. The EMA is open to participating in educational and exchange programmes for curators, but it generally sees itself less as an educational institution than as an avant-garde society ‘of museum experts of different national and cultural backgrounds united for the advance of museological knowledge based on … proved [sic] capacity in carrying out innovative museum projects’. Through its activities, the EMA seeks to reinforce the museum ‘as a meeting place and as a most promising forum for the development of scientific debate, creativity, social cohesion and cultural dialogue’.18 Networks of this kind, whose organisational forms range from the completely informal to the relatively non-hierarchical and moderately institutionalised, certainly can fulfil several important functions for museums and museum practitioners (Sticht 2000). For one, they raise museums’ profile in both national and European contexts, providing museums with additional resources and recognition through cross-border cooperation under initiatives such as the Museum of the Year Award. As in other areas of EU policy, the opportunity cost of joining European organisations and informal networks is low for museum associations and large national museums. The progressive consolidation of cultural policy within the EU has, at least for these actors, made participation in European networks and networking a routine matter, despite the daily demands of museum work.

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Secondly, European networks can serve to mobilise political and financial support for new museum projects. Often, as in the HEH and Musée projects, the prospects of a museum project’s realisation depend very heavily on the efficiency with which informal networks can generate sufficient institutional and financial support. In other cases, like the transformation of ethnological museums discussed in chapter 1, European organisations and networks at least help legitimate such projects as timely and progressive in a comparative European context, even when policy decisions are made within an exclusively national context and funding is likewise sourced nationally. As the Lending to Europe network and the network of museums dedicated to the so-called founding fathers of the EU have made clear, such networks are capable of influencing the policy agenda of supranational institutions in the EU and facilitating the emergence of new programmes and financial initiatives that in turn enable the realisation of particular museum projects with a European element. Thirdly, European organisations and informal networks serve as a forum for establishing cross-border contacts among museums – and for consolidating further cooperation, which often leads to applications for EU funding. Another of the many possible outcomes of greater cooperation is a process of mutual learning among museum practitioners that eventually enables the cultural transfer of museum practices and their adaptation to local traditions and conditions. Such transfers can, for instance, involve technological choices like the virtualisation of particular collections through improved and increasingly interactive Internet access, or participation in European Internet projects, which are dealt with in chapter 4. But cultural transfers can also involve museal contents themselves, not just their forms; examples include the transformation of historical narratives and representations of Europe’s borders, dealt with in chapters 5 and 6 respectively. In this respect transnational cooperation makes it easier for networked museums and curators to design attractive exhibitions.

Cultural Entrepreneurs: Intercultural Competence, Reputation, Networking To work effectively in the museal field, and perform the kind of functions outlined above, transnational networks have to be initiated, developed, stabilised and managed. This last function falls primarily to museum practitioners, although in some cases (such as that of the EP) politicians can play a short-term role during the start-up phase. Museum practitioners engaged in these functions can be regarded as cultural entrepreneurs con-

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ceptually akin to the ‘policy entrepreneurs’ in political science (Christopoulos 2006). Such a cultural entrepreneur always brings to bear a very particular combination of resources, usually including many years of experience in cross-border collaboration; a high level of linguistic and other intercultural competences; a reputation as a leading museum practitioner, gained for instance through the foundation of a new museum or the staging of special exhibitions that achieved international recognition; time and money, which are often provided by their employment in a well-resourced museum; and good contacts with non-museal fields (in Bourdieu’s sense) and a developed sense of their particularities. The careers and professional activities of these European cultural entrepreneurs typically involve elements of the following tasks and functions: work as a museum curator or director of collections; membership and committee-level experiences in museum organisations such as ICOM Europe and NEMO; teaching at least on an occasional basis in a university as a visiting professor, symbolising cultural and symbolic capital; scientific publication in disciplines such as history, or in cross-disciplinary museum studies; and a media presence that is at least local, regional or national, and in some cases European. So far, little if any sociological study has analysed the role of such European cultural entrepreneurs (Fyfe 2006). Nonetheless, all the museum practitioners involved in European organisations and networks who were interviewed in the course of researching this book identified the same small group of no more than ten cultural entrepreneurs who, in their opinion, have played a prominent role in European cultural policy and the Europeanisation of the museal field in the last fifteen or twenty years. Among them only Birkebæk, the co-founder of NEMO, is not from one of the original six member states of the European Union. Besides Negri and van der Weiden, Hermann Schäfer and Marie-Paule Jungblut form part of this group, representing two different types of museum practitioners who are active and influential across the European space. Schäfer, a German born in 1942, is the supreme example of one of the very few museum practitioners who move freely between academic, museum and political worlds. Having studied history at Freiburg University, gaining a doctorate and then his Habilitation, he taught both there and in Karlsruhe as an honorary professor. In 1987 he was the first director of the House of History of the Federal Republic of Germany Foundation, and he also served as director of the museum itself until 2006, when he spent the two years before his retirement working as the director of the Section for Culture and Media in the Berlin Chancellery. Since his retirement Schäfer has freelanced as a consultant for museums, culture and politics.

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Schäfer recalls that his childhood and youth in Trier were already marked by both European and international features.19 For instance, at some time or other he had both French and American teachers and he had French friends from an early age. His strong orientation to France later determined the choice of topic for his Habilitation, which dealt with nineteenthcentury technological transfers from Alsace to German regions. Like the project’s initiator, the Christian Democratic Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Schäfer conceived the Bonn House of History as a representation of the contemporary history of (West) Germany and its post-war assimilation to Europe. In 1992 at the international museum fair in Paris, he presented his proposal for a series of exhibitions on Germany and its neighbours, realised in respect of France, the Netherlands, Poland, the Czech Republic and Austria. Following this, Schäfer also participated in plans for European museum projects. Even before the initiation of the Musée, he had suggested setting up a mobile museum of European history on a train or a ship. Nothing came of this idea, nor of the plan he conceived with two colleagues for a Bauhaus Europa in Aachen. At his own House of History, however, he used his position to initiate voluntary exchanges with France, Belgium and later Poland, lend a European accent to young curators in training, and open new transfer pathways between museums. Gradually Schäfer assumed important positions in national and European organisations and committees. In Germany he sat on the advisory boards of various foundations and other museums, such as the House of History Baden-Württemberg and the Landesmuseum für Technik und Arbeit in Mannheim. From 2003 to 2008 he was deputy chair of Germany’s UNESCO Commission. After the House of History of the Federal Republic of Germany won the Council of Europe’s Museum Prize, he became a member of the jury of the European Museum Forum, and in 2009 he co-founded the European Museum Academy. Since 2007, Schäfer has also been a member of the executive committee of the European digital library Europeana. In addition, France recognised his advocacy for stronger Franco-German and European cooperation in the museal field by making him a Chevalier de l’ordre national du mérite. Schäfer owes his sizeable influence over cultural policy and museum strategy to his combination of academic, museal and policy work; the representation of the House of History in Bonn as a reference point for European museums; and the numerous official positions he has held in national and European organisations concerned with the museal field in the broadest sense. The Luxembourger Jungblut, by contrast, was born in 1964 and thus represents an entirely different generation from Schäfer’s. She exemplifies a type of markedly transnational curator strongly oriented

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to museum practice. In 1989, just one year after beginning work on a dissertation at the European University Institute, she curated an exhibition in Luxembourg and shifted directly into museum work. Since 1992 she has been deputy director of two museums belonging to the city of Luxembourg and chief curator of the Luxembourg City History Museum before becoming the director of the Historical Museum of the city of Basle in Switzerland in 2012. Moreover, since 2009 she has taught a course for students pursuing master’s degrees in museum studies at the University of Liège in Belgium. Fluent in several languages and also benefiting from Luxembourg’s longstanding position at the core of transnational European history, Jungblut is clearly predestined to work as a curator with a European accent. In 2006 she was appointed founding director of the Bauhaus Europa in Aachen before the project collapsed. She was a member of the IAMH executive committee and since 2004 she has been head of ICOM’s International Committee of Museums and Collections of Archaeology and History (ICMAH). However, Jungblut’s influence has less to do with her membership of various key committees than with her cross-border work as a curator of European projects and travelling exhibitions. Among the latter are, for instance, the exhibitions Your History – Our History. 4 Cities in Europe: Differences and Similarities, which during 2002 and 2003 was shown in the Luxembourg City History Museum, the Helsinki City Museum, the Museum of Liverpool, and the House of History in Bonn; and Everybody Is a Stranger – Everywhere, organised in 2005 and 2006 in cooperation with the House of History in Bonn and the DHM in Berlin, as well as other museums in Helsinki, Amsterdam, Zurich, Copenhagen and Athens. Jungblut has also curated the European Museum in Schengen, which opened in June 2010 in the town where the 1985 Schengen Agreement removing border controls was signed. Jungblut’s long-term intention is to use this museum, focused on one European theme, as a reference point for the creation of similar museums in other European states (Interview Jungblut). As the examples of the German museum directors Schäfer and Hütter and the House of History in Bonn demonstrate, this is one of several promising strategies for increasing one’s own influence as a cultural entrepreneur involved in transnational exchanges in museum networks, and of securing it in the long term.

Societal Actors in the Europeanisation of the Museal Field As this chapter has shown, a broader understanding of European governance in cultural policy and the Europeanisation of the museal field hinges

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on moving beyond the focus upon state institutions discussed in chapter 2. European cultural and museum policy is fragmented among different policy fields, initiatives and framework programmes, and it is not organised according to any clear hierarchy. This allows societal actors to influence the EU agenda in cooperation – and in competition – with various state institutions; to develop new programmes such as Lending to Europe; and consequently to further the cultural integration of the EU, at least programmatically. These societal actors include NGOs, which have mainly normative motivation and do not generally rely upon state funding; individuals possessing an educational background and professional training relevant to museums; and institutions such as ICOM Europe, NEMO and the EMA, which organise museums and museum practitioners at a European level. Since the foundation of today’s EU, supranational actors, above all the European Commission, have always supported the transnational organisation of these societal actors, both financially and organisationally (Kaiser 2010b). Nonetheless, this does not fully explain these actors’ increasing Europeanisation (Georgakakis and Weisbein 2010: 98; Robert and Vauchez 2010). EU funding for museum or research projects is limited. For academics and curators, the administrative cost of applying for and disbursing such funds often bears little relation to the actual benefits for academic research or museum practice (Gordon 2010: 109). Instead, the Europeanisation of societal actors in the museal field, as in other fields such as the economy, reflects what sociologists have called the gradual dissolution of boundaries in the social lifeworlds of elites (Favell 2008; Mau 2007). Most historians and practitioners active in the museal field still work in their native lands, but their professional experience as guest professors, academic advisers or curators for new museums or special exhibitions is increasingly transnational in character. Moreover, their normative convictions often correspond to intensifying the cultural integration of Europe. Apart from that, their social experiences too are more strongly transnational and European in character. They consequently work to transnationalise and Europeanise social structures to make them more congruent with their experience of a social lifeworld where boundaries are dissolving, and thereby protect the autonomy of their own lifeworlds. As the final section of this chapter has shown, the complex, fragmented, decentralised field of European cultural policy largely operates via structures of communication and decision-making that depend upon informal networks of one kind or another. Political scientists like Karen HeardLauréote (2009: 262–267) or Eva Sørensen and Jacob Torfing (2007, 2005) have demonstrated that political networks can increase democratic partici-

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pation by integrating societal actors, thus reinforcing the legitimacy of the EU, at least in principle. Furthermore, the principle of subsidiarity obliges the European Commission to promote only multilateral programmes of cooperation in which partners from at least three member states participate, which strengthens the importance of networks in gaining access to EU funding. Quite apart from this, however, the Commission is itself committed to this way of strengthening cross-border networking and the European orientations of such partners. Networks in cultural policy can be understood as ‘some form of association between cultural groupings and organisations from different member states that collaborate in joint cultural projects’ (Theiler 2005: 73). Since the Commission published its 2001 white paper, the concept of ‘network’ has assumed a special significance in governance rhetoric: ‘Discursively it connects to notions of things modern, sophisticated, decentralized and flexible with a grass roots feel’ (ibid.). Of course, such networks are prone to quickly fragment and become inefficient because they rely on informal exchange structures and allot cultural entrepreneurs a central role. When they do function effectively, they easily elude the control of democratic representative organs, which is highly problematic in the culturally and institutionally complex and multilayered EU system. Very often networks simply consolidate an existing unequal distribution of resources. This is true not only of political networks as such, but also of networks in the museal field which are not primarily intended to influence political decision-making processes but can become key players in the Europeanisation of the museal field. The Europeanisation of the museal field, in turn, opens up numerous options for museums to do things differently, or on a European basis, in their daily work. This process of Europeanisation as cultural practice – that is, making Europe – is the subject of the following three chapters on collecting ‘Europe’, the museal narration of European history as a shared (contemporary) history, and the discursive and museal representation of the definition of the external and internal borders of Europe and of the EU.

Chapter 4

C E Strategies and Challenges in Transnational Collection Practice D E    ,     tion? A response to this question should start with Boris Groys’s Logik der Sammlung (1997), which describes the differing subjectivities of collector and collected as they figure in the representation of history within and through the museum. The jacket Lieutenant Henry Anderson wore at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 is the same as, yet quite distinct from, the jacket that London’s National Army Museum acquired, conserved and recorded, and today displays. The inclusion of a thing in a museum lends that thing a new level of cultural meaning: it becomes a museal object (Pearce 1994). Therefore, the claim that one is collecting one’s own history as a possession can only be realised if a subject lacking subjectivity – for instance, the nation – intervenes as a ‘curator without specific identity’ (Groys 1997: 51), eliding the distinction between the identity of the collector and that of the collected. Chapter 1 showed how the premises for the emergence of national museums during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have marked collection policy and practice. The ongoing Europeanisation of cultural fields prompts a re-emergence of the question of the object of European or transnational history exhibited in a museum: which objects become European objects, and how? After all, museums cannot always acquire objects as prestigious as the Nobel Peace Prize medal awarded to the European Union (EU) in 2012, which is supposed to be the first object in the collection of the projected HEH. But to be collected, archived and exhibited as history, an object needs not only a material form, but also the idea of a common cultural history. As chapter 1 demonstrated, large-scale European museum projects have so far failed on precisely this point. This is because the twenty-first century so far lacks an entirely viable collecting strategy for a representative pub-

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lic: neither that of the older ‘cabinet of curiosities’ nor that of the modern museum fits the bill. The former strategy was oriented to the princely court and hence diametrically opposed to the current idea and practice of a democratically inclusive museum, whereas the latter contribute to the construction of national identity as an absolute. In these respects, they both played a role in the imperialist and totalitarian projects of the twentieth century. Following the Second World War, the ‘idea of Europe’ was mobilised to supersede such projects. Though the nineteenth-century museum is frequently still considered a model for the musealisation of Europe, many curators see the resulting essentialist representation of European history through canonised objects very critically, as has become apparent in the reconception of the Museum of European Cultures (MEK) and the Museum of Civilisations from Europe and the Mediterranean (MuCEM). Consequently the treatment of collections and objects in current museum practice is not considered properly European. Renée E. Kistemaker (Interview Kistemaker), former curator at the Amsterdam Museum, summed up the viewpoint of her colleagues in Europe’s museums when she stated: ‘We are not collecting with a European perspective’. Our own unrepresentative survey of curators in European museums demonstrated that the majority very much saw their collections as belonging to a European inheritance. However, scrutiny of the reasons for this view reveals that curators base it on vague notions of cultural and historical development. The outcome is that both the works of art by Sephardic Jews acquired by the Museo Sefardo in Toledo and the objects acquired by the Deutsches Auswanderhaus in Bremerhaven are treated as part of a European collection policy, probably on the assumption that the exodus of Sephardic Jews and the flood of European migrants to the United States reflect European norms and practices. Or again, the Baselland Museum treats the borderlands between France and Switzerland as a common European space. None of the objects on display in these museums can convincingly represent what Europe is, will be or should be today. Camille Mazé (2008: 116) summed up the situation: ‘Museum items deposited as the result of collecting activity within a national territory are inadequate to the proper representation and conceptualisation of Europe’. In some respects Europe seems too large a container, in others too small, for the credible production of interpretation and meaning. No specifically European collection strategy currently exists (Krankenhagen 2013a). However, European integration does influence museum practice at the level of collections – but not, as chapter 2 made plain, through a central policy issued from a political centre like Brussels, Luxembourg or Strasbourg. It is more illuminating to treat the asymmetric relationships

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(Karaca 2010) between present-day collections and the processes of Europeanisation as a mutual inscription, and thus a cultural practice in the making of Europe. In what follows, therefore, the concept and practice of collecting will be understood as a semantic framework – a process of interpretation and inscription capable of connecting to objects that already have a museal existence. Collecting today quite plainly must respond to challenges other than those faced in the early phases of modern museums’ establishment. As Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (2000: 152) wrote at the beginning of the new millennium, ‘The great collecting phase of museums is over’. Today’s task is to reorganise collections of objects that have already been collected. What current collecting strategies are suited for inscription with the idea of Europe, and of the course of European integration? What possibilities do European institutions have, and how do they use such possibilities to influence today’s collecting policy? How do individual national actors adopt, reject or transform these options? If there truly is a need to develop multiple perspectives on forms of cultural representation for the second phase of modernity (Beier-de Haan 2005), does this also apply to the material foundation of musealisation, that is, to objects and their route into museums? These questions foreground the policy and practice of collecting conducted by selected museums, institutions and networks, highlighting the manner in which they contribute to contextualising and defining extant and new objects as European. Which current collecting strategies are suited for participation as elements of Europeanisation, and why? The first step of answering is to itemise the challenges confronting appropriate collecting strategies. This will make clear that today’s discourse on the possible Europeanisation of objects and collections is part of a field that more generally seeks to redefine the possibilities and qualities of objects and collections for the twenty-first century. The second part of this chapter will introduce the concept of relational objects – taking a clue from Bruno Latour – to theoretically map the qualitative shifts in contemporary collecting strategies. Having clarified this, it moves on to present four domains that, each in their own way, exemplify the nexus of Europeanisation, contemporary collection policy and collection practice. The first domain concerns the method of participative collecting, conceived as a democratically inclusive collection practice and thus significant for processes of Europeanisation of the museum. How far this can claim to present a new and possibly European perspective will be examined below. The second domain is that of the digital platform Europeana, which ex-

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plicitly positions itself as a European collection. This example will be used to show how recourse to a common culture and history also aims to resolve legal and technical problems of standardisation. Since the beginning of the new millennium, an emerging third domain has concerned coordination of the lending and exchange of objects on a European level and creation of a network of European routes linking national industrial monuments; these undertakings will be outlined and analysed as transnational collection strategies. The question here is how movement and exchange, mobility and cross-border activity can be musealised. Attention will finally turn to the question of a common European memory – in particular, the observation that historical exhibitions and museums increasingly collect contemporary artworks and insert them into their historical narratives. What kind of stories about a very diverse European memory landscape does this introduction of contemporary art promote, given the lack of artistic context in historical exhibitions? In conclusion, the logic of a European collection will be investigated using the publication Reflecting Europe in its Museum Objects (ICOM Europe 2010), a meta-collection of European objects.

Collecting Today The present-day idea and practice of museal collecting reflects the comprehensive commodification and democratisation of history and historical writing described in chapter 1. The process of popularising history – a part of social development since the onset of modernity (Kittsteiner 2006; Koselleck 1989) – is redynamised daily in a present characterised by ‘an incapacity to allow things to vanish into the past’ (Gumbrecht 2001: 775). This is not merely the outcome of the much-discussed museum boom, but also of the ‘curatorial perspective’ of the twentieth century. Boris Groys (1997: 55), referring to a 2009 conference in Amsterdam entitled Me You and Everyone We Know is a Curator, concluded that this kind of conviction – that we are all curators of our own lives – and the related dynamic of the differentiation of any historical perspective are traceable to the avant-garde movement of the early twentieth century: ‘The avant-garde artist internalised the curatorial perspective, the perspective of the collector. In this way he began to function as an agent for the expansion of museal collections, bringing into the museum everything that had not previously been collected’. Now, over one hundred years since the avant-garde’s enthronement of the curatorial perspective, even the cultural pages of broadsheet newspapers proclaim the existence of a ‘curation nation’ (Füchtjohann 2011).

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Museums participate in this extension and exploitation of historical time in the historical obsessions of the present, which ‘already treats the time of a grandparent’s generation as if it were antiquity, as an archaeological site’ (von Buttlar and Mosebach 2010). This presents a striking discrepancy: collections and objects in museums receive increased attention, but their special status is denied. Some time ago Simon Knell (2004: 12) anticipated the end of a consistent collections policy, ‘because the collecting policy of today will not fit with tomorrow’. As if to confirm Knell’s judgement, the director of the Technical Museum in Berlin described the renovation of his museum as follows: ‘We want to say goodbye to the classical museum. … We are moving away from collections and towards themes’ (Beck 2010). Orientation towards a theme that is to be communicated and the associated development of a conceptually organised museum of ideas necessarily separates the institution from its own objects. As Steve Conn (2010: 43) has observed in regard to thematic museums: ‘They are not built, I think it is fair to say, around collections of objects’. Coinciding with this statement, and expressing a rediscovered interest in objects and collections, the International Committee for Collecting (COMCOL) was formed during the autumn of 2010 as the thirty-first committee of ICOM. Peter van Mensch (2010: 7, italics in original), writing as a founding member of the committee, maintained that ‘COMCOL is not the international committee on collections; it is a committee on collecting, or rather collection development’. This emphasis refers to a transition over the last twenty years that began with path-breaking work on the history and function of collections (Pearce 1995, 1994; Elsner and Cardinal 1994; Pomian 1987) and now directs attention to the practice of collecting. Pomian (1987) developed his work from the symbolic practice of grave goods, relics and treasuries; Pearce’s work (1998, 1995, 1994) combined anthropological and cultural historical perspectives upon the history, poetics and politics of collections. Nowadays this shift of emphasis puts the focus upon the act of museal collecting itself, foregrounding the processual character of museal collecting, together with its cultural and social functions. Paradoxically, the boom in museums and the critique of the traditional status of objects and collections are complementary. Preoccupation with the negative consequences of museum institutions’ social success has increased. Questions of the quantity and quality of collections are prominent in discussions. Have we really got ‘too much stuff?’ to cite the question posed in the report of the British National Museum Directors’ Conference (2003), a provocation intended to raise the question of the partial sale of collections. The museum practitioner Tomislav Sola (2004: 250)

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responded quite clearly: ‘We have touched the ceiling of growth, both physically and financially’. ‘Deaccessioning’, the sale of objects in official collections is no longer a moral taboo but instead a pragmatic response to the quantitative and financial limits most museums face and so, quite consistently, is understood as a qualitative element of a new collection policy (van Mensch and Meijer-van Mensch 2010). Systematic reduction in the stock of objects in a sense increases both the cultural and economic value of a given collection, as reflected in the instrumental rhetoric of collection policy (Petterson 2010: 168): ‘Whereas research creates the context and provides argumentation for the better use of the collection, the museum community needs practical tools for this to be realised’. The museal collection becomes conceived as an entrepreneurial laboratory with a given set of tools, in which the museal object ‘has to provide a specific performance in a series of tests’ (Belliger and Krieger 2006: 37). Today, objects in museums are examined for their social potentiality: are they capable of demonstrating their relevance for society and can they enhance the value of the museum? This seems, at least in theory, to spell the end of the idea of great collections and great collectors that characterised the history of the museum from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. In characterizing this era, Philip Blom (2004: 122) has described how Peter the Great had a collection of anatomical objects, including ‘teeth that he had pulled out, and not necessarily because they caused their owners pain’. Obviously, museum collecting should today take a different path, fulfil other conditions and be more inclusive. Hence collecting has been redefined as a continual activity on the part of the museum, less an end than a means with an impact on all aspects of the institution (van Mensch and Meijer van Mensch 2010: 2): Understood therefore as an integrative process, the theory and practice of museal collecting influences not only the work of collectors and curators, but also that of registrars and museum educators. According to Christina Kreps (2003: 10), collecting should create a connection between institution and visitors: ‘By identifying and naming the material and non-material elements that constitute their environment, people realize their rights to their world and gain control over it’. The cultural idea of a complete, culturally significant permanent museal collection therefore faces many different challenges. First, the number of those who can and do form collections is growing. In 2003 the Amsterdam Museum initiated a project called Memories of East Amsterdam for which residents of one part of the city have so far gathered 1,500 stories and everyday objects that are displayed in part in the museum, but mostly

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on its web page.1 This project has found numerous imitators (Kok 2010). ‘Participative collecting’ – a term originated in France in the 1970s by Georges-Henri Rivière and Hugues de Varine, who developed the idea of the ecomuseum (Davis 1996) – has become a slogan. Not only a slogan but a widespread practice, it is employed in particular by municipal museums of history, social history and ethnology on account of its social and local relevance (Gesser et al. 2012; Silverman 2010; Simon 2010; Crooke 2007). Connected to this development is the fact that, even in museums oriented to cultural history, the collecting and curatorial perspective is no longer oriented exclusively to the past, but increasingly to the present. Samdok, an initiative of the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm to establish the present as a field for collection and research on the part of museums, celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2007. It has resulted in more actors involved in museal collecting and more potential objects for collection. There is nothing today that could not become part of a museal collection. Between the Lawnmower Museum in Leeds and the Museum of Lies in Brandenburg, the museal zone has plenty of room to expand.

The Relational Object The concept of the relational object is a response to this extension and displacement in the idea and practice of collecting (Krankenhagen 2013b). Taking up Latour’s (2008: 191) renaming of things as ‘quasi objects’, we use the concept of relational objects to short-circuit selected current collection strategies with the cultural practice of Europeanisation: Quasi-objects … whose new properties we all admire, and whose network reaches from my fridge to the Antarctic, via chemistry, the law, the state, the economy and satellites. Composites and webs that had no place now have everything for themselves. Their task is representation, and henceforth the parliament of things will gather around them.

The function of things is that they serve as mediators, and represent this work of mediation. Objects, considered relationally, are both means of mediation and representation of the work of mediation between different actors, which Latour calls ‘actants’ (1996: 373) so that the network of social behaviour is not limited to subjects: ‘[A]n actant … is something that acts or to which activity is granted by others’. A relational concept of the object consequently plays with the threefold meaning of representation (Grinell 2010), in that a given thing first of all materially represents an object or a situation, secondly represents an

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intellectual idea, and thirdly creates a concrete occasion for things and people to come together. A ‘thing’ derives etymologically from the Germanic ‘ting’; which to this day in Scandinavia is the name for Parliament, where it is not things but people that meet to discuss matters – to talk, argue, deal and in so doing assume a function of political representation, as Latour (2005: 30, italics in original) himself emphasises: ‘Long before it meant an object ejected from the political sphere which then stands outside, objectively and independent, for many centuries das Ding or thing has denoted the matter that brings people together, because it divides them’. As will be shown, curators in Europe also use new collection strategies to bring together people and groups that are, in fact or intention, divided. What consequences does this definition of relational objects have for the question of European, transnational collection strategies? A relational concept of the object is derived first of all from modes of participation. Relational objects, by definition, participate in a context that extends beyond them. Secondly, this participation is organised in the form of a network. Since the industrial revolution, a net has been a popular metaphor for partly invisible yet very effective means of eliciting connection and communication, both technically and socially. Correspondingly, relational objects are often dematerialised objects that can represent a technical and/or a social network. Thirdly, the concept of relational object describes movement within and between different networks. Only with the possibility of exchange does modernity’s static conception of network emerge, represented in the railway network, for example. Relational objects are hence moving objects that represent exchange. Participation, network, movement and exchange: these are the qualities of relational objects to which Europeanisation, as a cultural practice in the domain of the politics and practice of collection, can connect. As the introduction outlined, exactly these functions and qualities have, in the past few years, led to actual or desired innovations in the domain of the museal collection.

Participative Collecting: Collecting in Common? The project Entrepreneurial Cultures in European Cities (ECEC) was also a network of things and actors. Under the direction of the Amsterdam Museum, museums and cultural institutions from eight European countries came together in this project to investigate the contribution of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to the development of European society, or more precisely European citizenship (Kistemaker and Tietmeyer

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2010).2 As a project funded by the second Framework Programme for Culture and oriented to the idea of a European society and citizenry, the ECEC was closely aligned with the aims of the EU, which have gradually shifted from a purely political to a more explicitly cultural conception of EU citizenship (see chapter 2). In fact the ECEC linked the idea of European citizenship to the larger topic of migration, as almost all the enterprises selected in each country were headed by migrants – another direct relation to the activities of the European Commission, which seeks to both study and promote the effectiveness of SMEs headed by migrants. A report commissioned from the University of Amsterdam by the Commission’s Section for Enterprise and Industry and completed in 2008, titled Examination and Evaluation of Good Practice in the Promotion of Entrepreneurs from Ethnic Minorities, describes ‘the measures for the support of entrepreneurs of migrant background … in the development, formulation, co-ordination and improvement of SME strategies in Europe’.3 The ECEC signed on to the report’s recommendations; meanwhile, the project also became a major issue in current scholarly work on museums as the method of participative collecting posed a unique challenge to the ‘civic seeing’ described by Bennett (2006) in terms of everyday life and the right to voice one’s views. At the same time, the ECEC consortium continued work on one of the programmes already begun by the two participating German institutions, namely, the Migration, Work and Identity project previously funded by the European Commission. Back in 2003 the Amsterdam Museum had drawn attention to itself with the project Memories of East Amsterdam (see above), showing that there were new ways of collecting, and of involving new visitor groups. Even the participation of the Ethnographic Museum in Zagreb had a link with the EU, since through the ECEC it was able to continue existing inter-regional cooperation funded through the Interreg programme (Interview Frlan). The way this project was put together exemplifies the partly clientelist funding practices of the European Commission, and particularly the interrelationship of the discourse of Europeanisation and various elements of innovation in the museal field. As already described in chapter 3, this process has been catalysed by curators and institutions that can be regarded as European cultural entrepreneurs, and analysed as such. But what are the concrete outcomes of the project? Which particular current collecting strategies are likely to become part of a process of Europeanisation promoted through a cooperative project funded by the EU? The project leaders have identified three scholarly approaches that should guarantee the ECEC’s production of innovative museological practices:

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outreach work, mediation through art and interdisciplinary contemporary collecting (Kistemaker and Tietmeyer 2010: 14). The choice of topics itself demonstrates that Europeanisation can function as a cultural practice for negotiating and in part reordering figures of innovation – in this case, current discourses and trends in scholarly museum work. The principles of participative collecting, the orientation to the present and the ambition of using art to narrate historical or ethnological stories in museums are all core points of a collecting policy in transition. The various projects of participating institutions also aim to acquire new objects in a new way, though this is not always an explicit goal. Thus there is significant overlap in the above approaches. The principle of participative collection appears as a common denominator in the work of the neighbourhood programmes of museums in Berlin, Amsterdam, Liverpool and Barcelona, as well as art projects in Amsterdam and Volos. Here, in the process of collecting and exhibiting, the institutions are supposed to cooperate with local communities, and specifically with small and medium-sized enterprises. Participative collecting takes on a double meaning in this context. On the one hand, it characterises the aim of including in museum practice social groups and individuals who have hitherto not been closely involved with museums. On the other, the applied collecting strategies build on ideas and methods common to the participating institutions, or else are intended to introduce them. As the project leaders emphasise (Kistemaker and Tietmeyer 2010: 117), ‘What brought [us] together was [our] joint wish to experiment with participation while collecting objects and stories related to small enterprises’. The attraction of the collected objects lies in their apparently unspectacular nature. The Berlin museum collects utensils associated with doner kebabs and objects from retail outlets such as slippers and bags from a local leatherware shop, as well as meaningful objects such as the apprenticeship certificate of an optician of Turkish background. Zagreb’s exhibition project Let’s Have a Coffee collects coffee tins and cups from the last forty years; in Amsterdam local purchasing books are collected; various collected objects in Liverpool include items from shops in Smithdown Road, such as hair extensions, satellite dishes and phone cards. The two largest groups of objects are photographs and stories. Interviews and photographs were part of the neighbourhood programme: Berlin schoolchildren, for example, interviewed and photographed small businessmen in their district, and museum employees in Liverpool, Zagreb and Volos did likewise in their own cities. They were also part of the virtual exhibition Neighbourhood Shops,4 which extended the participative collecting work undertaken by the Amsterdam Museum.

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However, the virtual collection of objects, photographs and contextualised stories reveals that the idea of a common collecting activity cannot be realised fully, but only partially. More than half of the uploaded objects quite clearly come from the holdings of the Amsterdam Museum, and the activity of visitors to the website was mostly limited to uploading individual photographs. Similarly, the objects installed by the ECEC on flickr.com, the website for digital or digitalised images, consist mainly of items from the museums’ established holdings alongside images of newly acquired objects. Hence the mantra of paradigm change via the Internet – ‘The internet, however, has changed the nature of collecting’ (Kistemaker and Tietmeyer 2010: 117) – is only partly true of the museal field. The responsibility for collecting, choosing, recording and archiving still belongs to the institutions and their employees, which was evident in the closing exhibition Neighbourhood Shops, mounted at the Amsterdam Museum from March to August 2011, which framed individual objects from the ECEC project in historical narrative. In this context, participative collecting shows itself to be mostly a pedagogical initiative that strengthens the social competence of the museum (Rogoff 2008), or in Latour’s words (2008: 189), a way for the museum to prove itself, ‘renewing the social bond’. The jointly collected objects are material proof that social bonds between seemingly separate worlds – of curators, entrepreneurs, natives, migrants, German or Croat museum employees – can be reconnected at a pan-European level. Europe takes on meaning not in objects, but in joint collection of its common material heritage. The project initiators (Kistemaker and Tietmeyer 2010: 119) ultimately concluded that the possibility, or necessity, of any project negotiating the question of the specificity of European objects was very limited: ‘The ECEC project has shown that entrepreneurs who had so far contributed (some) stories, photographs and objects on a local or neighbourhood level were less inclined to do so on a European one’. The Europeanisation of collecting policy thus has the shortcoming of taking its point of departure from national collecting traditions. Meanwhile, it implicitly upholds the idea that things will be different in the future, that ambitions as yet unfulfilled will nonetheless come right – as stated in the conclusion to the project (Kistemaker and Tietmeyer 2010: 120): ‘[W]hether and how these collections could play a role in promoting European understanding, will undoubtedly be a subject of study for future European heritage projects’. Nonetheless, the participating museums drive the process of Europeanisation onward as a cultural practice intended to draw attention to novelty

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in the work of objects that, having been jointly collected, serve to catalyse and legitimate social interaction within and beyond national borders. They foreground participation in and dialogue on both local and national differences, as well as what is shared in common. Their re-semantification as relational objects is possible precisely because they are inconspicuous. Neither a 2008 coffee cup nor a doner skewer from the same year is loaded with historical authenticity, neither is culturally exotic, and their cultural significance to coming generations is a matter of speculation. Their museal presentation – for instance, in the MEK workshop exhibition Doner, Delivery and Design – Entrepreneurs in Berlin (2009–10) – is soberly organised purely as documentation, not because the museum lacked other means of representation but because one consequence of participative collecting is that objects gain their meaning above all as actants in social participation (Figure 2). This level of signification can be documented, but not represented. Relational objects do not fulfil the same roles as objects considered as epistemic things (Rheinberger 2005; Korff 2005), for what renders them appropriate for exhibition is neither their materiality, nor the ‘condition of fixation’ (Rheinberger 2005: 66) that produces knowledge, nor even their durability (Korff 1992). Rather, relational objects signify modes of sharing. In the case under consideration here, the failure to produce a specifically European perspective upon objects and collections has resulted in a productive alternative solution: Europeanisation is presented as a cultural practice in which museums, citizens, objects, EU funding programmes and the current reformulation of museal collecting policy all participate equally and present themselves as participants. In this network the objects become socialized. They become acting subjects whose supposed or actual properties are to be rendered visible to the community. Participative collecting is a way for museums to respond to the challenges of reorganising and re-legitimising their collecting policy. Digitalisation, transnationalisation and aestheticisation are other attempts to meet these new demands.

Digitalisation: The Promise of Europeana Discussion of the digital platform Europeana has gone in two directions. On the one hand, this new platform concerns the search for technical standards and European harmonisation (Chambers and Schallier 2010: 106): ‘As outlined in Europeana’s content strategy, there are thousands of cultural and scientific institutions in Europe with content and collections that are of interest for Europeana. However, it is not sustainable for Euro-

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peana to work with all of these institutions directly. A content aggregation model is therefore of crucial importance in enabling Europeana to reach its objectives’. On several levels, therefore, the project needs switch points to ensure that individual institutions in member states are technically compatible with Europeana. On the other hand, Europeana seems also to be a project for European identity. It evokes concepts such as cultural legacy, descent and collection (Comité des Sages 2011: 4): For centuries, libraries, archives and museums from across Europe have been the custodians of our rich and diverse cultural heritage. They have preserved and provided access to the testimonies of knowledge, beauty and imagination, such as sculptures, paintings, music and literature. The new information technologies have created unbelievable opportunities to make this common heritage more accessible for all.

From this angle, digital technologies seem merely a new guise for the traditional cultural practices of preservation and exhibiting, now to be taken over by Europeana. But which perspective dominates the discursive order of a project that costs 3 million Euros per annum (Europeana Foundation 2011: 31) – a standardisation strategy, or the encyclopaedic collection idea resonating in the report cited above, entitled The New Renaissance? This rough-and-ready contrast merits refinement and examination in greater detail. Nanna Thylstrup (2011: 325) has made clear that alongside the work of technical harmonisation and the construction of a digital European legacy, the project from its outset turned on the question of a convergent European copyright law, thus involving a process of legal convergence between member states: ‘[E]ven though the primary motivation of large-scale cultural digitization projects such as Europeana is formally about preservation and access, it is in reality just as much about intellectual property and rights legislation’. Only from a global perspective can copyright law on the Web be understood and resolved. The urgency of so doing has been clearly formulated among those involved with Europeana, as for example by Paul Ayris: Let us be very clear: if we don’t reform our European copyright rules on orphan works and libraries swiftly, digitisation and the development of attractive content offers will not take place in Europe, but on the other side of the Atlantic. Only a modern set of consumer-friendly rules will enable Europe’s content to play a strong part in the digitisation efforts that have already started all around the globe. (2010: 197)

For legal reasons, the European citizen at present has no access to either out-of-print or orphaned works on the Web. The latter have become a litmus test in demands for the harmonisation of national laws, which also

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involves copyright protection and unidentified copyright (Kuhlen 2010). Out-of-print and orphan works form a large part of all books, maps, photographs and audiovisual material in Europe. The European Commission wants all of it to be made digitally accessible, together with all other objects and works in libraries, museums and archives. The Europeana project is therefore about global competition. The initial impulse came from the United States. Google Inc.’s plan, begun in 2004, to comprehensively digitalise books and other works in public libraries and make them accessible on the Web led to anxiety in Europe, and the invocation of cultural stereotypes. The former President of the French Publishers Association Serge Eyrolles (cited in Durantaye 2010/11: 158) considers it to be ‘an infernal machine, it never stops. … It is a disgrace. It is cultural rape’. Along with Jean-Noël Jeanneney, at that time director of the National Library in Paris, he accused Google Books of cultural imperialism. France, in the vanguard of the struggle against the commercialisation and sloganisation of a cultural legacy by an American firm, managed to gain EU support to accelerate its own digitalisation plans and merge them with those of the Europeana project (Thylstrup 2011). The European Commission communiqué of 2005, i2010: digital libraries, is both a review that complains of Europe’s subordinate role with respect to the U.S., India and China, and a counterproposal aimed at integrating various European initiatives. But France was itself a driving force behind Europeana because of the early adoption of its own digitalisation project; by the end of the 1990s it already had its own portal service for the digitalisation of the holdings of the National Library, and other projects had been developed for the digitalisation of television material (Interview Purday). At the same time France, together with Great Britain, was leading the development of the Gateway and Bridge to Europe’s National Libraries, a project that in 2005 resulted in the establishment of the European Library, which in turn became one of the European Commission’s most important contacts in the development of Europeana and to this day remains one of its main suppliers (Chambers and Schallier 2010). Europeana has been on the Web since 2008. By early 2013 the site provided access to more than 26 million digitalised objects, accessed from around 2,200 institutions in 34 European countries. Hence Europeana exceeds the Commission’s expectations as originally formulated, although member states’ contributions differ significantly in both quality and quantity. Given the background, it is not surprising that, according to a review in the summer of 2009, France led among contributors, having provided 47 per cent of the objects made accessible. Germany was next with 15.4 per cent, followed by the Netherlands with 8 per cent and Great Britain

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with 7.9 per cent. Member states like Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Lithuania, as well as Denmark and Ireland, had contributed less than 0.1 per cent of the total holdings of 4.6 million digitalised books, maps, photographs, film clips and newspapers.5 Yet one small non-EC member, Norway, made up 6 per cent of the holdings, according to a survey conducted at the end of 2010 (Europeana Foundation 2010a: 7). Like France, Norway had a politically legitimated and financed digitalisation strategy by the end of the 1990s (Interview Gaustad). Alongside the National Library, Norwegian archives, museums and libraries worked together on a regional and local basis and engaged in extensive digitalisation from 2008 to 2010 through the EU-funded project Europeana local.6 Europeana began life as a bibliographic project involving several national libraries, so it is no surprise that most of the available material is made up of digitalised texts, books and maps. Since regulation and protection of copyright is more robust in Europe than in the U.S., only 1 per cent of the material in Europeana is composed of sound and images (Interview Purday; Europeana Foundation 2010a: 7). The material currently most in demand is therefore least represented – a situation that could, in the view of the special report Europeana – Next Steps (European Commission 2009), lead to a digital ‘black hole for the twentieth century’. Even this brief account makes plain that the introduction of Europeana as ‘Europe’s digital library, archive and museum’7 is a striking image of the current process of Europeanisation. Europeana goes back to a model initiated and tested by a founding member state, in this case France. Wrapped up in the cultural politics of the EU, this national perspective still marks Europeana today; as Jonathan Purday, Europeana’s senior communications advisor, confirmed in an interview, ‘It’s a French model of seeing the world’. And Europeana’s advancement is due largely to several states in the so-called core of the EU: besides France, Germany and the Netherlands have been key players, as has Great Britain. The relationship between Europe and its nation states, even on the Internet, is still marked by the lack of a solid transnational framework capable of both reinforcing and superseding national semantics. The risk remains, according to the European Commission (2009) ‘that Europe’s digitalised cultural legacy will on the internet be split into national silo structures’. Even the World Wide Web is not in itself a global or transnational space. Visitors to Europeana, for example, typically structure their searches mainly by language and country (IRN Research 2009: 11). In a different context, Richard Rogers rightly called this ‘the revenge of the geography [in cyberspace]’ (2008).

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The process of Europeanisation also implies the demand for standardisation and convergence. Since the digitalisation of existing holdings of books, maps, and audiovisual material has a fundamental impact on the divergent copyright practices of members states, a higher level of legal harmonisation is necessary (de la Durantaye 2010/11). At the same time, the large number of contributing institutions permits too great a range of technical variation, so Europeana works with what it calls aggregators, who are responsible for the harmonisation of data at the level of individual institutions and will be dealt with in greater detail below. Ultimately, the idea of a common history and culture for Europe is used to impose uniformity upon quite independent developmental processes in museums and in society. In the case of Europeana, the harmonisation of legal and technical practice in Europe is explicitly considered a path to financial gain and global competitive advantage. As Nick Poole (2010), chair of the European Council of Content Providers and Aggregators, put it: ‘Europeana is beginning to demonstrate the business case for a more collaborative approach in the future’. Even during the initial phase of museal expansion, Annette Hünnekens (2002: 203) stated that ‘the interest in cultural legacy and so forth also comes from commercial motives’. Over 600 state and non-state institutions signed the Memorandum of Understanding, presented in 1996 on the initiative of the European Commission, which bound them to common guidelines in the use of the cultural legacy on the Web. By creating a publicly accessible European online network in 2008, Europeana took precisely the step that Hünnekens (2002: 234) had anticipated in concluding her review of the first models of digital collecting activity: ‘What would it be like if the public really did have such multimedia access to the cultural legacy?… Obviously there is a final step still to be made: publishing that which has long been public and common property’. Europeana has now taken this step with the intention of generating technical innovation (Interviews Purday, Badenoch) as presented, for instance, in Europeana’s own ThoughtLab.8 Clearly, the Europeana project must deal with both technical harmonisation and the making of a European legacy, for it creates a framework that at once inscribes the digitalisation of cultural objects and holdings within a European discourse, and resolves current challenges to the contemporary museum – or at least creates the prospect of doing so. The processes of Europeanisation here quite plainly represent a framework without content, as the objects presented in Europeana are devoid of context and semantics. The choice of objects is driven by questions of technical compatibility, not of their significance for a digital European collection.

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Thus the question resurfaces of what, and above all how, Europe collects. How are the idea of a collection and the status of objects altered in digital space? What concepts and contents does Europeana itself provide when presenting, in the third year of its operation, a collection strategy (Europeana Foundation 2010a: 2) whose declared aim is to permit the user to play a part in a European collection? After all, this same collection simply presents, unfiltered, everything that happens to have been digitalised in the participating countries: ‘Europeana has and will have to take what institutions make digitally available’. As Andreas Bienert (2004: 47) observed, museums did ‘right from the start play a major part [in the mobilisation of virtual space]’; indeed, since the foundation in 1967 of the Museum Computer Network in the United States, museums have been central to the international development of cultural materials online. It remains unclear whether such materials – exhibition items and pedagogic material online and on CD-ROM, digitalised collections, combined catalogues, net art and hyper-museums – challenge the traditional functions of the museum that is changing them (Hünnekens 2002), or merely serve to ‘reproduce the collection in a new medium’ (Bienert 2004: 56), since both processes run in parallel. Instead of addressing this question, the following will ask how a digitalisation project on the scale of Europeana generates its objects, and so collects. As already noted, this requires specific switch points – that is, aggregators – which receive the digitalised material from separate organisations, standardise data formats and metadata, and then upload or link the material to Europeana. Aggregators also engage directly with museums, archives and libraries in member states, providing training and administrative assistance. An example in the Europeana Aggregators’ Handbook details the kind of technical processes involved for potential aggregators. Marcin Werla (cited in Europeana Foundation 2010b: 19f.) from the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center describes the process step by step: It was important to establish the standard that would map precisely to ESE [Europeana Semantic Elements] across all Polish institutions that contribute data to the Digital Libraries Federation. We gave several presentations to our providers to advise them how to clean and augment their metadata. … Cleaning up the metadata was complicated, but once done, allowed for automated transfer. … We then ran the data on the Europeana Content Checker. … The Content Checker shows us how records are displaying in a test version of the Europeana interface. We were able to share this display and get feedback from our providers. … The next step was for the Europeana office to test our OAI-PMH interface so they could harvest the records. … Then it was out of our hands: Europeana harvested the 257,000 records and completed the internal processing.

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This example, from a Polish aggregator that Europeana uses, highlights how any Europeana aggregator becomes a European actor responsible for the standardisation and normalisation of metadata of all participating national institutions. Moreover, the description of the way data is transferred between national and European actors implies shifts in current collecting policy. Objects are not collected by Europeana; in fact, as the Europeana Aggregators’ Handbook states (Europeana Foundation 2010b: 2), it does not even hold them: ‘Europeana only ingests and indexes the institution’s metadata while the digital object remains at the original institution’. Instead, it collects metadata concerning connections to digitalised objects in various archives, museums and libraries, objects that can then be rearranged on Europeana, as one researcher stated (Interview von Hagel): ‘Ultimately Europeana is only a search engine which in one section, that of online exhibitions, rearranges exhibits’. But Europeana does treat indexed objects as a collection. They are categorised through their metadata and divided into broad groupings – books and articles, historical documents, photographs, paintings (Europeana Foundation 2010a: 9). Gaps in collections are identified and are supposed to be dealt with (Europeana Foundation 2010a: 10). Moreover, the cultural authority of the museum as institution is generally used for Europeana’s own legitimation, as expressed in the Foundation’s statement of its collecting strategy (Europeana Foundation 2010a: 10f.): ‘Europeana: all domains and all countries as a single, authoritative and authentic access point’. The contradiction between a digital search engine and a free-standing collection dissolves upon consideration of the exchanges between Europeana and the national aggregators. Europeana shows how the idea of a collection as something archived and stored became a medium of transmission. Wolfgang Ernst (2007: 19, italics in original) devoted his theory of media archaeology to this transition. Here he described ‘the signature of the television era: it transmits, it does not conserve’. This practice of transmission, exemplified in the above account of the relation between Europeana and its aggregators, has spread from traditional media of transmission like film, radio and television to storage media like the museum and its collections. Ernst (2007: 18, 94f.) and others (Dembeck 2010) link this conclusion to a turning point in the politics of memory. What is important here, however, is this practice’s call for a new way of dealing with museal objects. The idea is less to possess objects than to ensure their continuing transmission. In the domain of digitalised objects technology takes on this role, but the impact of the rhetoric of mobility and universal accessibility is also visible in the traditional business of loans of material by one museum to another.

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Transnationalisation: Exchange and Movement The introduction to this chapter characterised relational objects as means and mediators in processes of sharing, exchange and movement within networks. In this sense their museal value consists of these often quite transient qualities. Museum objects therefore need to be rendered capable of representing movement. This sounds less interesting than it really is. A collection is ultimately the basis of a museum, both historically and substantially, as Louis Réau (cited in Mairesse 2010: 73) emphasised more than a hundred years ago: ‘It has been understood that museums are made for collections that they should be built from the inside out, so to speak, shaping the container to fit the contents’. In this sense a functional hierarchy operates between a given collection and the museum as an actual building with a particular location. However, relational objects, by delimiting the material qualities of things and making them capable of transmission, challenge this rather traditional model of the museum as a container for epistemic things. When they prevail, even fixed and musealised objects can be rendered mobile. The negative aspect of this mobilisation of museums is the persisting idea of museums as places that are dusty and dead; something the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti referred to in the early years of the twentieth century, when he polemically defined museums as cemeteries (see Harrison and Wood 2003: 183ff.). Susanna Pettersson (2010: 167) explicitly invoked the Futurist Manifesto when she wrote that ‘[m]useums are sustainable by nature but at a certain point, when storages are filled with B- or C-category objects, they are in danger of becoming a huge wasteland of forgotten and unused objects – or cemeteries’. In this way, the archive or the museum collection – the heart of the institution – becomes a dump for unused things. New functions are proposed for collections and associated activity in precisely this context. The mobilisation of collections for exchanges between them is one of the most evident functions in the processes of Europeanisation. The idea of the relational object is here relevant in two main areas: exchange and movement. The following will address first the mobility of collections and then, in the next section, the integration of existing objects in European cultural networks, as in the European Route of Industrial Heritage (ERIH). ‘Collection mobility’, the exchange of objects, has featured prominently in EU strategy papers in the last ten years. Starting with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, originally conceived in 2000, which assures free movement of goods, capital, persons and services (Eu-

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ropean Union 2007), the ideas of exchange and movement entered the cultural field, the ‘European agenda for culture in a globalizing world’ (European Commission 2007) and the 2007–13 framework funding programme for culture. As described in chapter 3, the exchange of objects became a European issue at the start of the new millennium through a Dutch initiative supported by cooperation among member states, together with individuals in the European Commission and European associations such as NEMO. The Dutch initiators, among them Astrid Weij (Weij et al. 2005: 6), drew heavily upon an analogy between the EU’s internal market and the free circulation of cultural goods. From a cultural policy standpoint, the initiative was a success. Originated at the national level and mediated by EU institutions, it directly impacted on museum organisations in the member states. Seldom these days does a concept paper fail to mention the innovative potential of the traffic in objects and long-term loans – even though loans between museums have been part of established practice since the later nineteenth century. ‘Works of art were sent off like coal from the Ruhr or tree trunks from the Black Forest’, Martin Heidegger (2010 [1936]: 9) commented in the 1930s. This interest in mobility is attributable to changes in the public positioning and legitimation of museums, and their effects on current ideas of ‘object’ and ‘collection’. The Museums Association of Great Britain argued (2005: 4) that ‘[t]oo many museum collections are underused’, proceeding to identify national and international loans of items as a possible way to tap the unused potential of collections. The Renaissance of the Regions programme, for example, deploys collections’ mobility to stimulate the widest possible renewal of English regional museums. But clearly, and unavoidably, a significant share of objects in museums will never be exhibited, as a stock-taking survey carried out by NEMO in 2003 confirmed. The returns showed that 400 museums in eleven European countries collectively held 315 million objects, of which on average more than 70 per cent were in storage (Weij et al. 2005: 7). The mobility of collections, then, is no aesthetic project but instead a social and administrative procedure that, considered within the framework of Europeanisation, has significant implications for cultural policy. We will not attempt to track the movement of particular objects here, although in another context it would be interesting to see how the meaning of collections and objects shifts as they move between geographical and cultural spaces. Recently, for example, Jere Jäppinen (2010) wrote about unexpected demands regarding a collection of photographs of Sinti and Roma in a Finnish museum. Here, however, we are more concerned to

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discuss current collecting strategies apt for inclusion within a European framework while bearing in mind their relevance for national, regional or local fields and actors. As regards the mobility of collections, the Dutch have successfully linked current collecting strategies and processes of Europeanisation. Three institutions – the Ministry for Education, Culture and Science, the Institute for Cultural Heritage in Utrecht and the Collections Institute of the Netherlands (ICN) – simultaneously promote and employ collections’ mobility as evidence of the Netherlands’ innovative museum policy. In 1990 the Institute for Cultural Heritage advanced the idea of a comprehensive Dutch collection – the Collectie Nederland – which has now become a digital reality, with all items in the National Museum catalogued on an Internet platform.9 This was done expressly to make objects accessible for mutual exchange (Bergevoet 2001). The ICN has gone further in the same direction by digitally assembling objects for sale.10 Objects offered for sale move exclusively between various Dutch museums; they are not for sale to private individuals, ‘but anyone can see which objects are available’.11 In this way the Dutch have taken a first step towards public sale of objects from state museums, at the same time associating it with, and guiding it in terms of, national cultural policy. Interestingly, ICN’s digital archive is called a ‘relocation database’, meaning the digital stock is referred to as a collection of objects that only change their location. This links the sale of museal objects to the rhetoric of exchange and mobility that has characterised strategy papers in Dutch cultural policy since the 1990s. This long-term professionalisation of Dutch collecting policy makes it easier for Dutch actors to define the emphases of a new collecting policy at the European level. The integrative approach of Collectie Nederland thus interweaves the separate threads of current collecting policy: the mobility and exchange of collections, participative collection, digitalisation of objects and construction of a Web-based national collection, as well as the sales strategy of state museums. In retrospect, it represents a blueprint for European actors. Nonetheless, it should not be forgotten that in the case of the mobility of collections, Europeanisation is also a process of convergence in member states’ policies and strategies. Some of the objectives agreed by working groups established within the framework of the Open Method of Coordination – particularly those requiring states to underwrite insurance against damage, protection against seizures, long-term loans, protection from theft and illegal trading, and the mobility of museum staff – cannot be realised without national legislative changes (OMC 2010).

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Negotiations over state guarantees for loans are a vivid example of how strongly the interconnection of European and national initiatives can function as a process of convergence. State guarantees help reduce the cost of exchanging objects and collections. Whereas only six member states’ governments offered such guarantees in the 1990s (France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Great Britain), since the EU’s eastern enlargements of 2004–07 there are only five member states that do not (Portugal, Belgium, Greece, Estonia and Latvia). In the case of Greece, the cooperation of OMC working groups has persuaded the Greek Ministry for Culture and Tourism to arrange for national guarantees to be available. As this example shows, the process of Europeanisation is not driven forward mainly by Brussels but ‘made in Europe’ through a combination of actors in member states who operate at a European level, ongoing museum discourse regarding appropriate collecting strategies, and the mediation of and exchanges between European institutions. As Alexander Badenoch (2011: 301) said, ‘The EU in particular operates … by creating spaces for others to act’. As explained above, the discursive devaluation of the part of the museal collection that languishes in the archive, unseen and unused, is the precondition for the (transnational) mobilisation of the museal object. Supposedly, these objects can only be revitalised within a new pan-European exchange programme (Matassa 2010: 119). Hence European exchange and mobility programmes are run by national actors who are able to leverage their contribution to Europeanisation and their own modernisation strategy. Whether this will lead to greater visibility and usability of archival objects is questionable. What will become discursively visible, though, is the act of transnational exchange itself.

Transnationalisation: Networks, Routes, Roads Just as Europeanisation is becoming the path along which museal collections cease being a cemetery of unused things and enter a space of accessibility and usability beyond national borders, the concept of the ‘route’ faces the challenge of setting the ruins of industrial society into motion. Yet the monuments and sites that the ERIH brings together will never shift from their allotted places, as Tim Edensor (2005: 97) laconically notes: ‘By their physical presence … objects consolidate a sense of being in place and provide proof of shared ways of living, of inhabiting space, of producing and sustaining values’. Former sites of industrial production

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that cannot be linked through a European loan system nonetheless represent exchange and movement; thus, alongside the mobility of collections, the connection of existing objects via European routes like ERIH provides a further example of a transnational collection policy and practice. Given that the act of collecting is merely conceived as an act of semantic framing, the principle of the route has value as a current collecting strategy aimed at reinterpreting industrial history as European history. Anna Storm (2008) has studied this new interpretation of twentiethcentury industrial places. She describes forms of cultural re-semantification that, having already written their own histories, can be described comparatively. Storm sees their claim to a commonly conceived future that serves as a matrix for post-industrial structural change as carefully formulated, and often maintained against better judgement (Conn 2010: 15ff.). To the question of where this transition from heavy to cultural industry based around the construction of local identity might lead, she answers (Storm 2008: 169): ‘In sum, the industrial place has been domesticated aesthetically, made democratic with regard to perspectives and become accessible to a large audience by being transformed into a spectacle’. Many examples of the changed use of previous industrial plants (Willim 2008; Stanton 2007) addressed forms of aestheticisation, democratisation and commodification and criticised them as such at a very early stage (Hewison 1987). Here, therefore, we are interested in describing the conception of the route as yet another strategy in the reinterpretation of places and objects of industrial culture that are especially suited for Europeanisation processes. The ERIH originated in 1997 on the initiative of the North RhineWestphalia Tourism Association as a common project. Financed in two phases as an interregional project of the European Fund for Regional Development, it is now registered under German law as an association. From a very early stage, the structural transformation of industrial regions attracted copious attention in Germany, especially in the Ruhr (Stiftung Zollverein 2008: 112–20), and the ERIH was modelled on two German projects. The first was the Internationale Bauausstellung Emscher Park, which from 1980 to 1999 helped develop new uses for industrial plants in the Ruhr. Making abandoned mines and redundant factories accessible for tourism involved the culturalisation, musealisation and economisation of industrial culture, an approach the ERIH seized on; today it advertises itself as offering ‘integrated modern leisure and travel opportunities to old industrial sites’.12 The second project, and the immediate model for a network of European industrial monuments, was the Route of Industrial Culture created in the Ruhr in 1999. The first project to identify important testimonials

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of industrial culture as ‘anchor points’, it used them to structure a 400kilometre route for touristic use. Typical anchor points in the Ruhr are the North Duisburg Country Park, the Oberhausen gasometer and the Dortmund coking plant. The ERIH likewise works in terms of a culturalhistorical canon of sites like the Ironbridge Gorge Museum near Telford and the Swedish copper mines at Falun. Other structural elements of the ERIH also come from the German model. Meanwhile, the ERIH emphasizes European dimensions of industrialization, for example via biographical accounts of people with transnational experiences in Europe. Chapter 5 will detail how Europe is collected and communicated in the form of personal stories and biographies. Unsurprisingly, this approach is also used in the sphere of industrial culture. Synthesising industrial culture and the cultural industry within the framework of a “heritage for Europe” (Ashworth and Larkham 1994: 1) and attempting to both define Europe’s cultural legacy and make it accessible for tourists have been the task of the European Institute of Cultural Routes since 1997. In collaboration with the European Council – which in 1998 published a resolution on cultural routes (Council of Europe 1998) – and the Luxembourg Ministry of Culture, the institute takes decisions on projects ‘that on account of their historical, artistic and social interest are European, whether because of the geographical routing, or because of their content and meaning’.13 A cultural history standpoint locates the origins of this initiative in the tradition of national holiday routes, which reordered the increased mobility and leisure of the 1930s. This discussion will not cover how the European Council’s cultural routes combine with cultural initiatives for tourists or the idea of European sites of remembrance (Gostmann and Wagner 2005; Ashworth and Larkham 1994) but will instead take up a thesis advanced by Torgeir Bangstad (2011) that argues that cultural routes render visible, and simultaneously construct, specific narratives of travel, interaction and exchange. For this reason, the following will understand the massive, locally connected ensembles of industrial culture as relational objects, as their task is also to represent transnational exchange and crossborder movement. Pursuit of this question leads once again to the changes in collections policy, as is apparent in the international work of the relevant ICOM committee. In 2008 the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) published a ‘Charter on Cultural Routes’, a concept paper discussing the possibilities and challenges of researching, conserving and using cultural routes. It contains three approaches that seek to define the phenomenon, each in its own way.

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First, according to ICOMOS (2008: 1f.), cultural routes are transborder contact zones and therefore a common legacy that transcends national frontiers. Second, this conception highlights the social character of the common cultural legacy, which in turn is useful for lasting development of the particular region in question. Third, the paper understands cultural routes as representations of social dynamism and mobility. Generally speaking, the ‘Charter on Cultural Routes’ (ICOMOS 2008: 2f., 6) assigns routes a specific status as objects that can be studied and classified, and are to be preserved in a particular way, used appropriately and communicated to a broad public. In this way ICOMOS actors posited a cultural object quite distinct from other phenomena of industrial culture in terms of its classification, study and maintainance: the route became a museal object. Transborder, social, mobile – are these descriptors what connects the average visitor to a coal mine, a foundry or a canal lock? In other words, how does the idea of a route work? How do locally sited ensembles become transnationally mobile objects? Etymologically, the French term route refers not only to a concrete pathway (chemin) or street (voie), and hence the material connection between two or more places, but also to the moment and unfolding of travelling. In Diderot’s Encylopédie, the entries Route, Voie and Chemin clearly distinguish between route and pathway, defining the latter specifically through places that should be reached, whereas the former very much represents the moment of being under way, of travelling. But however much ‘route’ assumes the material properties of street, pathway and network, it is at the same time quite distinct because conceptually, the route puts movement between places centre stage. Hence each place upon a route provides an impulse for movement. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has shown how the concept and idea of the route are fundamentally well suited to linking global to local phenomena (2006b: 172). But the route is also understood as a cultural object in itself, whose primary feature is the representation of movement between units defined locally and globally. The route as object does not transcend the attributes of local, global or transnational, but mediates between them. The route as cultural product functions as a relational object – a mediator and signifier of movement. ‘Only by increasingly mobilizing things,’ according to archaeologist Bjørnar Olsen (2010: 9f.), ‘could humans come to experience “episodes” of history such as the advent of farming, urbanization, state formation, industrialization, and post-industrializiation’. Such historical experience is represented through the conception of route, ordered in the form of a map (Figure 3). As chapter 6 will make clear, whereas maps in museums can be used to eliminate geographical borders, the route

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as a museal map evokes other meanings. The representation of the ERIH network spotlights industrial arteries while also emphasising the concept of the route as a guide to (still) undiscovered parts of Europe. Giving the impression that the continent has yet to be settled, the map leaves an impression of future tasks that seem to lie before Europeans. In this sense the ERIH assumes the role of a mediator and presenter of a mobile history. Like the previous examples of Europe’s inscription in new forms of museal collecting policy and practice, it operates as a component of a cultural de- and revaluation: Structural transformation often means the end for many industrial firms. People lose their jobs. Whole regions seek a new identity and prepare themselves for the future. What remains is a rich legacy of industrial culture. This is spread across all of Europe – a gigantic network. All that has to be done is activate it. And that is what ERIH does.14

This is, to be sure, the rhetoric of a marketing strategy, but it does identify exactly those points that allow the route to be understood as a European object. An important initial step in this understanding is the devaluation of objects of industrial society (Barndt 2009: 276; Storm 2008: 9–27) characterized by a ‘necessity for ruins’ (Brinkerhoff Jackson 1980: 101f.). Once an industrial culture becomes redundant for its original purpose, it can be rediscovered as something new and shared. In the case of industrialisation, its culture is like a sleeping princess who needs only a kiss to wake up as a European route: ‘The industrial Revolution is alive – presented by industrial monuments and museums throughout all Europe’.15 The rhetorical interconnection of musealisation, Europeanisation and modernisation described in chapter 1 is evident here as well. The conception of the route as a terrain upon which Europeanisation can be inscribed relates in part to the longue durée of European history. Trading and pilgrimage routes created and reinforced the possibility of exchanging goods and ideas between European cultures. Industrial locations have always been characterised by transnational connections that today are increasingly attracting the attention of scholars of the history of technology (European Science Foundation 2011). Meanwhile, the early industrialized states that began the process of European integration – the Benelux countries, France and Germany – are also the driving forces behind ERIH. The route and its European framing are consequently a conception with a high level of historical plausibility. As Badenoch (2011: 298) states: ‘A focus on routes not only grounds a (self-) construction of the EU as a network state,

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it also builds on and emphasizes a longer history of constructing European identities around forms of mobility’. Besides that, the conception of the route requires and confirms a basic demand of today’s EU: free movement across national borders. Chapter 6 will more closely examine the fact that the right of free movement across European countries does not apply to all people and social groups, focusing in particular on the museal representation of migration routes. In the case of the ERIH, the routes of the Industrial Revolution sometimes overlap with EU political fields and the aspiration for modernisation in the form of cultural tourism. Accordingly, the European Commission has taken up the conception of routes and supported it with ongoing funding aimed at enhancing the visibility of transnational tourist routes.16 Two elements key to Europeanisation as cultural practice are present in the focus on the route. First, and yet again, the model comes from a ‘core Europe’ country, in this case Germany. And second, the European linkage of industrial sites of the past gains importance by reflecting a specific alternation in the status of the object. The discovery and revaluation of objects’ relational functions are congenially represented in objects that are simultaneously ‘placed’ and in motion, that possess both local and global qualities and that symbolise the movement between these two moments. Distinct from the case of participative collecting, here it is not the representation of participation, but the representation of movement that permits narration of the history of Europe as a history of a mobile society.

Aestheticisation: History and Art Art also contributes to altering the history and stories in the consciousness of men and women. More and more often, modern artworks are found outside art museums, particularly in historical and ethnological museums and exhibitions where the use of contemporary art is a reaction to institutions’ dependence on colonial history and its largely racially motivated classification policy. Mirjam Shatawani (2009: 370), curator of the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, summarises what can be said – based on the publications of Beate Binder, Dagmar Neuland-Kitzerow and Karoline Noack (2008), Pascal Gielen (2004: 156–58) and Sharon Macdonald (2003: 6–9) – of museum practice in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Great Britain: ‘Such a blurring of categories [by modern art] is highly confusing for the ethnographic museum, which derives its raison d’être from the compartmentalization of culture – each culture in its own pi-

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geonhole – and to such an extent that the inclusion of contemporary art might challenge its very existence’. Similarly, art can also shake up and confuse the traditional order of museums. As Isabelle Benoit, director of the exhibition agency Tempora in Brussels, stated in her interview: ‘Displaying art in our exhibitions is a choice, not [due to] a lack of objects’. Accordingly, the Musée has, since its first exhibition Dieu(x), modes d’emploi in 2006, assigned artworks a prominent place in particular exhibitions. Tempora usually borrows traditional objects from partner museums, but it also has a budget for the purchase of contemporary art that varies from exhibition to exhibition (Interview Benoit). Unlike the well-known collections of London’s Imperial War Museum, the In Flanders Fields Museum or the Bavarian Army Museum (Thiemeyer 2010: 288), the Musée’s exhibitions feature no ‘revaluation of art as illustration’. Nor is the use of art in historical exhibitions sufficiently appreciated by describing works as elements of postmodern installations (Wahnich 2008: 201), as has been done in the case of the Libeskind building of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Instead, the Musée introduces contemporary art as an empty narrative space to bridge gaps in the landscape of European memory. In history and cultural studies, it has become customary to argue that art of the twentieth century drew on history for its material, especially the history of war (Thiemeyer 2010; Wahnich, Lášticová and Findor 2008; Godfrey 2007; Krankenhagen 2005, 2004). Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski and Richard Serra are among the most renowned artists to have engaged with history in their work, and Pablo Picasso’s Guernica is an icon in this tradition. This painting is also prominent as one of the images most often used in European schoolbooks (Popp 2007). In this painting the perspective of aesthetic modernism – in its cuboid form – meets with that of the victim as a central experience of the twentieth century. As will be shown in chapter 5, the Second World War can be read as a founding myth of European integration in which diverse and partly competing historical images of the European states (Leggewie 2011; Jarausch and Lindenberger 2007a) pose a challenge to museal depiction of a European history. The representation of the depths of the war and post-war experience differ between, say, Poland and Germany, Finland and Spain. Only in a very limited sense is it possible to talk of a common European space of experience since 1945, given the extremely diverse experience of, and ways of dealing with, the Holocaust and war guilt, Soviet Communism, expulsion, colonialism and decolonisation. To what extent can the introduction of contemporary art into historical exhibitions contribute to

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a possible homogenisation of competing narratives? What story does art tell here, and what means does it use? The exhibition C’est notre histoire!, influenced by the historico-industrial ambience of its location, the basement of the Tour & Taxis event centre in Brussels, begins with two works of art: Missa, by the Canadian artist Dominique Blain, and Friedensrolle by the German artist Gunter Demnig. These two very large installations practically fill the entire room. No exhibition objects hinder concentration on the two works. At this initial moment, visitors find themselves in an art exhibition whose subject is war and peace. Around them, two hundred pairs of black military boots hang on visible threads, ordered by rank and row, ready for marching (Figure 4). Here war is not suffered but made, a justifiable approach if the responsibility of the individual is to be emphasised. But this is not what the work achieves. Instead, it evokes the vague sense of a mass – a mass of perpetrators, in which the individual soldier is imprisoned as part of an offending collective directed by a higher power. The idea that soldiers are the mindless marionettes of a commanding elite might have applied to wars led by feudal lords, but this is not true of the Second World War, which serves here as the founding myth of European integration. By contrast, Gunter Demnig’s Friedensrolle writes European history through the idea of the constitutional contract. The capacity of empires, states or nations to come to terms and ensure peace is central to this leaden roll some four metres long, which is engraved with the names of all the peace treaties and alliances concluded in Europe from 260  to 1981. The representation of Europe’s history as a constant effort to arrive at peace is clearly relevant to an exhibition that emphasises the Schuman Plan of 1950, as the catalogue affirms (Musée de l’Europe 2009: 17). So is the history of Europe one of wars, of a search for peace, or, as the opening sequence of the exhibition suggests, of connection? At its roots, political history can only be conceived as a history of conflict and its possible resolution. More significantly, C’est notre histoire! uses art to offer an ahistorical history of the founding myth of Europe in the twentieth century art. The most important part is what is left unsaid, for the Second World War was not a war of uninvolved masses as the exhibition proposes, but a war of perpetrators at every level. Neither should the Second World War be understood merely as a simultaneous perversion and logical consequence of a hyperbolised idea of the nation state, for it was also a war against European Jews. By placing the Second World War and the treaties that followed it within a continuous series of European attempts to achieve peace, culminating in the formation

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of the EU, the introductory installation Friedensrolle excludes the question of perpetrators and victims. The art represents a common European memory as one that is largely purged of historical facts. This has an impact upon the entire exhibition, as chapter 5 will show. Claus Leggewie’s (2011: 188) plea not to leave the ‘anxiety-filled’ images of European history out of museal representation has not been taken to heart by the Musée curators. Art and artistic interventions also play a prominent role outside of Western European museums and exhibitions, and not only in relation to the memory of the Second World War. Curators of museums of Southeastern Europe use contemporary art in response to the question of how to deal with the legacy of communism. Historical museums in countries like Serbia and Slovenia have a difficult job, both in terms of cultural policy and aesthetically. The museums that today are museums of regional history (Novi Sad), recent history (Celje), the history of the twentieth century (Maribor) or national history (Ljubljana) were, right up to the 1990s, so-called Museums of the Revolution, created to celebrate the struggle of Communist partisans in Tito’s nationalisation project. The historical rupture of 1990–1 runs right through these museums and their exhibitions. In various ways, what the director of the National Museum of Contemporary History in Ljubljana (Interview Širok) said of her own institution is true for all the former Museums of the Revolution: ‘This is the museum that is still dividing the nation’. The Museum of Vojvodina – a regional history museum in Novi Sad with a related Museum for Contemporary Art – is quite clearly divided. The Belgrade government planned and built it in the 1970s as a Museum of the Revolution. After the breakup of Yugoslavia in the wars of the 1990s, the museum, partly closed and partly simply abandoned by visitors, existed solely to employ the remaining historians and curators. Under a local initiative in 2009, it was reorganised into a contemporary art museum, and today it presents itself as a place for Serbian, South-eastern European and international art (Interview Mitrović). However, the display organised for the Museum of the Revolution in the 1970s retains its original form in the same building, and on the same floor, though it is reduced to only half the space, the other half being taken up by contemporary art since 2009. That is, the Museum of the Revolution’s display has simply been shrunk. A closed iron divider separates the two halves, locking away the post-war history of Yugoslavia and its representation as a social revolution as a ‘dark monster’ (Interview Mitrović). The art museum, not ten steps removed from the closed entrance, presents itself by contrast in the usual international art jargon: ‘devot[ing] special attention to the multicultural model of society and culture in Vojvodina,

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using it as a base for building relations with other cultures – Hungarian, Slovakian, Romanian, Ruthenian, and German’.17 The contradiction between the ghosts of the past and the transcultural future is ignored. In Novi Sad, the potential of contemporary art as a comment upon and confrontation of the complex history of Yugoslavia and Serbia is simply locked away behind iron bars. Things have turned out differently at the Museum of Recent History in Slovenia’s Celje. Here it is plain that Slovenian museums, in contrast to those in Serbia, have profited from a Dutch cultural initiative that provided management courses for the personnel of Slovenian museums between 1996 and 2001 (Interview Rabolj). The Museum of the Revolution in Celje, founded in 1963, has been continually revised and expanded. Originally oriented to the labour movement of the early twentieth century and the wartime partisans, during the 1970s the museum shifted its collecting policy towards contemporary and urban history. In 1991 it was renamed the Museum of Recent History. Since then it has been supplemented with a children’s museum (1995) and a workshop for historical photography (1996). In addition, it created a memorial at the former city prison dedicated to citizens of Celje who were murdered during the German occupation. A revised permanent exhibition opened in 1998. Given the museum’s history, its stock of material embraces weapons and propaganda, as well as items relating to industrial and contemporary history. However, in 2010 the museum launched an idiosyncratic initiative to make part of its own stored collection accessible. It publicly appealed to the population of Celje to donate used saucepans made by the firm Emo-Westen to the museum. Celje’s industrial development in the later nineteenth century was closely related to this enamelled cookware, which also represented a successful postwar Yugoslavian product. Westen was founded by a German from Westphalia in the 1870s and nationalised after 1945, and until its closure in the mid-1990s it was one of the largest industrial enterprises in Slovenia. It employed up to 3,000 employees, so many citizens of Celje had worked there, and it remains a prominent historical site in the city bound up with many memories, as Tanja Roženbergar Šega, director of the City Museum, confirmed in her interview. By initiating the project Don’t throw pots away! (Figure 5) the Museum of Recent History connected itself to a tradition of industrial production and its significance for the city. Early in 2010 the museum placed a very large plastic container by its entrance and called on the inhabitants of Celje to put their old Emo pots in it. Six hundred pots were collected in this way and then registered and catalogued by the curators (Celje Museum of Recent History 2010, n.p.): ‘We carefully checked the items and divided

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them in two categories: the pieces that complement the existing collection and the items that are used for installation purposes and can be changed or damaged by the artists’. Objects in the second category were passed on to three Slovenian artists and used in three separate installations – as a sound installation, one inside the museum itself and another in the archives. According to Roženbergar Šega (2010: 6), they opened up a dialogue with the objects in the collection: ‘The collection objects preserve memory, their artistic interpretation encourages critical social deliberation’. The Don’t throw pots away! project embraced the approaches used in participative collecting and artistic intervention. By calling upon the population to give the museum things that had personal and social meaning, it helped renew the social ties between the city and the museum. And by transforming these things into works of art, it upgraded a particular part of the city’s history and Celje’s identity. Contemporary works of art are dealt with variously, depending on whether one looks to Brussels, Novi Sad or Celje. The point is that contemporary art features increasingly frequently in historical museums and exhibitions and, as in the case of the Musée, plays a part in selected collecting strategies. This changes the perspective on art in a historical museum. In the instances noted here, museums use art not as a free-standing exhibition, nor as illustration, nor as a witness to history, but instead to represent an autonomous narrative defined by the fact that its statements remain imprecise and so form a narrative space. The Slovenian example again very clearly demonstrates that musealisation involves processes of both upgrading and downgrading. Indeed, before the museum’s archive can accept the items in question, they have to be thrown away – contrary to the museum’s demand ‘Don’t throw pots away’. The large plastic container in which the old pots land initiates the transformation process. Next, the museum’s curators carry out a second process of devaluation by selecting the objects that can be destroyed by artists. The discarded, valueless pots ultimately become art through the participation of a public that takes part in the creation of value. As Conn (2010: 38) observed, regarding the transformation of things into art: ‘[A]rt, in the absence of any more satisfactory space, is the categorical apotheosis that any object could hope to achieve’. Art and artistic intervention can therefore function as empty space in historical exhibitions. Precisely because the liaison of history and art in a museum is contradictory (Bogh 2008), historical exhibitions can use contemporary art to represent difficult elements of historical narrative without naming them directly.

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Moreover, because modern art makes commentary necessary, as Arnold Gehlen (1960) has observed, the absence of any unique meaning in works of modern art can (and must) be commented upon. In Brussels this takes place against the background of a teleological view of European integration that systematically empties history of meaning – in this case, the history of the Second World War. In Celje, by contrast, an effort is made to involve the public in creating a pluralist historical understanding of the present. Even if the Celje Museum of Recent History does not deal explicitly with the history of modern Europe, the Don’t throw pots away! project represents a use of art in historical museums and exhibitions that allows appreciation of art and history’s nature as production and construction.

The Logic of a European Collection The above examples have shown that when it comes to Europe, there is no single or common collecting strategy. Instead, there are different local and regional practices, all of which are inscribed in a European space. In conclusion we will, however, introduce a project that quite directly and explicitly aims at the creation of a European collection. Under the rubric ‘Daily Life’ in the ICOM publication Reflecting Europe in its Museum Objects, there is a picture of a blue rubbish bin (Figure 6). The catalogue data identify this object as a rubbish bin from Novosibirsk in the ‘second half of the twentieth century’ (ICOM Europe 2010: 64). The object is held by the Ethnographic Museum in Geneva, which raises several questions. How did a Russian rubbish bin end up in a Swiss Museum, and why was it collected and exhibited there? How did it then come to be included in the meta-collection of ICOM Europe? Why is a blue rubbish bin from Siberia a European museum object? Because things cannot talk, the object in the Geneva museum has its own explanatory text. It advances two arguments for making an object from Novosibirsk a European object. Firstly, the rubbish bin in general is defined as a sign of European cultural history (ICOM Europe 2010: 64): ‘The bin is a fairly recent companion of European societies and carries many historical, economical [sic] and cultural implications. It hides away the impure remains of daily life, depriving them of value in a reorganisation of everyday living space’. According to this view, collecting and sorting rubbish is part of European daily life and cultural history, so an object that highlights this process can become a European object. Secondly, its actual transfer from Siberia to Switzerland appears to point to the former

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conflict between East and West. By memorialising a political frontier that no longer exists, the rubbish bin signifies the history of the Cold War in Europe. An anecdote in the attached text also highlights the process of musealisation, undergone by every object that is collected, archived and exhibited in a museum (ICOM Europe 2010: 64): ‘The abduction of this (now) Russian bin into a Swiss museum was greeted with incredulous laughter. Yet one cleaning lady at the site called it “the only thing left here that had any value”’. Probably unaware of it herself, this (Russian?) cleaning lady was referring to a constitutive moment of cultural value creation that Michael Thompson (2003: 29) dealt with in his theory of rubbish – the lending of a dynamic to the cultural treatment of objects: ‘In our culture objects are either “ephemeral” or “durable”’. Correspondingly, there are ephemeral spaces and institutions – department stores, street parades, newspapers – as well as enduring spaces and institutions such as libraries, museums, archives. Thompson’s analysis assigns specific social characteristics to the categories of ephemerality and durability, since over time durable objects gain value, whereas ephemeral objects lose it. He goes on (2003: 29) to explain: ‘The Baroque commode belongs to the durable category, whereas the used car belongs to the category of the ephemeral’. The process of creating value for things, and hence the process that assigns things to one or the other of the above categories, occurs within a culturally produced framework according to concepts of authenticity, historicity and cultural significance (Carman 2010). A handmade, quite possibly rare commode from the early Baroque has more value culturally, and likely in monetary terms, than a mass-produced used car. Thompson’s approach enables us to address the possibility of transfers between the two spheres. How can ephemeral things – like a rubbish bin – become durable ‘museum’ objects if the distinction between durable and ephemeral objects is, for cultural and economic reasons, to be upheld? Thompson (2003: 31) argued that rubbish represents the necessary dynamisation between the two spaces. Because an object categorised as ephemeral steadily loses value, it eventually becomes rubbish: ‘I believe that an ephemeral object whose value and expected life gradually diminishes can move into the category of rubbish’. Only then – and exactly at that point – can it be found to have value and thus become durable as an object in an archive. From this standpoint, the rubbish bin from Novosibirsk, an ephemeral object, is itself rubbish. A glance at the object confirms this view: its blue paint is flaking off in several places, and it is covered with patches of rust, scratches and dents. But in the process of its musealisation,

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several durable properties can be attributed to it – for instance, it is an object of European daily life that symbolises the east-west conflict and also, through its presence in a Swiss museum, comments on this ironically and so becomes an object suitable for inclusion in a meta-collection of European objects. This is not the birth of a nation, but rather the birth of a European object. The Geneva museum, the editors of the ICOM publication and the observer produce, and testify to, the enduring value of the blue rubbish bin (Thompson 2003: 30): ‘We need to recognise that the properties that are attributed to objects are given to them by society itself ’. The photo of the blue rubbish bin from Novosibirsk is located in one of eleven sections that, taken together, outline a narrative for Europe: Beginning, Belief and Religion, Art and Culture, Exchanges, Technical Innovations, Daily Life, Power, War, Migrations, Borders, and Towards United Europe. All forty-eight objects in this meta-collection are in one way or another defined as European. The narrative reaches from imagined European origins – using objects from prehistory – to an ideally conceived European union. Two of the three works selected for the closing category, Towards United Europe, are works of contemporary art. Jörg Frank’s picture, Europa: Work in Progress, held by the Musée, closes the meta-collection of European objects. Reflecting Europe in its Museum Objects is among the few examples in which it is possible to track the manner in which European objects are made today. Here, the musealisation of Europe takes place solely in the context of the publication, since the process requires the lasting actualisation traditionally supplied by the institutions of the durable (Maranda 2009: 256). Precisely because this collection does not materialise itself outside the publication and in this sense is no kind of collection at all (Ambrose and Paine 2010: 135), it exemplifies the logic of the European collection of cultural and aesthetic strategies, as well as its aporia. Generally speaking, the Europeanisation of objects and their collection take place in a field that has redefined the possibilities and qualities of objects and collections. Europeanisation constitutes one possibility for participating in this process of re-description and guiding it to some extent. This does not necessarily point to an innovative reformation of collecting practice: European museums, and museums all over the world, have collected objects like the blue rubbish bin for more than forty years of intense involvement in aspects of the culture of daily life, and of industrial and mass culture. Nonetheless, the asymmetric relationship between Europeanisation and musealisation has consequences for collection practice and the concept of an object. In attempting to avoid any kind of essentialist and homogenous

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ascription of value, European collection practice favours a conception of the object that we have defined as relational. A relational understanding of the object plays down the autonomy and significance of the epistemic object. Instead, the mediating function of museal objects takes centre stage and is, at the same time, constantly produced and represented, as the examples of participative collecting, the European loan system and cultural routes show. No possible Europeanisation of objects and collections would ever involve the development of a dominating model for the museal field, so collection policy and practice oriented to Europe will not be organised as one strategy, let alone a common strategy. It will remain a matter for individual actors and cultural-political forces in the domain of museums that aim at Europeanisation. Depending upon national or regional, global or local traditions, Europe and European integration can be captured through thematically selected objects, such as those involving war, migration or frontiers. However, objects rendered European in this way are primarily defined by their original context of meaning – contexts that are themselves the outcome of a historical process of imputation and have their own particular logic and explanatory power. It should also be reiterated that the Europeanisation of collection practice reacts to models that have been employed in a national or regional framework. The digitalisation of museal collections and archives is based on a French model, the Dutch developed the exchange and reorganisation of loans of objects, and the North-Rhine Westphalian Route of Industrial Culture is a prototype for the development of a European Route of Industrial Heritage. Finally, national or regional actors and institutions use the Europeanisation of collecting policy and practice to demonstrate the modernisation of the idea of the museum, which is now oriented to the social openness and relevance of museums, and the visibility and usability of collections. Common, inclusive collecting is meant to challenge the museum’s inherent structures and gradually transform it. Digitalisation promises encyclopaedic knowledge for the twenty-first century. Transnational exchange and European routes dissolve the static nature of collections and objects. Contemporary art facilitates the retelling of history. Chapter 5 takes these points up by addressing the narration of European history, and above all the history of European integration that museums present today.

Figure 1. Exhibition C’est notre histoire! Wrocław 2009. Copyright: Musée de l’Europe, Brussels.

Figure 2. Exhibition Doner, Delivery and Design – Entrepreneurs in Berlin. Museum of European Cultures, Berlin 2009–10. Copyright: Museum of European Cultures, Berlin.

Figure 3. Anchor Points, European Route of Industrial Heritage 2006–7. Copyright: European Route of Industrial Heritage.

Figure 4. Missa, 1992. Copyright: Dominique Blain.

Figure 5. Poster Don’t throw pots away! Museum of Recent History, Celje 2010. Copyright: Museum of Recent History, Celje.

Figure 6. Poubelle bleue. Museum of Ethnography, Geneva 2009. Copyright: Museum of Ethnography, Geneva.

Figure 7. Watching the European Union grow, permanent exhibition. House of History of the Federal Republic of Germany, 2013. Copyright: Wolfram Kaiser.

Figure 8. Bulgaria’s accession to the European Union and NATO. The National Museum of History, Sofia 2010. Copyright: Nikolai Vukov.

Figure 9. Room on the Schuman Plan, exhibition C’est notre histoire! Brussels 2007–8. Copyright: Musée de l’Europe, Brussels.

Figure 10. Remembering a ‘founding father’. Robert Schuman House, ScyChazelles 2010. Copyright: Wolfram Kaiser.

Figure 11. Wheel of Myths. Swiss National Museum, Zurich 2010. Copyright: Wolfram Kaiser.

Figure 12. Foyer, permanent exhibition. Cité Nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration, Paris 2009. Copyright: Kerstin Poehls.

Figure 13. Map Actors from MigMap – Governing Migration. A Virtual Cartography of European Migration Policies, exhibition Projekt Migration. Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne 2005. Copyright: TRANSIT MIGRATION/Labor k3000.

Figure 14. Digital maps of European borders. European Museum Schengen, Schengen 2010. Copyright: Wolfram Kaiser.

Figure 15. Suitcase installation, exhibition Destination X. Museum of World Culture, Gothenburg 2010–12. Copyright: Kerstin Poehls.

Figure 16. Section on contemporary history, permanent exhibition. Museum of London, London 2011. Copyright: Wolfram Kaiser.

Chapter 5

N E The Story and Stories of European Integration T              difficult history, as the preceding chapter has shown. By placing particular works of art at the entrance to C’est notre histoire!, the curators of the Brussels exhibition separated the integration of (Western) Europe since 1945 – the subject of the exhibition – from a prehistory riven by conflict (Tempora 2007). The exhibition catalogue presented the end of the war as a ‘Year Zero’, and integration as a completely fresh start: ‘For the first time in the history of Europe, the culture of war has given way to a culture of peace’. By adopting this stance, the curators in fact studiously ignored both modern historical research on the subject and a debate over this supposed ‘Year Zero’ that has received relatively wide public attention. In Germany in 2010, disputes over structural and personal continuities across the Second World War flared up again with regard to the personnel and activities of the foreign ministry in the newly created Federal Republic of Germany. But continuities of this kind also pertain to European integration. For example, some officials of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) were involved in the international cartels of the interwar years and had also collaborated during the occupation (Kaiser and Schot 2014; Seidel 2010a). Indeed, European integration has proved as turbulent as national integration in nineteenth-century Europe. On closer inspection, narration of the history of European integration turns out to be a very controversial question. Whereas the so-called founding fathers of the ECSC and the European Economic Community (EEC) intended to unite Europe, others believed quite firmly that such moves would divide Germany, or Western Europe, for the foreseeable future. Many Christian Democrats regarded the inclusion of equal pay for men and women in the EEC Treaty as a progressive move, and market integration as the motor of socio-economic progress. Meanwhile, many Scandina-

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vian social democrats who saw the new organisations in Luxembourg and Brussels as conservative and Catholic-dominated were concerned that the ECSC and the EEC were becoming influenced by the Catholic Church and would be incompatible with the structures of their own national welfare states. Although the EEC formed a customs union, and then later an internal market that greatly simplified economic exchanges among its member states, externally the EU of today has sometimes followed a protectionist policy – most strikingly where inefficiently produced foodstuffs have attracted export subsidies. Many EU citizens have taken advantage of the new economic, social and cultural opportunities in an enlarged Europe and continue to do so, but others have found their jobs eliminated by increased competition, and some would welcome news that the EU was about to be dismantled. The Schengen Agreement has made cross-border mobility considerably easier, but the EU frontier with the rest of the world has become harder to cross. Despite belief in the EU that universal democratic norms and values are being exported (Manners 2002), many in the wider world, especially in former colonies, see this merely as a rhetorical strategy aimed at creating a new pan-European ‘empire’ (Zielonka 2006). This list of the sometimes heated arguments within and about European integration since the Second World War could go on and on. But what is key to the museal representation of integration is not only what is said (or not), but where it can be said. When nineteenth-century states founded national museums for the first time, reinforcing their self-image and selfconfidence, many of them nonetheless were quite slow to develop explicit accounts of their own national histories. By contrast, European integration is taking place in the context of a gigantic infrastructure of existing museums financed by a range of sources and varying in function. Purely for this reason, no consideration of Europeanisation as a cultural practice of the museal narration of history can confine itself to major projects that place European integration in broad historical perspective, such as the planned House of European History (HEH) in Brussels. Instead, it needs to examine how a possible Europeanisation of historical narration plays out in other kinds of museums in which existing national, regional or thematic narratives are modified by a European narrative presented as a common history. Any comprehensive account of the museal presentation of integration must therefore include these other museums: those dealing with national history such as the German Historical Museum (DHM) in Berlin, or the House of History of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn; those dealing with regional history such as can be found in Edinburgh, Stuttgart, Barcelona and Meran; or those devoted to particular issues and topics, such as museums for technology and for war, and for example the

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Schengen European Museum in Schengen, the first museum devoted to an EU policy field. Besides these museums, the memory sites and museums dedicated to the so-called founding fathers, already discussed in chapter 3, merit consideration. Our examination of museal narratives will cover not only the ‘what’ (which aspect of the European dimension?) and the ‘where’ (in which new or existing museal context?), but also the ‘how’. Before the debate over narration in the 1980s (Lorenz 1997: 170ff.), most historians believed that a so-called master narrative was possible and that it created social meaning, presenting ‘a coherent representation of history with a clear perspective, a representation usually centred upon the nation state and which not only moulded national historical disciplines, but which acquired public hegemony’ (Jarausch and Sabrow 2002b: 16). However, a pluralist academic system always holds competing ways of constructing the past, and individual master narratives can only ever assume a hegemonic authority temporarily. Making use of the existing literature, Jarausch and Sabrow identify six leading features of master narratives as dominant ways of talking about the past within a cultural community (2002b: 17f.). Two of them are especially relevant to Europeanisation as cultural practice. First is the master narratives’ ‘relationship to the social practices through which tradition is made and history shaped’ (Middell, Gibas and Hadler 2000: 24). Attempts to create tradition take place in diverse cultural spaces and institutions: historical popularisations, schoolbooks, essay competitions, theatre, television. The historical museum too is a forum suited to the formulation of narratives for a broad public. Given the constraints of the museum itself, complex historical developments have to be simplified for such narratives to conform to limitations of space, of the given repertoire of museal forms of representation and of visitors’ prior knowledge, when they have any at all. In these conditions, curators who set about constructing a museal master narrative informed by their own normative intentions find it quite easy to create a form of history that is ‘very simple and easy to remember’ (Interview Pomian) – as was planned for the Musée de l’Europe (Musée). Secondly, dominant master narratives develop social force, competing with other historical narratives and succeeding in influencing social groups and actors. Foremost among these are what we have called cultural entrepreneurs, who take up new contents and forms of historical narration in the museum, adapt them for the museum context and, as cultural mediators, propagate them across institutional and national boundaries. In the context of museal discussion, new trainees and curators can introduce new knowledge and narratives from their recent university studies, revis-

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ing existing accounts. Historians serving on museum boards also speed the entry of new aspects of academic debates into the museum context, where permanent exhibitions are usually revised every five or ten years. Above all, museums can expect to have an impact much broader than even that of successful popular historical paperbacks. Hence museums do not simply reflect dominant master narratives but can help create such discourses. Of course, academic historians’ suspicion of master narratives has grown in tandem with their increasing interest in theoretical and philosophical perspectives and issues. Michel Foucault, for instance, polemicised against the idea that Western European thought turns upon the idea of progress (1969), an idea evident in the teleological construction of many master narratives. The radical deconstructivist Jean-François Lyotard (1985) has likewise attacked idealism and Marxist historical determinism, both rooted in the nineteenth century but having an impact well into the twentieth. From these perspectives a coherent interpretation of history seems altogether impossible. Furthermore, debates that began in the United States among feminist and black historians have taken up this critique to argue that such master narratives are no more than the autobiographies of white European males. Even though this line of argument has not been so influential in Europe, today no history of Europe can avoid raising the issue of a real or imagined Eurocentrism in the construction of its history. This decline of master narratives of national histories is reflected in the stance of many new museums and permanent exhibitions, which tend to adopt pluralistic and sometimes radically deconstructing narratives. However, Jörn Rüsen has argued from a decidedly normative perspective that any cultural identity depends directly upon master narratives (1998: 23). Analogously, it might therefore be concluded that without the Europeanisation of master narratives, it will be impossible to form a European cultural identity. As was demonstrated in chapters 2 and 3, reinforcement of European cultural identity is one of the factors motivating state and societal actors’ efforts to Europeanise the museum field and their cultural practices. Since museums are themselves cultural institutions, they could indeed play a role in a shift from national to European master narratives. In both origins and traditions, museums function as institutional stockpiles for the creation of meaning, reshaping master narratives in the museal field and communicating them to a larger public. In so doing they shape and sustain collective cultures of memory (Assmann 2006; Halbwachs 1925), promoting the identification of people in a given society with specific political institutions and practices – in this case, those of the EU. Above all, many visitors quite plainly still expect museums to present plausible narratives. The curators of the House of History of the Federal

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Republic of Germany in Bonn, for instance, have reported that their own surveys show that most visitors seek an accessible chronological narrative rather than a more complex thematic approach (Interview Kraus). Most visitors count on curators to have ‘a good and well-founded understanding of established historical tradition’ and shape their exhibitions accordingly, although Bernward Deneke (1990: 79) suggested some time ago that curators who are fixated on objects tend to discount and neglect such a narrative understanding. This chapter deals with museums’ presentation of the history of European integration in its broadest sense, as a history shared in common. Given the enduring power of strong national narratives, no coherent European master narratives capable of gaining transnational societal validity have emerged so far. But two approaches do hold promise for development of such master narratives, at least conceptually. The first is the Musée project, which has proposed to narrate European history in terms of alternating phases of unity and conflict. The second is the representation, in a report by the HEH Committee of Experts, of today’s EU as a developed, highly institutionalised transnational and supranational constitutional order. Nonetheless, both are outweighed by the way the history of European integration is already inscribed, in one form or another, in several existing museums. Here integration is treated as an institutional shield for a cultural ‘unity in diversity’, and the stories told can be assigned to particular political fields in which today’s EU has special powers, fields that also can be made the object of museal representation, whether implicitly or explicitly. The next three sections of this chapter deal with each of these approaches in turn. The fourth section will examine narrative forms used in narratives of European integration, for these are just as important as the narratives’ content. In museums that deal explicitly with the history of integration, variants of biographical narration play a particularly important role. On the one hand, the initiation of Western European integration after 1945 is presented as an extraordinary achievement by the so-called founding fathers of today’s EU; on the other, integration is represented as the sum of the transnational social experiences of EU citizens. But does Europe, or the EU, really need a new European master narrative of the kind that the Musée project team and those associated with the HEH project are seeking? What kind of contribution can museums make to the development of such a narrative, and to embedding it in an emerging European society? These questions will be dealt with at the end of this chapter, building on the preceding analysis of European history museums. Here it will become evident that major structural barriers inhibit the rapid

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Europeanisation of historical narratives in museums that could in turn contribute to the Europeanisation of national, regional or local cultures of memory. What does seem more feasible is a convenient trade-off between the contrasting cultures of memory in East and West, connecting the familiar theme of totalitarianism in the East to that of integration in the West to create a joint European twentieth-century mythology of suffering and heroism.

Unity and Conflict: The End of European History So far, only the team working on the Musée has arrived at a coherent interpretation of the history of Europe and of European integration which can claim to be a new European master narrative capable of replacing national narratives. Their outline, Museum of Europe, A Shared History for a Common Future (Tempora 2003), proposed the year 1000 as a starting date for their account of European history, which at the time was still expected to occupy a building of the European Parliament (EP). This choice of year marks the effective completion of the Christianisation of most of Europe and the beginning of a ‘supranational community of the literary elites, both clerical and lay, bound together by the faith, the language of learning and their ancient modes’ (Tempora 2003). This proposal to place the beginning of European history not in antiquity, but at the point of alleged achievement of a unity of belief in the year 1000, implicitly resolved two central issues. The first concerned the geographical and cultural scope of Europe. Adopting the arguments of Krzysztof Pomian’s L’Europe et ses Nations (1990), ‘Europe’ was more or less identified with Roman Catholic Europe, thereby excluding the Eastern Byzantine Church together with the territories where it held sway. The Christian church did not divide formally until after the turn of the millennium with the Schism of 1054, but its branches had been drifting apart since the fifth century. Only by ignoring this problem was it possible to create the narrative of an alleged unity of belief in medieval Europe. This heavily Catholic narrative corresponded closely to conceptions of the ‘Occident’ shared principally by Catholic historians, publicists and supporters of European reconciliation in the interwar and early post-war periods. In their eyes, support for Western European integration could be linked to an earlier phase of European Christian unity. By selecting a Roman Catholic unity of belief in medieval Europe as its point of departure, the Musée created a suitable foundation for its preferred representation of European history. According to this history, over

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the last one thousand years Europe has alternated between phases of unity and of conflict. Unity of belief in the medieval period preceded its division during the Reformation and the subsequent wars of religion. The Enlightenment once more restored a unity in which, for the French philosopher Montesquieu, individual states were no more than provinces of a European republic of scholars. This was in turn followed by the era of revolutions, of nationalisms, ideologies, and finally two world wars. According to the exhibition C’est notre histoire!, the end of the Second World War marked a ‘Year Zero’ and, with that, the beginning of a new, third phase of European unity. While this master narrative of alternating phases of unity and conflict in European history remains a project yet to find museal realisation, its historiography follows that of the French Annales school and the work of historians such as Fernand Braudel in two important respects (Interviews Pomian, von Plessen). First, this choice takes up the idea of the longue durée, in which post-war European integration, the core theme of the planned museum, is traceable to the achievement of a Roman Catholic unity of belief around the year 1000. Second, the proposed narrative framework emphasises significant long-term cultural structures in European history. Specific events by contrast receive much less attention. However, Tempora modified this perspective for the exhibition C’est notre histoire! by merging it with the biographical approach, which constructs the history of unification around the so-called founding fathers and individual EU citizens. According to Pomian (Interview), this choice was due not only to the constraints of museal pedagogy, but also to his growing conviction that ‘historical processes cannot explain what we really deal with in history’. As in the plan for the larger museum, the exhibition C’est notre histoire! positions European integration after 1945 as the culmination of the master narrative’s phases of unity and conflict. From Pomian’s historico-philosophical perspective, this European unity can still disintegrate in the future (‘Die Einheit’ 2008). However, since those working in the Musée themselves seek to contribute to the cultural consolidation of this third phase of unity, the EU de facto appears, in both the exhibition and the plan for the museum, as the final triumph of European unity over conflict in Europe – or even as the ‘end of European history’, to adapt a phrase from Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) argument that the end of the Cold War signified the triumph of democracy as a form of government. Alternating phases of unity and conflict do not, in this conception, form an infinite historical circle. Instead, European integration should be conceived in Hegelian terms as a higher-level synthesis, formed from phases of unity and conflict on the model of thesis and antithesis.

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Consequently, the Musée connected the origin of the EU to a reflexive process and the action of individuals seeking a higher-level synthesis of this kind. According to the outlined proposal for the museum (Tempora 2003), at the end of the Second World War the aim of European integration was ‘something utopian, a pious wish, and not a political objective to be achieved’. Integration had therefore to be presented to museum visitor as ‘something that was in doubt, to encourage visitors to wonder how it was successfully put into practice’. The far-seeing founding fathers are presented to C’est notre histoire! visitors in the room dedicated to the ECSC, in a striking analogy to the Catholic trope of the miracle. According to a descriptive plaque in the Wrocław version of the exhibition, these ‘peaceful revolutionaries’ created their own ‘miracle of Luxembourg’ – the location of the newly formed ECSC – by bringing about the ‘most significant pacific transformation of all history’. As far as any academic history is concerned, this is of course an artificial miracle narration. Treating the story of European integration as a story of historical synthesis effectively excludes all conflict from this museal account of a new phase of European unity (Kaiser and Krankenhagen 2010). This applies particularly to the quite varied ideas and aims of the founding fathers, but also to the complete exclusion of other post-war European experiences in Western European countries that did not then join the EEC and especially in those that have not become EU members since. Hence C’est notre histoire! places the wartime British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in a tiny room to the side of the main ECSC space, where an extract from his 1946 Zurich speech makes clear that he was an early advocate of Franco-German reconciliation. Yet the exhibition makes nothing of it, nor does it indicate why Churchill nonetheless saw Britain’s role as an international power outside a newly integrated Western Europe. Those organising the exhibition viewed Churchill as a ‘classical imperialist’ (Interview Pomian) too deeply rooted in the past era of European conflict to merit a place in a museal representation of the miracle of integration. However, it is the museal representation of Germany’s contribution to European integration which best demonstrates how the master narrative created by the Musée writes all conflict out of this third phase of European unity. Not only does the Federal Republic’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, quite legitimately gain a central role as one of the so-called founding fathers, but it also seems, in the Brussels variant of C’est notre histoire!, that the end of the Cold War was primarily brought about by the East German protests of autumn 1989. Germans therefore appear as prominent builders who founded and extended the new house of European unity. In fact,

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the Musée’s narrative not only consigns the bloody prehistory of this third phase of unity to allegory, but it also gives broad museal emphasis to Germans’ experience as victims of the world war. In the entrance hall, visitors walk over an image of ruins of Cologne – not of Warsaw, Rotterdam or Coventry. Visitors are also presented with a slow-running film whose text states that ‘Europe was in Year Zero a continent of devastation and ethnic cleansing’ counting, among others, six million dead Jews, six million dead Poles and seven million dead Germans. Even in the Wrocław exhibition, revised for Polish visitors, a plaque asks visitors to reflect on ‘the German victims of the war started by Hitler’. This radical Europeanisation of a victim mythology that ascribes political responsibility and moral culpability to Hitler and ‘the Nazis’, under whose rule all Europeans suffered as equals, is very tempting for proponents of harmonisation of European cultures of memory. We will return to this below.

Pöttering meets Sternberger: A Constitutional Order for Europe In contrast to the approach taken by the Musée team, the 2008 report of the original HEH Committee of Experts recommended dealing only with twentieth-century history and concentrating on the post-1945 period, to which 70 per cent of the available exhibition space should be devoted.1 Unlike the Musée, which took up the idea of European integration after 1945 as the third phase of a process developing from two earlier phases, the HEH bracketed out conflicts predating 1914 and made no effort to seek deeper historical roots. Strongly influenced by the approach taken by the House of History in Bonn, the HEH report argued for a ‘chronologically ordered narrative’ (Committee of Experts 2008: 7) to assist the anticipated target group in ‘understanding historical events and processes. A simple chronology, supplemented by retrospectives and overviews where necessary, makes it easier to order in space and in time particular events and developments’. Retrospectives going back before the First World War were assembled as a sort of wish list by some committee members, who however were not entirely familiar with the most recent historical research. Hence the committee (2008: 15) suggested a treatment of nineteenth-century history of Great Britain which emphasised the ‘institutional solidity’ of the parliamentary system, the peaceful resolution of ‘major conflicts’ and the ‘evolutionary extension of the rights of civil and human rights’, together with ‘exemplary’ colonial administration. This list appears to derive from a long-defunct Whig history that sought to legitimate the nineteenth cen-

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tury’s only very gradual democratisation in the political system, together with the imperial role of Great Britain. Two important assumptions seem to condition the prehistory of post1945 European integration as presented in the HEH expert committee’s report. Firstly, the history of the Cold War is backdated to the First World War, so that the ‘East-West’ conflict begins with the ‘Bolshevik putsch in Russia’ (Committee of Experts 2008: 15ff.). Conceived in this way, the East-West conflict was already ‘a struggle between Communist dictatorship and free democracy’ in 1917. Interwar European movements and regimes centred upon nationalism, clericalism, fascism and National Socialism are marginal to the European history written around this epic struggle. Not until its meeting of 16 July 2008 did the committee recall that at the least, ‘support for right-wing dictatorships in the name of anti-Communism’ merited some sort of inclusion in the story.2 On the other hand, the committee proposed to bypass historical analysis and museal representation of the varied individual and collective experience of the war’s conclusion, simply stating in their report that 8/9 May 1945 could simply, and without hesitation, be referred to as the ‘Day of Liberation’. This is less a historical assessment than a normative proposition derived from the majority experience in Western Europe and 1970s West German historical pedagogy. Confronted with the historical fact that many Germans regarded the end of the Second World War as a defeat and a catastrophe, this practice assumes that it is better to have experienced it as a liberation, and that even if many Germans did not in fact do so, then all the same it is better to remember it as such. This idea of describing collective experience and memory as liberation is arguably even less appropriate for Eastern Europe, which after 1945 came under communist rule and Soviet hegemony. The HEH report advanced a variety of motives and reasons for European integration (Committee of Experts 2008: 21). Among them was the idea that war among ECSC/EEC members should be made structurally impossible, and that the resulting peace should serve to offset the loss of European importance in the wake of the Second World War and the gradual process of decolonisation. Meanwhile, initiators of the HEH project such as former EP President Hans-Gert Pöttering clearly sought a narrative that would present today’s EU as a modern, highly institutionalised ‘community of values’ on a transnational and supranational scale (Interview Kühnhardt). In 2007, before the appointment of the Committee of Experts in the same year, EP Secretary General Harald Rømer had argued in an internal memorandum for the EP Presidium concerning the HEH project ‘that specific emphasis should be put on the values of integration’.3 This narrative, which also influenced the EP Parlamentarium that opened

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in 2011, differs significantly from the intellectual history presented by the Musée, since it heavily emphasises Europe’s constitutional development in the recent past. The initiators see this process has having created a new supranational constitutional order that guarantees citizens’ political, social and economic rights and renders war in Europe impossible. In making this argument for their intended construction of European memory and identity, the initiators of the HEH project drew on Dolf Sternberger’s conception of ‘constitutional patriotism’, developed in the 1960s and coined in the 1970s (Sternberger 1990). His objective, in the wake of Hitler and the Holocaust, was to bind West German society to the idea of pluralistic democracy in a West German state. The citizens of the newly created Federal Republic of Germany should respect the values of the Basic Law (constitution), attach importance to the democratic institutions and procedures of a West German constitutional order, and be prepared to defend them. Sternberger hoped this new constitutional patriotism would replace the ethnically charged conception of the nation and the state that had contributed to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and opened the way to the aggressive racism of National Socialism. This new form of identification with a democratic state based on the rule of law – a form of republican domestication of the Germans – would moreover mark the end of the German ‘long march to the West’ (Winkler 2000). In the 1960s it was primarily West German social democratic and leftliberal academics who argued for a constitutional patriotism of this kind, which in itself was strongly reminiscent of the French republican model. The Christian Democrat Pöttering, however, used precisely this idea in promoting his vision for the HEH in 2007. This made sense in the context of a newly reunited Germany, as constitutional patriotism had sometimes been linked to arguments for abandoning the idea of an ethnically united Germany, an idea that anyway was made redundant by the GDR’s integration into the Federal Republic in 1990. Constitutional patriotism as a principle of political unity for the new Germany therefore superseded ethnicity. In any case, the EU political order held no future for an ethnically charged conception of the state. Paradoxically, however, during debate in Brussels regarding a European museum, the Franco-Belgian staff of the Musée, dedicated to a cultural and intellectual historical master narrative, accused the Christian Democrat Pöttering and ‘the Germans’ (Interview Benoit) of trying to propagate a narrative that actually was directly inspired by the French republican model. Some time after the HEH team began work on its first permanent exhibition in 2011, it did seem quite possible that the museum would be telling quite different stories about Europe by the time of its projected opening in

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2015. According to a flyer that the HEH organisers prepared for the Open Day of the EP on 7 May 2011 (‘Explore’ 2011), the focus remained on the twentieth century and European integration after 1945, as stated by the Committee of Experts. However, of the then thirteen appointees to the HEH team, only one staff member had any specific academic knowledge of the history of European integration. The group leader Taja Vovk van Gaal, by virtue of her academic training and Slovenian background, had a special interest in using the HEH as a vehicle for introducing the Eastern European member states’ experience under Communist rule during the Cold War and integrating it with the Western European experience. This became clear when the HEH team presented its first substantive draft to the EP Presidium in January 2012. Such a shift in narrative perspective might have been reinforced by the Polish historian Włodzimierz Borodziej’s presence as chair of the HEH advisory board. However, after this presentation and the HEH team’s subsequent internal debate, post-1945 European integration temporarily appeared to resume its prior centrality in the planning of the first permanent exhibition under the influence of the EP Praesidium and Rømer in particular. In any case, until 2011 the sharpest criticism of the HEH project came from Eastern Europe, above all from Poland (Trüpel 2009: 187). Only in Poland did the report of the HEH Committee of Experts receive broad media coverage by academics and journalists in 2008, there being virtually no response elsewhere. It was above all the national conservative columnist Piotr Semka (2008) who polemicised against the report in Rzeczpospolita. Semka and other Polish commentators demanded that the HEH include all the famous dates in Polish national mythology since the nineteenth century – from the battle against the Teutonic Knights at Tannenberg/ Grünwald in 1410 to Polish King Jan Sobieski’s leading role in the relief of Vienna in 1683, through the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 to the Solidarnošć movement of the 1980s. Another participant in these discussions was Bogdan Musiał, whose substantive critique of an exhibition on the role of the German army during the Second World War initiated by the Hamburg Institut für Sozialforschung in 1995 led to acknowledgement of the validity of some of his criticisms and a corresponding revision of the exhibition. At the time he represented the Institute for National Remembrance in Warsaw, a national political body whose programmatic subtitle was Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation – hence not crimes against Poles, persons or humanity, let alone crimes possibly also committed by Poles against other people.4 Musiał criticised the lack of a clearer condemnation of Stalinist and Communist crimes in the expert committee’s report

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(‘Polska’ 2008). Criticism of this kind demonstrates that Eastern European state and societal actors brought about a change in perspective for the politics of European memory, from a special emphasis on the crimes of National Socialism, primarily the Holocaust, to a museal didactic of totalitarianism, something we will return to later in this chapter.

The Taming of the Nation State: Unity in Diversity Only new, large-scale museal projects such as the Musée and the HEH can introduce master narratives like the one regarding integration as the third phase of European unity and the culmination of European history. For all other existing museal contexts, the question is whether dimensions of European integration can be written into a given narrative, how this might be done, and what kind of transformation is possible. Such representations do not always directly touch on European integration and today’s EU but can also take up transnational European issues that sometimes relate only indirectly to the EU. For many regional historical museums in federal or highly decentralised Western European states, integration is primarily inscribed by attaching regional historical discourse to the EU mantra of unity in diversity. The forms this inscription takes are as diverse as the historical experience, cultural identity and political rights of the regions themselves. From their perspective, the EU can facilitate cross-border exchanges and agreements, reinforce the cultural diversity of member states (not only of Europe), strengthen regional economic power and promote regional claims to autonomy. In this perspective, the EU is not a Leviathan aggressively engaged in accumulating ever more power centrally in Brussels, but instead a partner in moderating and limiting nation states that formerly were more strongly centralised. Especially in museums close to national frontiers, the EU functions as a neutral institutionalised context within which relations among ethnic groups and nations can be intensified and enhanced. A good example of this is the South Tyrolean Museum of History, where the local history of the twentieth century is presented in the keep of Meran Castle as a ‘Danteesque purgatorium’ (Interview de Rachewiltz). Visitors climb through the various levels of exhibition of the bitter cultural and political conflicts between South Tyrolean Germans and Italians, arriving quite exhausted at the top to be rewarded with the recent ‘success story’ (Interview Heiss) of growing economic wealth and political autonomy, and the view of the Etsch Valley below. Curator Hans Heiss tells this story in the context of bi-

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lateral Austro-Italian relations, which were transformed in the early 1990s by the prospect of Austria’s entry into the EU. According to the exhibition, this very much facilitated the ‘regionalisation of the provinces in historical Tyrol’ through the creation of a Euro region involving North and South Tyrol as well as the Trentino. This new regional focus made it possible for sub-national institutions to work together within an increasingly institutionalised cooperative framework, easing the implementation of the Autonomy Statute for South Tyrol in 1992 and enabling the mobilisation of citizens across the border, for example to lobby for the restriction of car traffic on the Brenner Pass. At the end of the exhibition, the visitor finds striking testimony to the regional identity paradigm in a transnational and European context from possibly the most well-known South Tyrolean today, the mountaineer Reinhold Messner, who from 1999 to 2004 was a member of the EP for the Italian Greens: ‘I am a European and a South Tyrolean, not a Tyrolean … maybe also a citizen of the world’. European integration also provides a thematic context for cross-border relations of all kinds: the twinning of towns, school exchanges and similar initiatives designed to promote intercultural understanding. One example is the final section of the permanent exhibition of the House of History Baden-Württemberg in Stuttgart, Grenz-Fall Frankreich. Neighbours and Frontiers. It alludes to the European anthem, Ode to Joy, to locate the changing representation of various twin-towns and discussion of different issues of cross-border Franco-German cooperation within a broader narrative of European integration. This section relentlessly documents obstacles and failures in intercultural communication, for instance drawing attention to the ritualisation of town-twinning, which is often nothing more than a routinised exchange of political courtesies between politicians and administrators. But the Stuttgart museum also deals with the economic dynamic arising from transnational relations. France is the single most important market for German exports, and especially for firms in Baden-Württemberg. The museum illustrates this through the story of the Smart car, which was originally conceived in Switzerland, belongs to Daimler Benz in Stuttgart and is built in Hambach in Alsace. Museal representations of transnational relationships in economy and commerce always rely on the existence of the EU’s internal market, even if this is not made explicit. In the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, for example, the advantages of exports to the EU that either create or sustain local employment are represented by a story about a Scottish prawn fisherman from the Isle of Harris, whom a plaque quotes as saying: ‘There’s a big demand for our prawns on the continent, mostly Spain, France and Italy. … Whatever they’re doing with them

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over there, I’m glad because it keeps us at sea’. The section on the Scottish economy also includes a story about a Scot of Italian origin whose frozen pizzas are exported to Italy, of all places, and one about Arbroath smokies, whose producers enjoy the protection the EU extends to products of local origin, as the story explains. Likewise, the Museu Història de Catalunya in Barcelona presents the period from Spain’s entry into the EC in 1986 to the beginning of the 1992 recession as part of Europa – prosperita intensa, a film about the contemporary history of Catalonia. It shows the rapid economic modernisation of Catalonia within the framework of the European market, accompanied by shots of the EU flag and long-serving Catalonian Prime Minister Jordi Pujol’s meetings with European politicians such as Jacques Chirac, Johannes Rau and Romano Prodi. In its closing sequence on Scottish devolution and the founding of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 the Edinburgh museum’s section on the twentieth century also draws attention to the role of the EU, whose decentralised, quasi-federal political system supports sub-national regions’ identity and right to autonomy. The Crown witness to this is Scottish Nationalist MEP for the Western Isles Winnie Ewing, whose medal for lengthy service in the European Parliament is displayed with the following text: When I became a European MP my puzzlement increased at the lack of ambition shown by the British parties. In the European Parliament with opportunities to join international organisations, I met many distinguished international politicians who asked ‘What is taking Scotland so long?’ I found great goodwill for Scotland internationally yet we allow big decisions about Scotland to be made by London often to our detriment.

The BELvue in Brussels also addresses such linkages between the increasing decentralisation of EU member states and the Europeanisation of political decision-making. This institution possesses no objects of its own and labels itself a ‘museum’ simply ‘to lure the public’ (Interview Lavens), but it has integrated a large quantity of EU-related visual materials in its exhibition, from 1960s shots of the European Commission’s Berlaymont Building to film of sessions of the European Council. The exhibition’s final section is composed of short texts with related photographs and film footage of the simultaneous ‘federalisation’ and ‘internationalisation’ of Belgium, which are both presented as aspects of Europeanisation. Here it seems that the more vigorous EU integration is, and the more Brussels becomes the de facto capital of the EU, the easier the further development of decentralisation is and, quite possibly, the faster the Belgian state will eventually peacefully disappear. The cultural institution advancing this argument is actually largely dependent upon financial support from the

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King Baudouin Foundation. This national foundation retains an interest in museal presentation of Belgian history since independence in 1830, but in today’s domestic politics such a presentation seems to operate only by flagging up transnational European connections.

Europe-Themed: Eurocorps and Ariane For a cultural institution within a pluralistic nationality state, the markedly transnational and European features of the BELvue are an avant-gardist exception among the few museums devoted to national history, an exception born of inner necessity. In the House of History in Bonn, the theme of European integration received some emphasis before its permanent exhibition was partially revised in 2011. The 1957 Treaties of Rome were central to the section A Europe of Treaties. However, as objects these treaties were ‘uninteresting’ (Interview Kraus); visitors spent little time looking at them, despite the curators’ efforts to introduce additional objects that highlighted conflicts over Western European integration in the Federal Republic of the 1950s. Since the revision, less space in the museum has been allotted to the foundation of the EEC, and more is devoted to the history of the GDR. Visitors can use a touchscreen to find out about the EEC’s origins and subsequent growth (Figure 7). The closing section of the new permanent exhibition depicts the EU simply as one of many challenges in an uncertain future, signified by a giant question mark, shown on the cover of this book. In most national history museums to date, the EU has been a museal appendix at most. For example, until the DHM in Berlin celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the EU’s existence in 2007, it hardly featured the theme of European integration at all. Between 2007 and 2011, visitors passed a standing desk devoted to this theme on their way out, having already reached the emotional and museal high point of the exhibition – the fall of the Wall and German unification in 1990. Remarkably, no reference was made to European integration’s importance for the new Länder. A copy of the Rome treaties lay on the standing desk, while plaques on the wall behind it provided a cursory overview of the present-day EU. The installation gave a general impression that shortly before the anniversary, the curators had realised that they had forgotten to deal with European integration in the permanent exhibition. The connection to the EU was therefore just an afterthought in a forlorn and mostly disregarded exhibit, which itself vanished in 2011 because its few displayed objects were acquired on long-term loan and had to be returned.

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Hence the treatment of today’s EU in the DHM, substantively and didactically, resembles that in Bulgaria’s National Museum of History, which occupies the palace of the former Communist head of state Todor Shivkov in Sofia. Having passed a few display cabinets devoted to contemporary history – dealing very superficially with the twentieth-century dictatorships of right and left to avoid domestic controversy – only the attentive visitor is likely to notice two cabinets with photos and short descriptions of Bulgaria’s entry into NATO and the EU (Figure 8) on the way out of the permanent exhibition. In Berlin the EU is dealt with in the area before the glass door at the exit; in Sofia, after the visitor has passed through the glass door. Nonetheless, the EU’s prominence in national history museums is greater in those countries where the question of membership was and is controversial, and where plebiscites were held before (planned) accession. For example, the National Museum in Copenhagen displays descriptive plaques, posters and film clips regarding plebiscites in 1972 on membership, 1992–93 on the Maastricht Treaty and 2000 on the prospect of joining the euro. The Landesmuseum within the Swiss national museum in Zurich has a permanent exhibition on the history of Switzerland. First opened in 2009, it deals explicitly with Switzerland’s internal division on European issues. It documents the ‘Split of 26 Swiss Cantons into Two Camps’ with a stela for each canton, showing on each, in black and white respectively, the percentage of votes for and against the proposals to join the European Economic Area and sign bilateral treaties with the EU. The associated text explains: ‘Swiss plebiscites over Europe or about the UN became domestic trials of strength. French-speaking Switzerland and the cities said “yes” and the rural areas said “no”’. The drama of a plebiscite in a country that does not even belong to the EU made it easier for curators to present European integration as a museal spectacle. By contrast, their colleagues in similar museums throughout the EU either did not see such conflicts over integration as a drama, or did not want to represent them as such for lack of space or for normative reasons, or have found no suitable means for their museal representation. Europe and European integration have proved to be more easily inscribed in national history museums devoted to a particular theme. Even military and war museums, where the European ‘other’ usually turns up as an enemy who once was shot at, are beginning to represent European military cooperation in the context of the United Nations, NATO and more recently the EU. Indeed, until the total revision of its permanent exhibition in 2013, the Imperial War Museum in London devoted a small gallery (Keeping the Peace) to this new topic at the end of the section on

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the post-1945 period. This gallery dealt with the observation of conflicts and peacekeeping missions, among other issues. In one cabinet a variety of headdresses (including a cap with the EU flag) allegorises transnational cooperation among the military forces of democratic states. More recently, creating new or revising permanent exhibitions provides opportunities to highlight such instances of European cooperation in the field of military technology as the Eurofighter programme or joint involvement in the Eurocorps, as the Stuttgart House of History of Baden-Württemberg’s sections on France and Germany have already done. In fact Europe can hardly be omitted from the contemporary sections of the larger technical museums, since the development of modern largescale technology demands transnational European cooperation. This is particularly apparent in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. A German Space Agency film shown there speaks of ‘German technology’ but for the most part presents major European projects, such as Airbus, which has become the ‘pride of Europe’ and successfully challenged the ‘dominance of the Americans’. Other major projects, presented through objects, text and film, are Spacelab, described as ‘a European Space Project’ that gained the European Space Agency ‘the right, despite much criticism, to pursue international space projects’; the large hadron collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN near Geneva; the Ariane rocket programme, which ‘gives Europe independence in the load-carrying rocket sector’; and Galileo, the satellite navigation system. European cooperation of this kind is also legitimated transnationally. For instance, the Deutsches Museum shows a film in which the French head of the European Space Agency talks at length of how ‘without teamwork’ between national organisations in Europe, nothing ‘can be achieved’. In connection with a short presentation on the launch of the European Mars Express in 2009 as an independently organised venture in planetary exploration, the Deutsches Museum talks of ‘Europe being on a par with the USA and Russia: autonomous, but not seeking autarchy’. In most of these large-scale technologies, ‘Europe’ appears in the form of multilateral intergovernmental cooperation. The EU gains advantage from this, because it normally coincides geographically with the states that participate in such projects. Thus technology museums can lead visitors to associate the EU with successes for which it is not at all responsible. Other museums, though, examine the EU’s role more critically. The Danish Fishing Museum in Esbjerg, for example, deals among other things with EU fisheries policy and its impact on national fishing fleets and fish stocks in the North and Baltic Seas. The European Museum that opened in Schengen on the Moselle in 2010, putting this small town in Luxembourg on

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the museal map, is a thematic museum organised around one area of EU policy: the agreement reached there in 1985 to remove internal border controls among most EU states, more recently including countries like Norway and Switzerland. The agreement made the name Schengen synonymous with the removal of border controls in Europe. Since its opening, this small museum has regularly welcomed visitors from not only Germany, France, Luxembourg and Belgium, but also new EU member states such as Poland and Bulgaria. According to museum employee Martina Kneip (Interview), even coach parties of Chinese communists stop off on their way from the Karl Marx House in Trier to Brussels, the unofficial capital of the EU.

Founding Fathers: The Myth of European Idealism Stories of transnational contemporary history as a common history are inscribed in existing narratives in a variety of ways across a range of museum types. But even so, the history of today’s EU is not easy to represent in a museum. Not every museum has an Ariane rocket in its collection, and who, apart from lawyers, likes reading treaties? At first sight at least, European integration lacks drama. It seems like a chain of endless negotiations conducted by men in grey suits, the outcome often more or less invisible in the daily life of the EU citizen. National master narratives, by contrast, were all about heroic leaders such as Giuseppe Garibaldi and Lajos Kossuth, together with dramatic collective experiences such as wars of liberation or revolution. Much of this was imaginary, serving primarily the construction of new ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1983). All the same, it was a basis of development for effective myths of nations and their respective pasts (Berger and Lorenz 2010), myths that marked collective memory and made museums into places of cultural self-representation (Boswell and Evans 1999). For museum workers who either want to or have to deal with today’s EU, the question is less what story they want to tell than how they can tell it so as to attract visitors’ attention. One response might be a range of biographical narratives that lend stories of European integration a specific content as well as their own museal form. Various museums and exhibitions have experimented with three types of biographical narrative: histories of the so-called founding fathers, that is, prominent politicians who played an important role in Western European integration in the years following the Second World War; memories of witnesses who fostered European integration in the recent past either through their work or in their

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private lives; and compilations of memories and opinions about European integration collected from museum visitors. European museums did not invent the myth of the founding fathers. Inspired by the American example, societal actors like the Christian Democratic parties are the chief discursive elaborators of this myth, together with the member states in the European Council and the supranational institutions of the EU – in all cases with the aim of forming and reinforcing their own political and institutional traditions (Joly 2007). The C’est notre histoire! exhibition took up this founding father myth in its first room, which was devoted to the origins of the ECSC in the early 1950s (Tempora 2007: 37–44). This room, with inset beams that look like girders, contained seven display cabinets (Figure 9), each dedicated to one politician whose biography and political role the curators had represented exclusively through objects: busts, photographs of the person in question celebrating the conclusion of negotiations, printed autobiographies and gramophone records of political speeches, together with objects of daily life, such as the glasses worn by the Belgian foreign minister Paul-Henri Spaak, Jean Monnet’s walking stick, Robert Schuman’s passport and the watering can from Konrad Adenauer’s rose garden. The four existing museums dedicated to individual founding fathers place even greater emphasis upon private life. Each private home combines a site of memory with a small museum and educational programmes intended mainly for the young. As outlined in chapter 3, only quite recently has cross-border cooperation begun between these institutions, lending greater emphasis to these politicians and their roles in European integration. Despite the great differences between the four sites of memory, three significant common features mark the way these museums and exhibitions present their museal narrative of the founding father myth. First of all, they all focus upon the private life of the four men and their role as ‘pater familias’ (as the exhibition C’est notre histoire! put it). Adenauer is presented in his home in Rhöndorf, surrounded by his many children and grandchildren. Schuman was unmarried, and his home and the associated museum emphasise his deep Catholic convictions and simple way of life, which itself allowed him to devote himself entirely to a common cause. The sacred character of this site of memory is underlined by the adjoining thirteenth-century chapel where Schuman was reinterred, which is decorated on the inside with the European flag and those of all member states (Figure 10). The Jean Monnet House in Houjarray presents Monnet as the head of a transnational network of convinced Europeans devoted to the task of

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European reconciliation and integration. Unlike in the Schuman House, the curators made no effort to authentically reconstruct the furnishings of Monnet’s house, but they have distributed contemporary telephones around the whole house to emphasise Monnet’s role as a networked communicator. As the catalogue for C’est notre histoire! stresses, these politicians and senior administrators ruled their countries as ‘family fathers’ and correspondingly created European institutions that served common interests. A second point is that these museal narratives of the so-called founding fathers depoliticise their impact upon European integration. The catalogue for C’est notre histoire! mentions only in passing that ‘the majority of them were Christian Democrats or liberals, in addition there was one Social Democrat’ (Tempora 2007: 38). However, in the early post-war years the geographical scope, institutional design and ideological orientation of European integration were highly disputed. Hence Adenauer in particular, like De Gasperi, used his policy of Western integration to continue the domestic struggle against socialists (Kaiser 2007). Parallel to this, many Northern European social democrats – especially those in Sweden (af Malmborg 1994) – criticised the ECSC and the EEC as being dominated by conservative and Catholic forces. The museal founding father narratives make no mention of this or any other political issue related to integration. This is also the case for the first report of the HEH expert committee (Committee of Experts 2008) and all the museums and exhibitions that depict the founding fathers as a happy little family. To paraphrase the German Emperor Wilhelm II’s dictum of 1914: after the Second World War the founding fathers seemed to know no political parties, but only Europe. Finally, the museal narrative also denationalises the so-called founding fathers’ backgrounds and orientations, so that they appear to the visitor as model proto-Europeans. The Pieve Tesino museum, for example, underlines De Gaspari’s fluent German and his role as a Catholic deputy in the Austrian Imperial Council in Vienna up to 1918. It also demolishes the liberal-national myth of the Risorgimento, which depicted all the inhabitants of Italy as supportive of the liberal demand for a united Italy. Reference is made in this context to the very small number of Trentinians (around 700) who, when Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary in 1915, changed sides to fight for the absorption of the Italian-speaking part of the Tyrol by the Kingdom of Italy. Likewise, the museum in Scy-Chazelles emphasises Schuman’s ‘Germanic anchorage’, his education in three different German universities and the influence of Rhenish social Catholicism in forming his political convictions – historical facts that help explain the aggressive domestic political criticism of Schuman by communists and

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Gaullists during the Fourth Republic (Poidevin 1986). The Scy-Chazelles museum, by contrast, presents Schuman’s transnational and intercultural socialisation as a great advantage in post-war efforts to reconstruct and institutionalise Western Europe. By placing such great emphasis upon these transnational and intercultural dimensions, the museal founding father narratives ignore the importance of continuing particular interests in the process of European integration – interests that governments were happy to call ‘national’ even when they actually had more to do with particular social groups whose character was sometimes more transnational than national. This is true of Monnet’s proposal for a European community in the coal and steel sector. The plan, which he put forward in early 1950, was a response to the failure of the domestic French modernisation plan, which had not given sufficient weight to the interdependence of the French and German economies (Lynch 1997; Milward 1984). Adenauer, for his part, sought full recognition of the newly founded Federal Republic in Western European politics (Schwarz 1986: 850–79). By airbrushing political interests out, this kind of museal narrative of the founding fathers represents them as European idealists – enlightened and determined politicians whose work for European integration was entirely altruistic. Of course, the museal founding father narrative as exemplified by C’est notre histoire! could be rendered more dramatically. Curators could introduce Schuman’s flight from German internment, Adenauer’s interrogation by the Gestapo or Spaak’s work for the Belgian government in exile in London. These narratives could also use other means of visualisation, such as clips from radio and TV broadcasts, thus avoiding the reliance on objects that prevailed in C’est notre histoire!, whose significance is often very unclear to young visitors. But even then, the founding father myth would suffer from its lack of relevance to anyone but the original members of today’s much larger EU. Unlike the American experience of westward expansion in which the murder of Native Americans created a tabula rasa, the ‘empire’ the EU has created (Zielonka 2006) has not eliminated those who got in its way. The transnational European narrative of integration sought by the EU is instead a common history of a varied collective memory and memory cultures reaching from Sweden to Poland (Leggewie 2011) – whether this is the mythology of a predominantly social democratic Scandinavian welfare state, or of the sufferings of Eastern European peoples under Stalinism and Communism. Perhaps the founding father myth could be supplemented by one involving the ‘fathers of expansion’, like former Spanish Prime Minister Filipe González or former Polish trade unionist and President Lech Walęsa, creating a narrative appropriate for

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all twenty-seven member states. At any rate, a personalised museal story requires a chronological and geographical reach far greater than that of the founding father myth.

From Frontier Barrier to Bridge-building: Europe Lived across Borders Another problem with the museal story of the founding fathers is that the social and political connotations of the idea of a well-meaning father figure seem outdated. In the emerging European society, the father figure has long been in retreat. Women have no place in this narrative of integration; nor, finally, does the quasi-monarchical style of government that the founding fathers are supposed to have fostered sit well with today’s pluralist media democracy. These problems partly explain why living witnesses who recall their own involvement in European integration in the broadest sense have found a place in museums and exhibitions, providing both new content and a fresh narrative style. This is in line with historical museums’ generally increasing reliance on statements of eyewitnesses, a trend that began with museums and exhibitions devoted to the Holocaust (de Jong 2012; Kushner 2001). In C’est notre histoire!, these living Europeans are at the core of the space devoted to the foundation of the ECSC alongside the founding fathers (Figure 1). In the EP Parlamentarium in Brussels, they more or less displace the founding fathers entirely (European Parliament n.d.). The European Route of Industrial Heritage discussed in chapter 4 also has a section called Biographies that deals with ‘significant people whose lives crossed many borders’.5 And in the Europeum in Mariazell, an Austrian conference centre that mounts exhibitions for pilgrims and tourists, The Discovery of Europe represents the lived integration of Europe solely through the testimony of contemporaries.6 Paradoxically, all these institutions make use of a strategy of museal representation that, they claim, the EU has superseded as a principle of political organisation: they nominate just one citizen and one memory for each member state, just as C’est notre histoire! selected just one representative for each founding state of the ECSC, plus Monnet. The significance of each of the twenty-seven memories is not that the witness experienced something very important or told a particularly illuminating or striking story, but merely that he or she had a particular nationality. There is one witness for every member state, deflecting possible nationalist criticism and involving visitors from all states in the exhibition and in the narrative of integration.

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This second variant of the biographical approach to representing the history of integration in a museum context is marked above all by a failure to clarify the criteria for choice of witness and of memory. Tempora claims there was no particular logic to the decisions (Interview Benoit). In the revised Wrocław exhibition, a plaque at the entrance states that ‘what is true for these 27 is also true for a great many other people. And at the end of the day, it is true for everyone’. Nonetheless, all twenty-seven witnesses and their statements seem carefully arranged to cover all of the EU’s most important policy goals (de Jong 2011; Kaiser 2011). So, for instance, the Polish witness says, ‘when life is good for people, they don’t want to fight wars’, thereby emphasising the EU’s contribution to the welfare of its citizens. A Luxembourg officer claims that ‘we all know that the priority of the EU isn’t in the military sphere but rather development aid or diplomacy’, and in this way conveys the self-image of the EU as ‘normative power Europe’ (Manners 2002). Finally, a Swedish woman working at the large hadron collider in Geneva says that scientific cooperation in Europe is ‘all about the common European knowledge capital’ in reinforcing Europe’s competitiveness. Here the witness uses an expression so closely matching the rhetoric of the European Commission that it is hard to imagine that the interview was not carefully prepared in advance. Another characteristic of this second biographical variant is that the great majority of recorded memories of positive personal experiences of integration come from university-educated professionals belonging to the middle and upper classes of the various EU states. As members of an elite whose socialisation and orientation is strongly transnational, they have profited socio-economically and culturally from European integration in much the same way that similar social groups benefited from national integration and the creation of larger markets in the nineteenth century. As became clear in chapter 3, museum curators themselves belong to this strongly transnational educated elite. For them, this second variant of the biographical approach has implicit autobiographical features and testifies to the EU’s relevance to the museum milieu. The streamlined selection of the twenty-seven witnesses for C’est notre histoire! seemed quite artificial and unconvincing, from the visitor’s point of view. Those responsible for the EP Parlamentarium claim to have learned from this (Interview Kleinig) by aiming instead to create a more elaborate social cross-section among a larger number of witnesses who talk about aspects of their daily lives. Only at the end of each interview did the curators insert an explanation of why and how the interviewee’s life has, in their view, been positively influenced by the EU and the EP. In this way, the political commentaries on the EP become more transparent. Still, everyday

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experience has made clear to most visitors at such institutions that in social terms, European integration and economic globalisation create both winners and losers – something one would think could be dealt with in exhibitions devoted to the history of today’s EU. Ultimately, this second variant of biographical narration fails to adequately convey the development of European integration over time. Hence the twenty-seven witnesses in C’est notre histoire! provide at best a panorama of the EU’s many supposed advantages of the EU at the time the exhibition was conceived and assembled in 2006–07. Taken together, the witness testimonies provide no meaningful chronology, no ‘red thread’, something that Taja Vovk van Gaal, the leader of the HEH project, sees as essential to future museums of European history. Sometimes it is only the form of the exhibition itself that ties witness statements together. C’est notre histoire! effects this through a standardised presentation of films in four languages on computer screens integrated into a stela, accompanied by a photograph of the particular witness and a brief biographical note. In the absence of an adequately coherent narrative of European integration as a common history, these interviews can easily look like ‘extensions of Commission propaganda policy’, in the words of an external advisor to the exhibition (Interview Dumoulin).

Sharing: Participative Narrating The various historiographical and practical problems in the first two variants of the biographical approach to the museal representation of European integration inform the present search for suitable ways of integrating the visitor more directly into temporary or permanent exhibitions. These visitors have their own transnational European experiences and their own opinions about Europe. The search for new ways of telling a story also reflects a broader trend of presenting museum history as a history from below, influenced by social history and the history of everyday life, together with the method of oral history. In this form of museal narration, the history of simple, unknown people overlaps or displaces the history of (allegedly) great men and women. Thomas Thiemeyer, in his study of the representation of both world wars in museums (2010), has recently noted the same phenomenon. He characterises this trend as a shift from the ‘personalisation’ of history, as in the museal founding fathers narrative, to its ‘personification’ through the actions or sufferings of unknown persons (Thiemeyer 2010: 146; Bergmann 1997). Because it is easier to identify with such protagonists, their experiences can have a greater emotional impact upon the visitor. This im-

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pact is clearly the aim of those working on the HEH project who present the future Brussels museum as ‘a permanent reservoir of European narratives and memories’ (‘Explore’ 2011). The museal practice of participatory collecting discussed in chapter 4, in which every visitor is curator of his own life, thus extends beyond objects to personal experiences and histories, becoming participative narrating. Two structural factors reinforce this trend towards participative narrating in the context of a museum. Firstly, curators of modern-history museums or sections in permanent exhibitions rely less and less on objects to tell stories. Steven Conn (2010: 7) has noted that ‘[t]he place of objects has shrunk as people have lost faith in the ability of objects alone to tell stories and convey knowledge’. Secondly, the trend to personification is bolstered by museums’ growing wish to draw the visitor out of the role of a passive observer through the use of interactive processes. The rapidly growing use of websites, interactive technologies and social networks (Ambrose and Paine 2010: 17ff.) should make it easier for visitors to tell the museum their own stories, including those about Europe (Interview Kraus). But there are still problems with this third variant of biographical narration. For one, the bulk of witness memories generated in this way and displayed in museums and exhibitions convey little that is historically relevant to today’s EU, since they mostly deal with individual experiences in transnational and intercultural contexts. Also, the range of languages spoken by visitors, especially in a museum like the planned Brussels HEH, implies that visitors will be able to relate only a fraction of the store of memories and opinions to their own, since most of these accounts will be expressed in a foreign language. Meanwhile, in the absence of structured guidance, visitors find it harder to record memories of their own lived experience of transnational European integration than to express spontaneous opinions on the good or bad aspects of Europe. Museums might find it worthwhile to collect normative statements of this kind, but they would more suitably grace the closing sections of a European museum, or a European segment in another museum, than function as an integral component of a museal narration of European integration. All the same, visitors’ memories and opinions as testimony have the great advantage of documenting the disputed character of European integration, today’s EU and its policies. Even when they concern referendums, as in the museums in Copenhagen and Zurich, such controversies tend to seem abstract precisely because their representation is impersonal. Moreover, the inclusion of critical and negative memories and opinions could

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enhance visitors’ perceptions of the plausibility and legitimacy of museal narratives of European integration, as compared with normative orientation of manipulated exhibitions such as C’est notre histoire!. Ultimately, a pluralistic representation of individual memory and opinion would adequately reflect the post-1980s decline of the so-called permissive consensus – citizens’ broad assent to integration combined with a lack of interest in the Brussels political process – and the gradual transformation of the EU into a much more politicised, pluralist polity where different ideas and interests often compete with one another (Kaiser, Leucht and Rasmussen 2009).

From the Deconstruction of National Myths to European Master Narratives? The content and form of the inscription of European integration in existing museums, as discussed above, also benefit from the way in which Western European museums increasingly question established national myths, sometimes going as far as to caricature them (Ostow 2008). These museums tend to recount national history as a fragmentary story of various individual experiences, to which very different memories correspond (Levy and Sznaider 2007: 52). In principle, they ascribe similar legitimacy to each different individual narrative. Curators openly refuse to take positions on conflicting collective memories and stories, and make no attempt to impose their own academic, museal or pedagogic knowledge. The resulting plurality of perspectives creates new possibilities for a transnationalisation of historical stories relating to Europe in museums. The best example of such a radically deconstructivist narrative of national history is Zurich’s Landesmuseum – Switzerland arguably being the European country with the most tenacious national historical myths. The permanent exhibition is dominated by the ‘Wheel of Myths’. Like history, this wheel turns very slowly, passing through multiple symbolic representations of Swiss history and cultural identity, from William Tell to Heidi to the yellow post bus (Figure 11). The permanent exhibition primarily caricatures contemporary myths, occasionally resorting to the perspective of Switzerland’s ‘allies’. Hence the section of the museum entitled No-one Was Ever Always There uses the biographies of celebrities resident in Switzerland, like the tennis player Roger Federer, to ironically comment on Switzerland’s alleged cultural homogeneity. The supposed superiority of its grass-roots democracy is questioned by noting that Switzerland extended voting rights to women only in 1971, just before Portugal after its transi-

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tion to democracy and the principality of Liechtenstein. The permanent exhibition also highlights how the policy of neutrality – which supposedly prevented occupation by Germany during the Second World War – can, like that of banking confidentiality, be seen as a political preference that the Swiss have exercised at the expense of their neighbours. The National Museum of Scotland also deliberately seeks to undermine national mythology, whose roots in this case are in the Romantic period (Interview Devine). In the section One Nation, Five Million People, whose title itself alludes to the new individualisation and fragmentation of the telling of national history, the visitor finds a collage of clips of interviews with people of different genders, backgrounds, ages and education levels who all live in Scotland, and who were asked twelve questions about Scotland. The curators of this collage arranged it so that contrasting responses to the same question follow one another. For example, a German academic dressed up in bow tie and waistcoat uses a romantic cliché when he says that Scotland has ‘a reputation of being a rough wild country’, and he goes on to say that he is a great fan of single malt whisky. Immediately thereafter comes a middle-aged working-class woman from Glasgow who says that nothing in Scotland is worse than the whisky, as the appalling ‘drinking culture’ destroys people, families and lives. National myths have been jettisoned not only in Edinburgh but in other historical museums in Scotland as well. Until a few years ago, the memorial to the Battle of Culloden in the Northern Highlands in 1746, where the Jacobite uprising was destroyed, was set up in terms of a romantic evocation of the Stuart Pretender Bonnie Prince Charlie and the supposedly heroic resistance of the Scottish clans. By contrast, in the new museum the visitor walks down a passage that displays objects and mementos from Stuart supporters on one side, and from Hanoverians on the other. Here it becomes blindingly clear that the five risings between 1689 and 1745–46 were in no respect simply conflicts between English and Scots but civil wars in which Scotland was itself deeply divided. Several Scottish clans and many soldiers at Culloden fought on the side of the Hanoverian-British troops of the Duke of Cumberland. Deconstructivist narratives of national history of this kind call for comparative and transnational contextualisation and extension. Switzerland introduced women’s suffrage later than nearly every other state in Europe. Perhaps people who do not live in Scotland drink less and might be happier or more productive for it. National myths and stories that turn on a (positively) exceptional history, claiming it was always better here than anywhere else, are at least questioned, if not entirely rejected, by such critical comparisons, which are usually drawn with other cultures and countries

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within Europe. Implicitly, historical museums nearly always take Europe as their point of reference. This Europe is sufficiently homogenous culturally, economically and politically that comparison of this kind seems to make scholarly and museal sense, and from the standpoint the overwhelmingly European visitors it also seems legitimate. Thus, the way that existing European museums draw implicit or explicit comparisons themselves represents a significant form of Europeanisation as cultural practice. Indeed, it seems to be so obvious, and hence obviously legitimate, to curators and visitors alike that the ‘allies’ – German whisky lovers and other, mostly European foreigners with their external perspective – testify in museums to participate in such comparisons. The deconstruction of national myths also invites the transnationalisation of museal narration. Ultimately, national historical mythology is founded upon the idea of a particular homogeneity in, and superiority of, one’s own nation, requiring at least implicitly some way of marking oneself off from others. Often enough these demarcations are also explicit, for instance in the supposed contrast between Germania and Marianne, and between German culture and French civilisation, evidenced in the Franco-German exhibition shown in 2009 in both Paris and Berlin, A chacun ses étrangers?. In both academic historical research and museums, the destruction of these kinds of myths of national differences requires seeking out cross-border connections and drawing attention to them. This approach weighs heavily in, for example, the museums and sections devoted to contemporary history in Bonn, Berlin and Stuttgart. Here, FrancoGerman relations after 1945 are presented as a history of bilateral reconciliation achieved through tourism, twinning meetings and youth exchanges. The DHM in Berlin also draws attention to meetings of the youth wings of European federalists who wanted to abolish all borders after 1945. This cause is represented symbolically with a photograph, familiar from school textbooks, of the demolition of a frontier barrier on the German-French border in 1950. Of course, the transnationalisation of narration in museums can only further pluralise the stories that are told. The new emphasis on crossborder connections cannot set up new narrative boundaries, nor should it. Transnational narratives not only transgress the boundaries between France and Germany but reach beyond them into regions outside Europe, as our analysis of the museal representation of migration in the following chapter shows. The transnationalisation of museal narration therefore does not automatically bring with it new European boundaries and master narratives. It does, however, make it easier for museums to handle the topic of European unification, which should be read and mediated not only as a

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supranational institutionalisation and the formation of a unified legal and economic space, but also as a process of transnational Vergesellschaftung, or societalisation. So far, this seems overwhelmingly to be the case when curators want to address European integration for particular regional or local political reasons. A good example, apart from the already-considered regional history museums and those for the so-called founding fathers, is the Luxembourg City History Museum. A gallery devoted to post-1945 Europe presents the decision to make Luxembourg the seat of the High Authority of the ECSC, the construction of various buildings for European administration on the Kirchberg, and Luxembourg’s continuing role as the location of various European institutions, such as the European Court of Justice. Other cabinets highlight the introduction of the Euro and the conferral of the Aachen Charlemagne Prize on the Luxembourg politicians Joseph Bech, Gaston Thorn, Jacques Santer and Jean-Claude Junker, as well as, in 1986, the people of Luxembourg – ‘a hitherto unique event’, as the descriptive plaque explains. For the time being, these links to European integration remain eclectic. Transnational understanding is doubtless easier when Europeans learn and know more about European, rather than national, history (Mackow 2003). But does Europe actually need a new, systematic master narrative of its own contemporary history in the form of a common history that goes, in the context of the museum, beyond these fragmentary narrative links to European unity? Perhaps most of the member states are culturally and politically homogeneous enough to manage a pluralisation of narratives after the end of national master narratives, but is this true for the EU? Institutions, opinion surveys and referenda increasingly create the impression that in the differentiated political system of today’s EU, the legislative output and the input from democratic processes at the supranational level are inadequate to secure stronger allegiance from EU citizens or enhance the legitimacy of institutional procedures and decisions. Anxious voices are already warning that the financial crisis that began in 2008 could bring about not only the demise of the common currency but also the EU’s relapse into a collection of treaties among sovereign states (‘Europe’s Return’ 2011). In such circumstances, how might European constitutional patriotism itself create sufficient allegiance, when even an apparently strong member state like the Federal Republic of Germany seems to require the emotional outpourings of the Football World Cup every four years? Might it be that a European master narrative centred on post-1945 European unification is needed to strengthen citizens’ emotional connection to the EU?

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Signs favouring a positive response to this question include, first of all, the fact that Europe lacks common positive memories. Negative memories – such as the Europeanised remembrance of the destruction of European Jewry, propagated in 2000 by the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust and already strongly institutionalised in Western Europe by dedicated museums and permanent exhibitions – appeal to a rational common obligation of ‘never again’. Among others, Dan Diner (2007: 9) and Aleida Assmann (2007) have advocated the position that the Holocaust is the one common memory capable of reinforcing the EU’s legitimacy. However, the Holocaust has no really obvious or plausible relation to European integration, and none at all to the EU of today. Prevention of wars between European nations and states – one of several motivations for Western European integration after 1945 – has become embedded in the collective memory of the Second World War (Berger 2010). But the experience of the Holocaust played no part at all in the thinking of the socalled founding fathers. Above all, judging retrospectively, there is no convincing discursive or museal construction through which the fact of the Holocaust could have made European integration necessary or desirable. Like the idea of constitutional patriotism as the exclusively normative basis for legitimation of European government, the Holocaust as a negative European founding myth is mainly a construct by German elites for European elites. As Timothy Garton Ash (2002) sarcastically commented, and Peter Novick (2007) elaborated, it remains unclear to all other Europeans why the ‘German [technical] DIN norm’ of Holocaust commemoration, which itself developed out of a domestic German ‘battle over memory’ (Kansteiner 2006), should apply to them. After all, a Europeanisation of this kind of Holocaust commemoration would implicitly involve an Europeanisation of responsibility, even if this was not the original intention. In any case, the dominant museal representation of the Holocaust is ‘a story of victimhood’ (Jureit and Schneider 2010: 95). The few survivors of the Holocaust have in the meantime nearly all died, and their descendants make up a very small percentage of the EU’s population. It is therefore questionable how long this negative memory can continue to be medially communicated and remain socially effective. Such negative memories are neither suited to the legitimation of future policy nor capable of creating the new affective bonds that the EU lacks. Only the history of European integration presents itself as a positive memory for Europe and the EU, as Claus Leggewie has rightly argued (2011: 45ff.). A common positive memory of this kind at least has potential to evoke a stronger emotional bond while also supplementing rational ‘never again’ appeals and European constitutional patriotism, and promoting the

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emergence of a reflective, moderate European patriotism. It might even gradually strengthen the legitimacy of the EU in the eyes of its citizens.

Barriers to European Master Narratives The initiators of both projects for a museum of European unification in Brussels certainly see promise in a common positive memory of European integration. They share the normative aim of filling the existing vacuum with a European master narrative that appears to emerge from a pluralisation of national narratives and thereby reinforcing the historico-cultural legitimacy of the EU. The personalisation and personification of European unification seem at least potentially suited to a museal transformation of what visitors have so far encountered as a boring narrative of treaties and negotiations derived from the conventions of academic history (Kaiser and Varsori 2010). The extreme personalisation of the history of integration through the stories of the founding fathers is historiographically problematic, but in the museum it does give children and young people easier access to a topic that is still marginal in their schoolbooks (Kaiser 2012b). Claudia Waibel, a museum educator at the Adenauer House, notes that personalisation in an ‘authentic place’ such as the home of a politician makes history ‘something that can be experienced’. In this way it is also possible to ‘convey emotions’ (Interview Waibel). The sense of place alone noticeably alters the atmosphere, as when, for instance, the Foundation which runs the Adenauer House has project days with French and German schoolchildren. According to Julien Gascard, who organises school visits to the Jean Monnet House, only through the ‘human dimension’ can young people gain access to the complex topic of the history and present situation of the EU (Interview Gascard). Meanwhile, heavier reliance upon participative narration by museum visitors could spark greater interest in the transnationalisation and integration of Europe. As early as 2008, the then EP President Pöttering envisioned the creation of branches of the HEH throughout Europe on the model on the House of History in Bonn, which has branches in Leipzig and Berlin.7 Such a system would reach more EU citizens than a single museum in the unofficial capital of the EU ever could. Even the initiators and curators of the Schengen museum see their project as a model for the foundation of new museums in other EU states. Such foundations could establish local connections to other treaties, or concern themselves with the revision of existing treaties or political fields other than those relating to freedom of movement (Interview Jungblut). Even if the curators of centrally financed

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national history museums were reluctant to go farther than the inclusion of a European dimension in their existing museal narrative, or were not permitted to do so, perhaps in the long run the creation of European museum franchises could shape new European master narratives with political resonance and diffuse them throughout the Continent. For the time being, however, the shortage of public funding makes this franchising idea unrealistic. In addition, four particular structural obstacles make it extremely unlikely that a European museal master narrative will gain societal dominance on a transnational basis in the foreseeable future. The first is contemporary historical research’s failure to generate suitable material for such a master narrative. The historiography of European integration has become professionalised and seeks to mark itself off from the work of earlier historians such as Walter Lipgens and Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, who sought to help consolidate European unification through their work (Seidel 2010b). Nonetheless, this historiography generally remains quite marginal within contemporary history (Kaiser 2010a), so its ideas will only gradually be able to engage with museums. Along with the simple pressure of deadlines that curators routinely experience, this marginality helps explain why even museums in the founding EEC member states contain striking errors of fact in the sections on European integration. For example, before the revision of the permanent exhibition of the House of History in Bonn in 2011, the section A Europe of Treaties described Walter Hallstein as the ‘first President of the EEC’ – an official post that did not then exist. In fact Hallstein was president of the EEC Commission. The Berlin DHM moved the date of the Schuman Plan, which led to the founding of the ECSC, back two years from 1950 to 1948. The National Museum of History in Sofia described the instrument of Bulgaria’s accession to the EU in 2007 as a contract (private law) rather than a treaty (public law). Even the EP Parlamentarium dramatically but erroneously describes French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman’s declaration on 9 May 1950 as an initiative ‘which surprised everyone’ – even though by this time the possible integration of the coal and steel industry was being discussed not only at governmental level, but also between Christian Democrat party elites, for example, and even in the media. A second obstacle is the advanced stage of development of the discussion of national master narratives in both research and the museum field. It is hard to imagine how supporters of a new European master narrative could avoid the same critical questions faced by those who develop new national museums to consolidate established master narratives on a permanent basis. Historians and curators often oppose political aims of this kind, as chapter 3 has already illustrated in regard to the plan for a Dutch

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national historical museum. Similarly, the plan that then French President Nicolas Sarkozy launched in 2009 for a Maison de l’Histoire de France, to open in 2015 (Schuhmann 2011), was criticised by Henry Rousso, among others, who argued: ‘A national history museum could have a tendency to stress “us” against “them”. A history museum at the beginning of the 21st century should be more oriented towards an international community and shared history’ (‘Sarkozy Plan’ 2009). A European master narrative in a museum might avoid such criticism by presenting European history as a history of transnational contact on a more systematic basis than has so far been achieved. Yet a fragmented narrative as an ‘histoire croisée’ (Werner and Zimmermann 2002) fails to achieve a key aim of the Brussels HEH: legitimation of the political core of today’s EU. Thus, and thirdly, representation of EU history in a new museum-based European master narrative must contend with the obstacle presented by the ongoing redrawing of economic and political boundaries and simultaneous dismantling of internal frontiers in the European unification process. This question is examined more closely in chapter 6, which focuses on the musealisation of migration. The fact that the customs union and the internal market shut other European countries out has to be addressed. Likewise unavoidable is the vehement rejection of the EEC’s long-term political aims by many political groups both within and outside the original member states, something that persists in the present-day EU. A further presentational difficulty is that Western European integration, as part of an ideological and political conflict with communism and the Soviet Union, was made easier by the existence of this conflict. The popularity of national master narratives rooted in nineteenth-century historical mythology owed much to the way in which they created boundaries excluding others. The many analogous options for a European master narrative are hardly limited to the varying, centuries-old construction of fundamental opposition between the Christian Occident and the Islamic Orient, which now and then re-emerges in discussion about the possible accession of Turkey to the EU. Other boundary-creating options relate to the contemporary history of the EU as well. Curators could represent European unification as a history of a common defence of democracy against communism and the Soviet Union; as a project for the consolidation of a mixed economy with a robust social security system competing with the capitalist system of the United States; or, in the present, as a way to protect Europe from overdependence on China as a possible new hegemonic power in a multilateral world. Collective social identities are based on boundaries that exclude others. Therefore, a new museal master narrative that Europeanises existing

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national narratives is likely to promote EU patriotism more successfully than one based on transnational contacts. However, the EU’s postmodern self-description precludes such exclusionary boundaries. This, rather than the dominant preferences of historians and curators, is the reason EU history in museums can only be shown as it is now presented, for the time being. The enlightened renunciation of instrumentalisation of internal or external ‘enemies of the Reich’, as Otto von Bismarck called them following the unification of Germany in 1870–71, renders a European master narrative less vulnerable politically. But as a contribution to the historicocultural legitimation of the EU, such a narrative is also quite possibly less effective or suitable. Everyday social life is a factor in the final important structural obstacle to the rapid development of a socially dominant transnational European master narrative in museums: the disjointedness of historical experience in an EU of twenty-eight member states (since Croatia’s accession in 2013). These do not form a single space of memory but rather a diversity of transnational memories that overlap and cut across each other (Aust, Ruchniewicz and Troebst 2009). The idea of ‘interwoven’ spaces of memory captures the sense of porosity that is absent from the alternative notion of ‘memory regimes’. To a certain extent even the original founding members of the ECSC and the EEC recognised the diversity of their historical experiences. In particular, the French culture of contemporary memory has a strong Gaullist streak. This is evident for example in the Historial Charles de Gaulle in the Musée de l’Armée in Paris, a multimedia show without objects but of a museal character. Here it almost looks like the French general and president of the Fifth Republic invented European integration himself, even though during the 1950s his parliamentary party voted against both the ECSC and the EEC. The distinct cultures of memory are a considerable impediment to presenting European integration as a common history in the context of a museum. For instance, in Scandinavia as a space of memory, a predominantly social democratic conception of the welfare state marks the culture much more strongly than is the case in Western Europe. Nonetheless, the greatest discrepancy runs along the former Cold War frontier between Eastern and Western Europe (Troebst 2010). Unlike the American Civil War and the Sonderbund War in Switzerland, the Cold War did not create the type of contradictory memories that necessitate the work of sublimating individual and collective memories of the former enemy and subsequently turning them into a common culture of memory. Except in the former Yugoslavia, internal European experiences of war are all from the time before 1945. The Cold War was overwhelmingly experienced as a Soviet

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occupation of Eastern Europe. Most Eastern Europeans greeted the collapse of the Communist regimes in 1989–90 as a liberation. The social and political forces that then seized the initiative in Eastern Europe regarded the prospect of accession to the EU as a return to the European fold, and campaigned on this basis. Such discourses from the transformative period in Eastern Europe do, however, suggest a more convergent collective memory and identity than might have been expected after a forty-year period in which the historical experiences of West and East ran separately, though in parallel. That was of course what West and East Germans experienced once they were reunited in one state. Until the early 1990s at least, people in Hungary or Poland were hardly in a position to experience Western European integration as part of a transnationally binding common European history. Eastern European cultures of memory are still so dominated by the experience of communist rule that its historical, political and museal processing and representation is assigned top priority, to the extent that domestic circumstances allow. In South-eastern Europe the lines of political conflict remain strongly marked by the varied experience of communist rule and the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Reflection upon this history in historical museums is still taboo, as noted in the National Museum of History in Sofia and the Museum of Vojvodina in Novi Sad. In those parts of Eastern Europe where a marked post-communist consensus prevails and the period after 1945 is dealt with in museums (Sarkisova and Apor 2008; Knigge and Mählert 2005), it is usually handled using the terminology of totalitarianism, referring mostly back to the work of Hannah Arendt (1951) and to its prevailing use in political discourse (Jarausch and Lindenberger 2007b: 3). Such usage assumes that nationalsocialist, fascist and communist regimes’ systems of rule and oppression were structurally similar. This assumption is at its clearest in the Budapest House of Terror mentioned in chapter 2, which strongly emphasises the period after 1945 but still includes the fascist rule of the Arrow Cross in the same museum context as that of the communist era. Critics have made the point that the museum has become an instrument of conservatives in their struggle with socialists (Marszovszky 2011). But from a European point of view, it seems more important that the use of the idea of totalitarianism in this museum and others facilitates development of new narratives of victimhood that transcend particular regimes and hardly touch at all on one’s own citizens’ participation in the crimes of various systems of rule. This distinction between Eastern and Western Europe within an extended EU makes it much more difficult to anchor the history of European integration in museums located in the new member states. In re-formed or

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even entirely new states, cultural policy directs all its resources into nationalising memory, not Europeanising it. Here the EU might find representation in the display of an EU flag and acknowledgement of the co-financing of a new museum or revised permanent exhibition. In the museum itself, Europe does not appear at all. Cases in point are the Museum of History in Bratislava, or the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo. The major reworking of the C’est notre histoire! exhibition for Wrocław (Tempora 2009) in Silesia, a European border area that has been multiethnic for centuries, also demonstrates that in Eastern Europe, for reasons of both political history and museum pedagogy, it is still necessary to inscribe European history within a national historical experience. Only in this form did an exhibition of this kind appear to be acceptable to local elites and accessible to visitors who lacked any foreknowledge of the history of Western European integration. The Wrocław exhibition was conceived at a time of heated domestic controversy in Poland, when the nationalist and especially anti-German sentiment of the Catholic and national conservative right was strong. Those preparing the temporary exhibition put Poland at the centre of its account of European post-war history and of the political transformation in 1989–90. The first version of the exhibition in Brussels had centred on the East Germans who brought the wall down in November 1989 and thereby began the end of communist rule in Eastern Europe. In Wrocław, however, the protagonist became Solidarnošć in a heavily modified telling of the transformation story in which Poland initiated the transformation of Europe, a revision that, according to Krzysztof Pomian (Interview), was the outcome of complex negotiations with the local political elites in Wrocław. Even for Marie-Louise von Plessen (Interview), a member of the Musée Council, the museal outcome of this process was ‘really too heroic’.

(Un)holy Alliance? Narrating Totalitarianism and Integration In the enlarged EU, the nationalisation of cultures of memory and concurrent resort to the topos of totalitarianism have primarily had a divisive impact. In Western Europe, collective memory and museal representation of the twentieth century remain strongly marked by the experience of National Socialism and fascism, and by a belief in the singularity of the Holocaust. All the same, historical and museal narratives are subject to negotiation processes and could change quite significantly in the long run as a consequence of the opening to the East. Politicians, historians and

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museum staff from the new EU member states have insisted that Eastern Europe’s contribution to contemporary European history be properly taken into account. Hence Mária Schmidt, director of the House of Terror in Budapest, asked in the first meeting of the HEH Committee of Experts in 2008 that more attention be paid to what ‘Eastern Europe [has] contributed to Western Europe’s prosperity and justice. That dialectical process should be highlighted’.8 In Poland, discussion of the first HEH report likewise called for detailed treatment of the contribution made to European history by Eastern European nations and states. The use of totalitarianism opens up new options for the Europeanisation of collective memory. Since the decline of a strongly normative leftist treatment of fascism that had laid heavy emphasis on the common features of National Socialism, fascism and clerical regimes and disputed any analogies with communist ideology, totalitarianism has returned as a central concept in both academic and popular discourse. This is true, for example, of a resolution moved principally by deputies from Eastern Europe and voted in by the EP on 2 April 2009.9 The resolution, ‘On European Conscience and Totalitarianism’, integrated the 1989 ‘peaceful revolution’ in Eastern Europe, the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the beginning of the Second World War in 1939. Passing with 553 to 44 votes, it established 23 August, the date of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, as a pan-European day of remembrance. Governments of some of the new EU states had previously successfully placed ‘totalitarianism’ in the European Framework Programme, for example, in the Action 4 Active European Remembrance. This funding stream concerns the crimes of national socialism and Stalinism, although the bulk of the funding still went to Holocaust projects. A shortcoming of using the term ‘totalitarianism’ is that it quite radically downgrades the question of active perpetrators. In this perspective, all perpetrators appear as anonymous executive agents of an abstract system of rule, as do the groups of leading perpetrators, so that museal narratives influenced by this approach generally talk of the crimes of national socialists, and not, for example, German National Socialists, let alone Germans. This tendency makes it possible (as in the House of Terror in Budapest) to present not only ‘the Hungarians’ as victims of totalitarian ideologies and regimes, but even ‘the Europeans’. This is the same kind of communalised history of twentieth-century European suffering presented in C’est notre histoire!. Selecting a photograph of a ruined Cologne and referring to seven million dead Germans in the same breath as six million murdered Jews (in part German Jews, of course) was a ‘deliberate choice’ (Interview Pomian). Pomian and the Musée team had the didactic intention of contributing to German-Polish reconciliation by emphasising that the Germans ‘were

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not only criminals, but also victims’ (Interview Pomian). This approach coincides with more recent medial memory discourse in Western Europe, which puts much more emphasis upon experiences of suffering and loss than was previously the case (Wahnich, Lášticová and Findor 2008). This is especially the case in Germany, where the sufferings resulted from war, bombing, rape and expulsion (Fischer 2011). This might open minds to a kind of politico-historical trade-off between East and West in which (as in C’est notre histoire! ) totalitarianism and European integration become the dual leitmotif of a new master narrative of twentieth-century European history. Indeed, it seems to be a possible option for the HEH in Brussels. Lacking a legal construction in the form of an independent foundation that could secure increased autonomy for the curators, the concrete plans being developed for the HEH permanent exhibition at the time of writing of this book will most likely come under considerable political pressure from within the EP and beyond. The final outcome could, quite independently of the actual intentions of the project, be a compromise at the lowest common denominator of a European history of suffering and heroism. Because of the structural obstacles outlined above, other museums not explicitly devoted to European history could find it much more difficult to develop an integrated master narrative of this kind. Quite apart from that, there is the normative question of whether Europe and the EU should opt for a master narrative that is highly problematic from an academic historical and ethical viewpoint. This kind of approach simply replicates a solidly established mythology of heroes and victims, as in Poland, and obstructs critical collective remembering of the central role of Europe and Europeans in two world wars, numerous colonial wars and crimes against humanity such as the destruction of the European Jews – or may even make any such recollection impossible.

Discursive Negotiation of European Historical Narratives There is one possible transnational discursive option appropriate for narration of European contemporary history which the initiators of the HEH project have not pursued. In September 2007 Ludger Kühnhardt, one of three directors of the Center for European Integration Studies at the University of Bonn, had proposed to Pöttering that a general European symposium should be held in Brussels involving ‘between 150 and 200 academics, museum experts and media and education specialists’. Clearly, its purpose was to have an open discussion of how a museum for European

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history should present this history.10 The organisers in the EP, however, decided against a symposium out of concern that the idea could quickly become a political football and collapse in the face of attacks by Eurosceptics, who later characterised the HEH as a ‘House of Horrors’ (‘51M to Build’ 2011). After beginning work in 2011, the HEH team leader Taja Vovk van Gaal concentrated her efforts on contacts with museum curators and academics, making no effort to involve the public in her preparations. Eventually the HEH team proposed a public forum for May 2013, but the EP Presidium rejected this plan in favour of continued secrecy until a full first draft of the plan for the permanent exhibition was developed. Paradoxically, by adopting a strategy of avoiding public discussion of the HEH project for as long as possible, the EP simply confirmed the view, held by many, that the EU was an opaque bureaucratic apparatus – one of the very views the new museal narrative of European integration was supposed to help overcome. Other actors have aimed to achieve a greater degree of convergence of collective memory in Europe by promoting transnational discussion and understanding of the narrative of European history as a history shared in common. Among them are intellectuals who tell ‘European stories’ marked by their individual national contexts and involving relations between EU states as well as within them (Lacroix and Nicolaïdis 2010). Also relevant here is a project of the European Cultural Foundation founded by Denis de Rougemont in 1954. This Amsterdam-based foundation seeks to determine which new historical stories stemming from both local and global experience can inspire a younger generation in the wake of disenchantment with national master narratives (Chenal and Snelders 2012). It also encourages European artists, intellectuals and citizens to contribute to their own history of Europe. The Danish director and writer Jens Christian Grøndahl regards this kind of participatory narration itself as constituting ‘Europe as a narrative; the story, to be continued endlessly, of an endeavour which can never be fully achieved but which will make sense anyway, because of the hopeful efforts and good will put into it’.11 Although a transnational public in Europe can, for linguistic and other reasons, be constituted only in part and ad hoc and furthermore consists mainly of elites (Meyer 2010; Trenz 2002), museums can and should join in a broader debate on how European history can, and should, be narrated. This pertains especially to the most recent past, which in newer museums and permanent exhibitions comes almost up to the present day. This contemporary orientation clearly seems to reflect the wishes of the majority of visitors, according to a survey concerning the prospect of founding an Austrian museum of contemporary history (Brait 2009). As chapter 1 ex-

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plained, the modern museum is not merely compensatory; rather, it sees itself as a public space for negotiating the future – in this case, the future of Europe, which feeds off narratives of its past. Museum visitors have already been involved in discussion of the narration of European contemporary history and the future of Europe in museums. For example, before revising its permanent exhibition in 2011 the House of History in Bonn asked its visitors whether they wanted more European integration or less, and to what purpose. In C’est notre histoire! visitors could volunteer their thoughts on how the EU budget should be spent. New technologies can enable discussion among visitors to different museums across Europe. In addition, museums can stage events to stimulate and frame societal discourse. The HEH team is planning many events to accompany its treatment of European topics and help create a forum for thought and discussion on the future of Europe (‘Explore’ 2011). Given the currently prevailing Europe-fatigue, the manner and method of museums’ potential contribution to the transnationalisation of debate on European memory, and to the creation of a historical narrative of integration as a shared history, seems at least uncertain. But chapter 6 will use the example of the narration of frontiers and migration in Europe to demonstrate museums’ definite ability to perform these functions.

Chapter 6

C E Migration and Mobility in Museal Spaces The Schengen European Museum, located in the Luxembourg town of that name, has set itself the task of presenting the background to the Schengen Agreement and its significance for Europe. The museum seeks to illuminate both the unwelcome consequences of the abolition of frontier controls within the EU and its practical, everyday effects. The curator decided first of all to get museum visitors to focus on the power of frontiers by drawing attention to the external boundaries of the EU (Interview Jungblut). In this way she created an intense contrast to the narration of the disappearance of internal European frontiers, the museum’s primary objective. Photographs by Olivier Jobard trace the route taken by the illegal Cameroon migrant Kingsley during his journey to France (Jobard and Saugues 2006). Personal texts, diary entries and handwritten cards document his route through various African countries to the southern coast of the Mediterranean, from Morocco to Spain, and from there to Paris. The cards, written during Kingsley’s travels, testify to the shifting, temporary nature of transit routes and their dependence on border controls, as well as the work of smugglers and their boats, knowledge and transnational networks. They also cover his experience of the legal framework of the EU migration regime run by FRONTEX, the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union (European Council 2004). This agency also regulates the location and frequency of patrols along the sea border. The promise of freedom and wealth on the northern continent, which initially seemed to Kingsley to be just over the horizon, morphed and faded over the course of a difficult journey filled with unexpected problems. The promise finally took the shape of an everyday existence working illegally in France to financially support the family he left behind in Cameroon.

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This presentation in the Schengen European Museum suggests that the target public must first look afresh at the everyday meaning of political frontiers if it is to properly grasp the impact of the Schengen Agreement, which in fact has done away with most internal border controls. For younger continental European visitors in particular, controls of this kind are no longer any part of the Europe they know. The example of Kingsley also clearly demonstrates the direct connection between the abolition of internal European frontier controls and the correspondingly more visible external structures and mechanisms by which Europe marks its external border. From the perspective of someone outside these borders, the EU’s efforts to clearly mark and regulate its frontiers epitomises Europe. The fragility of the Schengen Agreement and the fact that frontiers are not necessarily irrevocably invisible became apparent early in 2011, when the French and Danish governments, reacting to an influx of thousands of North African migrants in the states bordering the Mediterranean, invoked special clauses that they claimed permitted the de facto reintroduction of national border controls within the Schengen Zone. Hence internal European frontiers have not disappeared at all, but rather are subject to periodic renegotiation and enforcement (Green 2010). Neighbouring states and also the European Commission levelled much criticism at the domestic pressures to which Denmark in particular was responding. Before the newly elected Danish social democrat-led government once more abolished these unilateral controls in late 2011, the Commission considered taking legal steps to demonstrate both its concern for the principle of free movement as part of the EU’s international political profile and the importance of immigration for the European economic space. This case illustrates the ubiquity of transnational milieus and the complex realities of everyday life, structures and movements across borders, realities that EU member states encounter especially in domestic European cooperation. Given these diverse interconnections, it is plain that migration cannot be stopped by border controls. Thus, even the European Commission talks of managing migration.1 And such management is no longer limited to the borders depicted in atlases and on maps. EU borders have a filtering function, both within and outside the territory of the EU (Buckel and Wissel 2010; Laube 2010; Fischer-Lescano and Tohidipur 2007). Since 2000, museal representations of migration have been on the increase, addressing these complex social relationships in the context of very different national experiences and structures. The first national museum of migration opened in Paris in 2007 as the Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration (CNHI). Munich’s City Museum and city archive have begun to reconsider their holdings in the light of transnational connections

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and the diversity of migratory movements. Larger institutions – the Stuttgart City Museum, the Historical Museum in Frankfurt and the Museum aan de Stroom in Antwerp, as well as the National Archives in Great Britain in collaboration with several British museums, to name only a few – have begun to examine the ways in which they can rearrange their holdings to illuminate migration routes and inspire visitors to their exhibitions to pose questions about mobility. Planning under way for a British Migration Museum aims to extend the limited, local narrative of migration currently on display in Spitalfield’s lodging house at 19 Princelet Street in London. The planned Migration Museum sees itself very much in the mainstream as a ‘high-profile, symbolic, declarative institution that treats immigration not as a difficult or tiresome subject, but as a major event in its own right’.2 Besides these initiatives, an increasing number of temporary and travelling exhibitions have addressed migration in the last few years. As outlined in chapter 1, the nation has been the leading ideological influence on the museum ever since its emergence as a genuinely European institution – so much so that the museum itself served to convey to its public the effective demarcation of nations and broader cultural spaces, marking the distinction between the inside and the outside. This guiding idea of the nation now seems to have been displaced by the paradigm of transnational mobility. The lines traced in museal space no longer map onto the boundaries of nation states. Today such lines are more often drawn to highlight routes of migration, showing the historical continuity of migration across time. This testifies to a remarkable alliance between the museum as a classical institution of placement, demarcation and exclusion – of classification – and a discourse of mobility and migration that calls any such demarcation or exclusion into question. Display cabinets, exhibition texts, temporary exhibitions and museums combine to realise this alliance around the common theme of migration. This chapter will examine its forms of representation and narrative strategies. Exhibitions devoted to migration are certainly not the sole cultural practice or sole site in which societies examine migration as a phenomenon transgressing national and European frontiers. Many milieus, institutions and individuals participate in the multilayered phenomenon of migration and in its academic analysis, moral evaluation, historical contextualisation, social organisation and political guidance. In European states migration therefore assumes various degrees of significance, both historically and in the present, that are reflected in political discourse. Although migration is quite plainly a complex phenomenon, European societies long regarded it as a straightforward matter unrelated to any differentiation between legalised, undocumented or forced migration; or to movements involving different

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areas of work, different climates or succeeding waves of migration; or to the domestic or foreign nature of migratory movements; or to whether such movements had political, economic or entirely personal motives. Hegemonic discourse has usually assigned the concept of the migrant to the ‘other’, that is, people in movement whose status is economically and/or politically precarious. Such people and groups are quite distinct from the ‘multilingual gourmet tasters’ (Werbner 1997: 11) who, for professional reasons or as members of a transnational social sphere, move around the world and thereby validate their own special social status (Grillo 2007; Vonderau 2003; Pries 2001). However, writing on migration is undergoing changes that present new opportunities for exhibitors. John Urry (2008) has argued that the time is ripe for a ‘mobility turn’ that will make redundant the conception that a settled existence is the norm. Instead, he argues, one should regard different forms of mobility as the expression of a global constant (see Lenz 2010 for criticism of this position). If this line of argument were followed, migrants would acquire a new social status. Moreover, cultural theorists and social scientists have used the term ‘reflexive Europeanisation’, coined by Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande, to create a new understanding of a Europe that has always been marked by migration – not merely since the colonial era, and certainly not just since 1945 (Beck and Grande 2007; Römhild 2007; Delanty 2005). Reflexive Europeanisation challenges the validity of traditional, hegemonic images of Europe modelled on a Western universalism, the Enlightenment or Christianity. Self-examination and a productive sense of uncertainty replace these images, leading to consideration of Europe’s historical and contemporary interconnections with other regions of the world. Critical study of migration, and not least of the EU and migration, directs itself to the dispositif of transit migration, including the complex interplay between the EU border regime and local practices, especially at the European periphery (Hess 2010; Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe 2007). This involves a regime in the Foucauldian sense: ‘the “ensemble” of practices, institutions, architectural arrangements, regulations, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical propositions and morality that frame a disciplinary space’ (Shore, Wright and Però 2011: 11). A dispositif of transit migration implies that the interweaving of all these aspects makes mobility a constant in the lives of considerable numbers of people. Exhibitions render migration in Europe a physically accessible thing that ordinary people can directly experience – unlike academic, political and media debates on the subject. Gottfried Korff (2007a: x) has argued that ‘public debates on current topics are increasingly conducted through

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museal presentations, and not through the usual discursive fora and media’. Even in the first half of the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin (1980: 527) regarded exhibitions as ‘the most advanced outposts in the terrain of means of representation’, where constellations of political power and parallel discursive threads were uncovered and revealed. The tasks of a temporary exhibition are distinct from those of a museum and its permanent exhibition. They go about their work according to different logics. Temporary exhibitions provide relatively short-term commentary on current topics of social relevance. They highlight the Zeitgeist, revealing how societies perceive themselves, reacting emblematically to a given mood. As ‘museums for a limited period’ (Korff and Roth 1990b: 21), such exhibitions – and especially those devoted to migration issues – also challenge museums’ practices in virtually all core areas, from the manner in which they deal with collections, to the way they address the public, to aesthetic issues. As argued in this book’s introduction, museums nowadays are supposed to collect and preserve traces of the past for the future. They see their task in the long term, so their permanent exhibitions, often designed to last an entire decade, cannot adequately respond to current debates. The resources devoted to them consequently differ from those for temporary exhibitions, being dependent upon a communal, regional, national or even international public as well as institutional foundations and the history of the museum. Uniting temporary exhibitions and museums, however, is the imperative they both face: to use their resources to stimulate societal debate. And whether they are housed in communal galleries, large museums of history and culture, newly founded museums or cultural centres with exhibition space, predominantly temporary exhibitions devoted to the topic of migration exacerbate tensions between these places of cultural representation. What Gottfried Korff and Martin Roth said about temporary exhibitions applies here as well: more deeply dedicated to a particular issue and more courageous than a classical museum, temporary exhibitions have to have the courage of their convictions and the courage to show it, so that they might with their message provide both material for and guidance to public discussion. They are points of departure for trends and far-reaching processes of interpretation and understanding, expressly capable of stirring up the discursive unrest that is a precondition of an active historical culture. (1990b: 21)

This chapter’s emphasis is on mobile people living under very precarious conditions, so the mobile professional holding a green card seldom appears in the following discussion. Nonetheless, these exhibitions commonly aim to display the entire range of mobility. They can involve the immigrant’s

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contribution to the cultural diversity of European societies, or alternatively highlight migration’s transformative influence on host societies and the EU, bringing ‘migration struggles’ (Bojadžijev 2009) into critical focus. Exhibitions dealing with migration therefore contribute to the cultural practice of Europeanisation. What kinds of perspective upon Europe are developed in this way? And what role is ascribed to Europe and the EU in the context of migration? We will address these questions first of all through an examination of the function of maps in establishing narrative context in museums, turning then to the diverse transformations of classical symbols and objects in migration exhibitions. Next, the discussion considers the general physical organisation of an exhibition, something that has recently been ascribed a significance and power of fascination in its own right that is comparable to that of the exhibited objects themselves. In the cultural-historical context of museums, influences from neighbouring genres such as film, journalism and art are integrated into narratives of migration, with consequences for the exhibition as a genre. Examples will be provided to show that across Europe, migration exhibitions have become established as a genre of selfreflection that makes cultural practices manifest, and that these practices suggest that those who stage exhibitions share amongst themselves a discourse on the representational possibilities of a European present. These cultural practices inform us about the state of discussion about migration today, and about the lack of clear boundaries in Europe as a continent and as a political entity.

Sketching Migration: The Importance of Maps Exhibitions often treat maps as secondary objects, placing them unobtrusively behind well-lit cabinets containing what are thought to be the real objects of an exhibition. But they play a special role in migration exhibitions, with arrows large and small connecting the regions, countries or continents that make up the framework of the museal narrative that follows. Maps become symbols that render the large visible in the small as pars pro toto, or alternatively provide a condensed focus as synecdoche. Of all European migration exhibitions, it is the CNHI in Paris that has, since 2006, been the focus of Europe-wide debate on the form and content of the museal representation of migration. If migration exhibitions were themselves mapped, then the arrow would point first to the CNHI and from there in various directions, for this museum, as a source of inspiration to those staging exhibitions, has become a general point of reference.

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The CNHI owes this special regard to its conflict-ridden genesis. After the CNHI’s opening during a change of government, the historical and contemporary interlinkage of migration, (post)colonialism and the Grande Nation sometimes provoked hostile reactions; after all, this was a sensitive issue, even in its official museal representation. As a result, a museal narrative developed through debate among various actors. According to Mary Stevens (2009, 2008), at the end of the 1980s the historian Gérard Noiriel’s book Le Creuset français provided the initial impulse for the creation of an organisation that would promote these themes. However, only after France’s 1998 home victory in the football World Cup was political discourse ready to contemplate the idea of France as a melting pot on a larger stage. A surge of support for a Migration Museum followed the 2002 elections, in which Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National made gains. Stevens describes what followed as a shifting multilevel debate between and within three central groups: those who had been engaged to work in the CNHI, which was still in the process of formation; specialists involved in creating the art exhibits; and lastly the broader public. Internally, difficulties arose concerning the implicit integration paradigm, according to which immigrants were obliged to adapt their lifestyle and world view to that of the French nation. Artistic objections were levelled at the conception of identity inscribed in the prevailing model of integration. In the media and at conferences, there was general demand for a clear assessment of the role of the colonial heritage in the creation of social inequality. This brief outline of actors and positions shows that migration as a phenomenon resisted the development of a coherent narrative because of divergent political assumptions and beliefs. Simply walking through the exhibition building reinforces this impression. The CNHI is located in the Palais de la Porte Dorée, whose friezes, ornamented facade and rooms reveal its origins in the Paris Colonial Exhibition of 1931. The space is replete with symbolic depictions of the contemporary colonial world view, presenting the manifold blessings of civilisation that Marianne brought to the ‘Black Continent’ in the form of technological and cultural knowledge. France’s history as a colonial power is obvious in the architecture. Recalling a geopolitical world order that has left traces even in the era of EU integration, the exhibition space highlights historical constellations that have left their mark on current debates over migration. In the foyer of the permanent exhibition, above the entrance hall, a group of large-format maps of the world (Figure 12) cuts across the irony of the choice of location. Here an objective note is struck that is alien to the pathos of the floor below. Coloured arrows relativise the importance of the French nation by showing the migratory patterns of past centuries

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right up to the present. Arranged in three large cubes, the maps show mobility at three levels: within France, marked historically by migration from the countryside into the town, and between the regions; towards France, in migratory movements taking place during and after the colonial era, but also between France and neighbouring countries; and globally, in movements of European emigration to North and South America towards the end of the nineteenth century, nomadic movements within Asia during the 1930s and movement along the routes asylum seekers took to reach the EU in 2006. The arrows and numbers are intended to show the omnipresence of migration throughout history. Nonetheless, in supplementary texts the curators affirm that the number of people in movement has multiplied over the past 200 years. The motivations for migration are therefore part of recurrent cycles that have changed over time. By arranging the large-format maps so that visitors enter beneath them and can approach them from several directions, the exhibition’s curators maintain that migration cannot be limited in space or in time. In France, as in any other country, migration is not something that comes only from outside. Mobility within the country’s borders has always coexisted with movement to and from overseas, and these two types of migration are equally important to national development and to the European continent. In the exhibition’s map display, borders not only fade graphically into the background but also are far less interesting than the arrows that testify to the continuities of migration. Karl Schlögel (2006: 26) has said that ‘the arrows shown in the world atlas assume at once an importance that transcends mere illustration. They are a helpless attempt to grasp with graphic and statistical means the dynamic of migration, its chronological course and its spatial expansion’. Whether they are understood as mere ‘helpless’ documents or as a powerful act of ordering the world, all maps, no matter how detailed, are inevitably the result of selection, omission, isolation, distance and codification (Corner 1999: 215). The seemingly objective representational form of maps is the outcome of subjective decisions and conforms to social, political and cultural interests. Any map could therefore look different than it does. In this sense, the organisation of the CNHI exhibition represents an attempt to construct Europe in a different way. This is the purpose of showing Olivier Jobard’s photoessay about Kingsley, mentioned above, with its central element of handwritten cards recording the route that he took. On these cards, distances shift but the relevant borders are marked, as are the morphological givens – mountain ranges and seas – that determined his route. The arrows, set alongside the diary entries, highlight how his travelling speed changed to accommodate to unanticipated periods of waiting

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and the availability of means of transport. Distance is consequently relative – as are Europe’s contours. The continent so clearly marked in capital letters on the maps seemed to slip out of sight as Kingsley arrived in Paris, since it was the city itself and national legal circumstances that formed the decisive framework. Maps were also important in the Projekt Migration exhibition mounted by the Cologne Art Association in 2005, which was influential in a debate on representations of migration at the intersection of the arts and humanities that created a ‘virtual cartography of the European migration regime’. Called MigMap, it consisted of four different maps portraying actors, discourses, locations and practices along with the phenomenon of ‘Europeanisation’ (Figure 13).3 The European map created from the abbreviations for the many actors introduced in chapter 3, and from the organisations and initiatives involved with migration within the EU and beyond, demonstrated the complexity of migration as a field of European policy as well as the diverging interests and world views that come into conflict in this field. Making up the first of six groups of actors to be mapped were autonomous organisations, initiatives and action alliances involved with migration to the EU, among them Sans Papiers, Indymedia, Frassanito, Noborder and No One Is Illegal. Institutions from the world of research and business are distinguished by different colour: the International Centre for Migration Policy Development, Intergovernmental Consultations on Asylum, Refugee and Migration Policies, Siemens AG, the Centre for European Policy Studies and the Migration Policy Institute, together with a dozen or more European media organisations. The interactive maps also feature many NGOs working on a global scale, like Amnesty International, the International Red Cross, Médecins sans frontières or Human Rights Watch, as well as more local organisations like ASTRA Belgrade or the Irish Refugee Council. The international and intergovernmental organisations found on this MigMap include the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). EU institutions and European infrastructures are also depicted – for example, the Council of Ministers for Justice and Home Affairs, the European Commission, FRONTEX and the Schengen Information System (SIS). Last but not least, states and national institutions also feature. Linkages, changes in font size, colouring and overlaid lettering indicate that the sorting process undertaken on the map is purely analytic, whereas in reality a whole range of financial, organisational and personal dimensions are interlocked. NGOs receive public financing, state actors base their activities partly on information from private-sector media organisations,

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border authorities and activists face each other in local contexts and directly relate their action to the work of EU agencies – and so on, back and forth. This map of actors is flanked by another interactive representation of discourses on migration, including those about human trafficking and smuggling, human rights, and the principles of ‘illegal immigration’ and asylum. The actors already identified elaborate these principles through campaigns, political decision-making or the establishment of slogans – for instance, the ‘one chance rule’ within the framework of the Dublin II Regulation, which is supposed to coordinate asylum procedures across Europe (European Council 2003). These actors insert these messages into public spheres of varying range, accessibility and language. Here the language of weather maps is borrowed to show how debate, action and events influence each other like areas of high and low pressure in a constantly changing European weather system. An interactive map of the sites and practices of migration represents the contradictory interaction of mobility, everyday locations, public institutions, procedures and arrangements along the physical border. Railway stations, airports and above all deportation camps are central locations. The procedures of oversight and control lend the EU border major significance. Here the individual European states’ political spheres of influence become entangled with those of the EU, IOM or UNHCR. Europe as a combined and unitary geographical and political entity disappears almost entirely in this graphical representation. The final MigMap echoes the aesthetics of an Underground map. It shows how the history of European integration and the Schengen and Budapest4 Agreements relate to debates over extraterritorial camps for migrants and the introduction of a common European border policy. On this map, the conferences and informal meetings associated with this, the decisions made and treaties signed are represented as ‘stations’. For example, a green line called ‘Schengen’ leads from the Schengen Agreement of June 1995 via the foundation of the SIS to the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, which transformed policies on visas, immigration and asylum from a sphere of intergovernmental cooperation into a EU responsibility, making signing the Schengen Agreement, as the ‘Schengen acquis’, an accession condition for candidate member states. MigMap, as one emblematic object among others, together with a comprehensive catalogue, marks out in detail the field in which European migration exhibitions inevitably move, though not explicitly. The exhibition curators demonstrate through MigMap that the EU’s migration regime is a web of interconnected decision-making structures located within a diffuse field of political practices involving actors at different levels with

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different degrees of responsibility. It articulates the academic discussion of EU migration sketched above as an object in an exhibition. With MigMap, Projekt Migration demonstrates that Europeanisation as a cultural practice is always part of a circular process that Borneman and Fowler (1997: 488) argue is characteristic of Europeanisation itself: ‘this circularity – the EU as both cause and effect of itself – begs the fundamental question of what it in fact is’. It is simply not possible to represent the phenomenon impartially while addressing Europeanisation, for every representation of Europe consolidates and impels its development. MigMap presents the visitor with a ‘temporal stratum’ or Zeitschicht (Koselleck 2003; Massey 1995: 188), a complex stock-taking and interpretation of European realities in 2005. The use of maps in exhibitions introduces the question of how longterm historical developments can be traced – how Fernand Braudel’s longue durée might be graphically realised. In the Schengen European Museum, for example, an animation based upon eighty-three maps, each with a different set of frontiers, shows the location of European borders since the 1815 Congress of Vienna (Figure 14). Similarly, the Museum of Civilisations from Europe and the Mediterranean (MuCEM) envisioned a sequence of five exhibitions entitled Le Paradis, L’Eau: L’homme dans son environnement, Le Chemin, La Cité – la Ville and Feminin – Masculin that use maps to show the long lines of historical development and the constancy of migration and mobility across the Mediterranean. Each exhibition is devoted to the Mediterranean as an interconnected cultural space. Each of them, and particularly Le Chemin, uses maps. For instance, the maps will enable visitors to grasp the web of trade routes that, from antiquity to the thirteenth century, conveyed both goods and knowledge. As a Zeitschicht these maps present a schematised, rationalised snapshot, though all the same, they employ diverging styles, graphic solutions and particular substantive accentuation in doing so. Taken together, they indicate temporal development thus providing space with a contour, something one individual map could not represent. The curators want to extend the exhibition to the Europe of the colonial era, the movements of Sinti and Roma through Europe and the contraction of space and time brought about by, for example, the development of France’s high-speed train network. Unlike in the Schengen example, each map in the MuCEM exhibit clearly has an author who, being from a particular time and place, can therefore be interrogated. These examples of actual and planned museal representations of migration show that maps as such prompt questions about the social and imaginary spaces in which people locate themselves, others and their action. The museum context enhances these questions’ visibility. What standpoint does this perspective imply, and what routes are sketched with arrows, what

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tracks and movements are followed? Karl Schlögel’s observations (2007: 457ff.) on the cartography of flight and expulsion in Europe between 1938 and 1948 can apply, in weaker form, to the phenomenon of migration: Maps of flight and expulsion are, like all maps, abstractions, stylisations, which necessarily and consciously omit a great deal so that they can make a clear statement. But it is this abstraction from terrible and incomprehensible events which is for the most part appropriate to the drama, and leads us to … take refuge in maps. … Arrows are symbols of displacement. They retain something of the force that is necessary to move people. … The arrows that symbolise the major deracinations lead from one space to another. Whoever wants to know what happened will have to read thousands of biographies and use the maps that show these spaces as overlays, or place them side by side.

The curators of these exhibitions have assumed from their publics the power to make such overlays, or side-by-side comparisons, and developed instead, through the selection of information and its arrangement, a perspective of Europe characterised by different forms of mobility. Maps, in other words, are instructive objects of Europeanisation as a cultural practice in two respects. One, they provide an image of Europe in migration exhibitions that depict links to the political structures and dynamics influencing migration both to and within Europe. And two, they operate as new forms of representation that break from traditional geographical maps to toy with established ways of seeing. In these ways maps like those in MigMap contribute to the ideas of Europe that circulate in the public domain. However, comparing maps of this kind against one another results in a paradoxical effect of blotting out Europe’s frontier as a coherent metaphorical or political entity. At the same time, they relativise Europe as a continent and as a political body. Counter to the erroneous idea, common in media discourse, that Europe is the most important migration destination (United Nations Development Programme 2009), they present migration as a global phenomenon. Therefore comparison of maps used in the context of migration exhibitions reveals their inability to depict the ambiguous, and thus their own fragility. They become ‘sign systems in the crisis of representation’ (Rogoff 2000, 75).

Packing Up Migration: Luggage and Other Objects in Movement Can a museum represent migration without using a suitcase? Whoever has visited a migration exhibition in the last few years will remember the great variety of luggage presented singly or in piles to the ceiling, tidily arranged

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side by side, displayed in well-lit cabinets, styled as part of the architecture or things to which text is attached, assembled by the dozen into a massive globe, or pictured as a photographic reference to the world beyond the exhibition. Whether in the travelling exhibition C’est notre histoire! in Wrocław in 2009, the installation Unikate, Sammlungsgruppen und Archive by Christian Philipp Müller in Cologne’s Projekt Migration exhibition in 2005, the section Migration in the current permanent exhibition in the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, the permanent exhibition of the CNHI, Crossing Munich. Orte, Bilder und Debatten der Migration in Munich’s Rathausgalerie in 2009, the exhibition Destination X in Sweden’s Museum of World Cultures in Gothenburg in 2010–11, or a set of photographs in Migropolis. Venice / Atlas of a Global Situation in Venice in 2009, brown leather suitcases, red, white and blue plastic bags and capacious chests are all quite clearly condensed signs, pure and simple, when and wherever the history of human mobility is displayed in museums. By indicating that something has been brought with the person (Benjamin 2006), suitcases, chests and bags set up associations with the idea that people stuff their bags with ‘their culture’ before setting off on their travels. This is unpacked upon their arrival to serve as either a fragment of memory or something that continues in daily use. Suitcases can also refer critically or ironically to clichés applied to migrants themselves: they sit on packed bags that are (Baur 2009b: 20) ‘no longer here, not yet gone, no longer travelling, not yet there’. However, the question of the cases’ content changes when visitors’ attention shifts to all the things that the majority society has already claimed for itself. The focus moves away from what has been packed, transported and unpacked, and on to the ideas that the public, as the curators envisage it, has of migration as a practice. The CNHI curators installed unspectacular objects – watering cans, coffee pots, woven mats, a wok, a drum, wooden figures, large, chequered plastic bags – all everyday objects of the ‘host society’ that hang like a giant mobile over visitors’ heads. The bag makes a concrete reference to the way migration alters everyday material culture, the structure of individual action and patterns of social distinction. The bag combines with other objects the curator presents to lead visitors through Europe and the wider world to undermine the distinction between one’s own and the other (Clifford 1997; Marcus 1995). Substantively, these things refer to migration as a catalyst and an expression of economic interconnection, as various economic actors enter into a silent dialogue with one another. This silent dialogue testifies to the mobility of objects and patterns of consumption, in this way undermining the presumed borders of Europe as the epitome of the ‘First World’. As in

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chapter 1, where discussion of The New Museology centred attention upon the reciprocal relationship between realities within and beyond the walls of the museum (Macdonald 2006; Vergo 1989), the organisation of the CNHI can be understood as a museal contribution to a transnationalisation of Europe that is exploring different directions (Transit Migration Forschergruppe 2007; Beck and Grande 2007). Crossing Munich takes up this point. In this exhibition, large suitcases contain texts about Munich’s main railway station, a location that, marked by migration, in turn marks the experience of migrants. Again and again the visitor glances into a case, bends to read the details on the address label attached to the handle, and wanders around these objects, which take up several square metres and are placed at the gallery’s centre, so that the stories that overflow from them can be examined from all sides. The team of curators who put Crossing Munich together sees suitcases as part of the exhibition’s architecture as well as an everyday object recorded in photographs. And naturally enough, heaped-up bags and cases are ‘things’ that are to be interrogated, and not merely on account of their sheer materiality. They instead confront the public with the majority society’s stereotypical images of migration in a reflexive turn that, when integrated into the exhibition, undermines the usual images of migration. Instead of dwelling on the culture of immigrants, attention is shifted to a constantly changing self and the fact of the existence of a hegemonic understanding of mobility and migration. The narratives that curators have developed in these exhibitions reflect not only the cultural practice of Europeanisation but also the objects themselves, the museal order deliberately undermining a supposedly unambiguous distinction between self and other. The growing interest in the mobility of objects has further ramifications. Behind the scenes of exhibitions accessible to the public, existing museum collections are examined for traces of migration and mobility. Objects of migration generally escape established collection routines, which ascribe each object to a fixed location. These objects must be re-examined to make mobility apparent, since migration hides behind object descriptions, even if they are very detailed. We have already remarked that the questions directed at the lowest level of a museum’s collection – the collected object – are changing. In chapter 4 we referred to the brochure Reflecting Europe in its Museum Objects, where we find objects that testify broadly to mobility, and more strictly to migration: a bronze statue from the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia that points to the Bronze Age copper trade in the Mediterranean, and a coach in the Museum of London that dates from 1757 and was built in the ‘Berlin style’. This coach testifies to the spread of skills and knowledge, and its decoration with symbols of power reveals a shared

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stylistic sensitivity. The CNHI has a photograph by Kasimir Sgorecki from the 1920s or 1930s that shows Poles in Northern France in front of their grocery store, documenting their places in the everyday life of the country to which they have travelled. To this small virtual collection of ‘European’ objects, Antwerp’s Red Star Line Museum contributes a chest the Bonelijn family used on their sea passage from Europe to the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. Finally, the Musée de l’Europe, which alone among the participating museums has no collection of its own or permanent exhibition space but is a virtual museum, presents Jörg Frank’s 1995 painting Europa: Work in Progress: a ‘painting [that] is finished [although] it looks as if it was not’ (ICOM Europe 2010: 122). Here the geographical contours of Europe are laid on in thick brush-strokes of vividly coloured acrylic paint and crossed with a written ‘work in progress’. This image of Europe, whose potential for modification could well be suggested by transitions between colours, shows something that the objects presented alongside it cannot so clearly portray: that both historically and in the present, Europe has been, and is, a constant order that, being neither fixed nor rigid, is thus an ever-changing mobile entity (Barry 2002: 147). However, neither this permanent condition of change and transformation, nor the fragility associated with it seems to be fully capable of representation through objects. Real objects resist the sense of diffuseness associated with Europe. This is especially true of the many privately owned everyday objects on display in smaller museums and migration exhibitions – for example, in the permanent exhibition of Berlin’s Kreuzberg Museum, or in a private museum on Lesbos that commemorates the flight of Greeks from Asia Minor in 1922. Both institutions see themselves as places memorialising migration in a sometimes quite openly sentimental manner, commemorating those people who still today play central roles in the everyday life and self-image of Kreuzberg, and in Skála Loutron, a small fishing village on an island in the Northern Aegean. But at the same time, both exhibitions also aim to systematically document donated items on the grounds that the social and everyday life of migrants has to be placed within a larger historical and political context. Portrayal of the forced migration of Greeks from Asia Minor to the West as registered and ordered in Skála Loutron, or of the early years of Turkish ‘guest workers’ in Germany, is often accomplished using donated objects: clothing, tools, salt and pepper pots, tea services, personal mementos, official documents. Advocates of museal representation through objects believe that this involves a dual promise (Grosz 2009: 125):

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[T]he thing functions as fundamental provocation – as that which, in the virtuality of the past and the immediacy of the present cannot be ignored – [but] it also functions as a promise, as that which, in the future, in retrospect, yields a destination or effect, another thing. … The thing is the point of intersection of space and time, the locus of the temporal narrowing and spatial localization that constitutes specificity or singularity.

Consequently, this point of view entails a fear that ‘exhibitions without objects’ will eradicate the inherent interplay of provocation and promise. In the absence of ‘looking at things as a way of looking at the world’ (cf. Mitchell 2002), exhibitions would become text-heavy – books that one can visit, where the burden of reading replaces the pleasure of looking. Objects representing migration refer to individual stories and fates more directly than to structural conditions and historical continuities. Instead of being ‘epistemic things’ that embody ‘what one does not yet know’ (Rheinberger 2006: 28; Korff 2005), they seem to be auratically charged symbols that finalise interpretation, their melancholy aspects becoming dominant. Hence organisers, for example in Gothenburg (Figure 15) or Munich, integrate suitcases into their exhibitions in a playful, ironic, deconstructivist way, as a means of distancing sentimentality. The suitcase, a mass-produced item distinguished and individualised only by the traces of its use, is introduced as a bearer of ambivalent meanings. If one therefore considers how objects are deployed in museal narratives of migration, it becomes clear that, besides their traditional presentation in illuminated cabinets, their use is, with increasing regularity, a means of disorienting the observer, prompting self-examination. Differing presentations of everyday items used in travelling reflect the fact that self-examination is prompted by the museum but also takes place within it; and that is also part and parcel of museums’ self-reflection on the way in which they work. As a genuine national institution, the museum did not emerge out of a recognised need for self-examination but was instead supposed to supply answers to, for example, the question of what the British, German or French nation was. The examples used here demonstrate that the self-understanding of museal work is currently becoming detached from its historical origins. This too can be considered an expression of Europeanisation – one that, as a cultural practice, does not result in clarity. Regarding even the treatment of the smallest element of the museal work of representation, the object, Europe assumes the form of a diffuse entity whose relative significance has to be repeatedly established through narrative strategies and rearrangement.

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Staging Migration: The Shaping and Aura of Arrangement The way in which objects are dealt with also shows that the language and style of migration exhibitions allows them to become quite distinct indicators of discourses upon Europe and migration, and of representations of the zeitgeist. As outlined above, exhibitions cover a broad spectrum, from exhibitions devoted to the immediacy of authentic objects, to museal presentations evoking a sense of mistrust with regard to everyday or cultural objects and the aura attributed to them, to presentations that seek to open up the societal meaning of migration through artistic means. The discussion of the use of maps above shows how migration exhibitions can dissolve Europe’s frontiers, although maps are also capable of working to destabilise museal forms of representation. Also worth considering is the poetics of migration exhibitions (Lidchi 2006, 1997), that is, ‘the practice of producing meaning through the internal ordering and conjugation of the separate but related components of an exhibition’ (Lidchi 1997: 168). Aesthetic and narrative strategies, inner logic and systems of reference indicate that migration as an exhibition theme tends to blend hitherto separate genres. Everyday objects, art, film effects and journalism are today all present in migration exhibitions. Some examples will allow a more detailed examination of the significance of this combining and mixing. Rijeka City Museum in Croatia showed Merica. Emigration from Central Europe to America 1880–1914 5 from December 2008 until June 2009. The exhibition included individual stories of migration and routes to America around 1900. It also presented the economic context and the firms that made it possible for people to travel to the coast and across the ocean and, by providing for their livelihood, helped create this wave of migration. The key idea of the exhibition turned upon a handwritten itinerary on a yellowing page of writing paper. It shows the twists and turns of the stages of a journey from a Croatian village to the Ligurian coast, and on to America. It gives exact information on where emigrants had to change trains and buy new tickets. The list contains no border controls or visas, neither of which existed at the time. In the view of the creators, this piece of paper was for ‘someone who does not know where they are going, who does not know the routes’. To convey this sense of not knowing where you are going, of uncertainty about the next stage in a journey through Europe, the exhibition was organised as a maze – ‘but with a way out’, as its website assured the prospective visitor. This exhibition did, therefore, deliberately seek to confuse the visitor by transposing the atmosphere of the migrant’s situation into the layout of the exhibition, making clear that even a little map like the one on display

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has to be read and understood if it is to have value and help overcome the sense of disorientation (Corner 1999: 214f.). Moreover, the organisation and plan of the exhibition sought to realise the creativity of migration. Migrants have to first imagine living in a different place, under other economic and social circumstances. They have to find or invent routes to this place (Corner 1999: 217). This exhibition strikingly exemplifies the way in which meaning inheres not in the individual objects, but in their organisation, or more precisely their spatial arrangement – with the clear intention of laying emphasis upon the sensory aspect of a visit to the exhibition. At the beginning of their tour at the Deutsches Auswandererhaus in Bremerhaven, visitors find themselves in a cramped, almost claustrophobic waiting room filled with the sounds of ships’ sirens and the murmur of parting families, until gates open onto a replica of the quay. In this section the Deutsches Auswandererhaus aims to create a sense of emotional closeness, even if this is done with a far higher level of technical resources. In Bremerhaven this has another effect: for the visiting public the route cannot be chosen, it is predetermined from the point of entry, and the chronological development of the sea journey unrolls almost like a film. Visitors seem to be on a film set, moving around scenery and stories. Here the aim is not confusion, as in Rijeka, but rather the communication of a story with a clear geographical and narrative beginning and ending. The exhibition Destination X, shown in the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg in 2010–11, took a different approach in its treatment of the crossing of borders and their tendency towards dissolution. The object of this exhibition was to show the contradictory conditions according to which mobility takes place, both historically and in the present. The spectrum reaches from ancient pilgrimages through forced expulsions from areas riven with war and crisis to the group journeys in ‘pink buses’ that are popular with Swedish youth and can be seen on all continents. Here the envisaged public is supposed to grasp the argument put forward by the exhibition on the basis of experiencing it. The first impression on entering comes from the sound installations and lighting. Quotations along the walls set the tone and establish that the curators have long since completed the mobility turn. The larger of the two spaces holds display cabinets containing shoes. Karl Schlögel’s insight (2006: 24) that ‘all history [involves] movement, especially in the most physical of all movements, the journey’ becomes a museal narrative of all those objects that the body carries with it: shoes, small items of luggage, and the small amount that can be fitted into pockets. The Gothenburg exhibition includes historical footwear as well as more modern versions borrowed from individuals, and they establish a silent link to a palm tree installation several metres high built

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out of flip-flops that washed up on Kenyan beaches. For European tourists flip-flops symbolise a freedom from the constraints of everyday life, but for migrants they are often the only affordable kind of shoe. This palm created by an NGO – part art installation, part documentation – embodies the paradoxical connection of Europe as part of the wealthy West to its ‘other’ (Hall 2003). It is less the individual shoe or its remnants that make an impact here than their repetition across the exhibition space as objects both ethnographic and artistic. Another installation blurs the traditional boundary between art and everyday life with even greater force. In 2010 Valarie James and Antonia Gallegos built their installation Hardship and Hope – Crossing the U.S.-Mexico Border from small children’s rucksacks, pieces of hand-embroidered clothing, the brand of children’s shampoo No Más Lagrimas and other objects left in the Arizona desert, and in so doing made themselves both artists and archivists. These objects, together with others from Destination X, make clear how little regard there is for the phenomenon of migration in the prevailing discourses on borders in Europe, or between Europe and the rest of the world. The design of the exhibition brings these connections into focus by mixing aural, visual and architectonic media. A simple distinction between Europe and non-Europe cannot be drawn without ignoring the complexities arising from the nature of mobility in the present. Crossing Munich also seized on the potential of moving exhibitions beyond the classical museum genres of art or social history. A team of artists and ethnographers found hidden sites in Munich connected to migrant routes and networks spanning the whole of Europe. This is materialised in a very large mobile that visitors can walk through. It shows the workings and importance of the Hansastraße station, from which buses depart regularly for the Balkans. Because it has no printed timetable, buildings, stands, signs or shelters, this station demands special competence on the part of passengers. As understood and displayed in Munich, migration means less a familiarity with the world in a traditional, European bourgeois sense than the ability to quickly and informally pick up knowledge wherever one is. The organisation of this exhibition consequently catalyses reflection by involving a poetic, expressive image of migration. Destination X and Crossing Munich base themselves on chains of association that the arrangement of art installations and documentation rich in facts can prompt. One alternative, housed in Turin’s Museum of Resistance, Deportation, the War, Rights and Freedom, is a small presentation on daily life at a site devoted to a Europe of clearly drawn borders. Photos from an extradition camp just outside Turin raise the question of national and European citizenship, and the resulting social hierarchies. Historical images of the

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present-day Schengen border are contrasted with contemporary photos of the extradition camp. The unambiguous message of the monochrome photographs is almost accusatory. Captions document the desolate situation of the migrants in such camps in journalistic language that readily separates the guilty from the innocent. Here, activists and journalists are giving a broad-brush treatment to images of migration from the perspective of Northern Italy. This comes at the cost of reproducing the dichotomy between an active state and helpless migrants that discourse elsewhere has attempted to overcome (e.g., Gatti 2010). The blame here is quite possibly owed to the general tone of a dominant Italian discourse about migration that is heavily influenced by right-wing populists. The small island of Lampedusa, the first European port of call, is an especially visible point around which conflicts over migration can crystallise. They did so increasingly over the course of the exhibition in 2011, when political unrest in North Africa accelerated the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean to Europe. Unlike other exhibitions, whose prime objective is to emphasise the ubiquity of migration, the Turin exhibition takes a photojournalistic tone to convey the urgency of political change. Visiting the exhibition is like reading critical investigative reporting. Here the playful undertone of the Gothenburg and Munich exhibitions is quite alien. Migration exhibitions like those described above confirm that the topic has become widespread in museal space at a time when differences between various aesthetic genres have become less important. Such exhibitions have indeed tended to reinforce this development. Borrowing ideas from journalism, art, film and performance theatre, organisers place the guiding idea of the presentation centre stage. Rather than depending on items from their collections, curators seek to evoke ‘infatuation through reflection’ (Korff 2005). Aesthetic and style indicate whether the target public is the general public or instead perhaps more avant-garde aficionados, whether the anticipated visitors are young and to be addressed in the present, or through their personal familiarity with recent history. The fine distinctions curators make in this way themselves condition participation in a larger societal discourse on Europe and migration. The organisation of these exhibitions also, of course, depends on the available resources, the traditions of the given institution and the decision-making structures from which exhibitions develop. All the same, experimental approaches in migration exhibitions are quite frequent. Similarities between events show that exhibitors keep track of each other’s work, and that there is a significant body of discourse on the museal representation of migration in Europe. Even if items from museum collections no longer assume a central role in exhibition narratives,

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three-dimensionality and materiality have not been abandoned; rather, the emphasis has shifted to the exhibition’s overall design. The museal space created in this way itself becomes a meta-object (Bal 2002) and hence an arrangement that reflects the conditions of showing and seeing.

Placing Migration: The Museal Space of Mobility What imagined social and political spaces do the structures and practices of migration represented in exhibitions relate to? The examples introduced above show that the inter-related points of reference can be city, region, nation, or even the entire world. How do Europe and the EU fit into this incomprehensible melee? An initial indication was provided by the work Spedition Schulz in the Crossing Munich exhibition. Spedition Schulz, a well-known transport firm in Munich and beyond, is a central actor in a transnational trade network. Migrants commission the firm to transport cars to their mainly African countries of origin. The work displayed large-scale ‘mental maps’ showing a close-knit network of firms along routes in a global business. They included a bakery distributor in Böblingen, the business offices of the freight firm Grimaldi Lines, service workshops in Antwerp and Naples, customers in Togo, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, and many other partners and institutions. The apparent lack of national borders on these maps was noteworthy, but it was particularly striking that Europe was not centrally placed as Europeans would normally expect – one map even reversed the usual orientation to the north so that south was at the top. Frontiers were nonetheless sketched by arrows expressing the reach and transnational competence of actors involved in migrants’ economic networks. These mental maps suggest that entrepreneurs and their customers see Europe as little more than a space for initiating thought and action long since directed at other continents – one that is accidental, rather cramped and unaffected by European integration and the Schengen acquis. The mental maps were flanked by a series of photographs of the yard of Spedition Schulz, particularly the cars waiting for export under loads of bags and cases stuffed to bursting with all kinds of objects. A listening station played fragments of interviews expressing the viewpoints of several actors in the business. The broad range of products exported in this way from Germany to the rest of the world provides both income for the traders and a living for their recipients several thousand kilometres away. The cases and their contents therefore conveyed a sense of continuing contact

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between the everyday worlds of those who went and those who stayed. This part of Crossing Munich almost incidentally illuminated the scope of the exhibition’s treatment of migration. Even if none of the people interviewed or pictured explicitly intervened in the political regulation of migration in Europe, their entrepreneurial activities and expertise in matters concerning customs duties and global logistics demonstrate that migration both triggers and expresses movement in many directions. This set of circumstances was placed in a perspective emphasising the autonomy of migration, which despite political and legal barriers is a coherent field of action with its own rules (Moulier Boutang 2008). The research and exhibition project Migropolis. Venice / Atlas of a Global Situation, staged in the autumn of 2009, showed that the conditions under which migration takes place can be specified and criticised from a European perspective upon globalisation, even where the spatial status of Europe is not at issue. Venice has a unique place in the imagined map of Europe. Those who staged the exhibition addressed themselves to a provincialisation of Europe (Chakrabarty 2007; Conrad and Randeria 2002) and, in their snapshot, caught a global situation: the interweaving of global migration with Western practices and structures of tourism, which Migropolis showed through the use of historically rooted imaginings of Venice and the local Venetian tourist and migrant infrastructure. The basic thesis of the project was that mobility and a transnational way of life are global matters. A study group formed by Wolfgang Scheppe elaborated and mapped this idea. Using interviews, mental maps and census data transferred onto maps, they brought to life the everyday association, in European and Italian migration regimes, between Venice’s economic vitality on the one hand, and the rest of the world and its connection with the city, its hotels and the varied imaginings of Venice as a tourist destination on the other. The realities of migration leave their mark on all of this. Migrants’ expectations of a better life collide with an imagined world in which solvent travellers cruise on the Adriatic. Venice’s morbid, exotic ambience, so useful for the tourist industry, is sustained by the dazzling history of the city. But it is the prospect of a secure future that prompts migrants to seek Europe out as a destination. Along with the groups of actors outlined above, numbers and statistics exerted a subversive force on the image of migration through the restrained aesthetic of diagrams, tables, pie charts and maps. They developed a disturbing poetry by combining categories that cut across established distinctions of origin or residential status with series of pictures of, for example, the photographic traces of street traders in Venice’s public places.

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At first the dominance of two-dimensional, uniformly framed images and texts evoked a feeling of working through the 1,400 pages of the exhibition catalogue (Scheppe 2009) without having seen the contents page, but the many individuals who ultimately rendered casual talk of ‘migrants’ an object of critique quickly lent depth to the representations of migration. Series of photographs depicted, for example, suitcases and large bags that in no way here symbolise what came with the migrants. When linked with maps and city plans, they instead revealed the spatial and economic organisation of Venice’s various inhabitants. Places for living and for work, routes through the city, access to the urban infrastructure – all were related to migrants from Africa and Asia who lack legal residence status and thus need to make themselves as invisible as possible. Their places are the streets and squares where they can sell fake designer bags to tourists, quickly gathering them up when the police appear. A Bulgarian migrant working as a cleaner in a hotel takes quite different routes through the city. Her physical presence and her work remain invisible to tourists – the other large, mobile group in the city – but as a regular migrant she can rely upon a stronger social network than street traders do. These few examples illustrate the way Migropolis arranged EU borders at different levels of visibility and fragility to prevent their being reduced to permanent lines. Instead the exhibition presented borders as a phenomenon of social hierarchy. They overlapped, ran straight across the city and separated visible from invisible people moving around the city as though they were in a microcosm of a migrant Europe. Such a conception of the border as a filter subtly confronts established ways of seeing and clearly highlights everyday absurdities. Their very contradictoriness represents a situation characteristic of the EU: hardly any European economic sector, and least of all tourism, could thrive without the presence of otherwise invisible immigrants. To be sure, exhibitions besides Migropolis and Crossing Munich also link explicitly to their geographical sites. They illustrate the dynamic of the European framework of migration policy presented in MigMap, magnifying sections and rendering them comprehensible. They also create connections to the everyday world of the exhibition visitor. For example, Traces from Lesvos through Europe6 transformed the former camp at Paganí on Lesbos in the northern Greek Aegean Sea into a museum (Lauth Bacas 2010; Klepp 2010). This small photographic exhibition, which explicitly and unambiguously criticizes the power of EU borders in the form of a threedimensional platform for argument and action, has travelled through Europe since 2010. When it came to Paganí, the building and its use were presented as a piece of the past:

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We took our exhibition ‘Traces from Lesvos through Europe’ to Paganí and turned the space where refugees and migrants have been detained and humiliated into a museum – a place that belongs to the past. The first thing to do when we entered Paganí was to open up all gates and doors behind which people were forcibly kept from freedom. We built up the exhibition across the yard, put banners at the front side of the building and we hoisted our Welcome to Europe flag on the roof of Paganí.7

The interconnection of larger and smaller spaces can be seen on a larger scale in Marseilles. The new MuCEM, as a prominent institution steeped in tradition, explores the ambivalence and temporary nature of Europe’s borders, contributing to the mapping of European, urban and museal spaces. Continuity and change in the Mediterranean area, when seen from the viewpoint of Marseilles, can clarify the perspective upon Europe, the mobility typical of the continent and the current border policy of the EU. In advance of its opening in 2013, when Marseilles would be the European City of Culture, this quite special instance of a museal ‘transformation’ confirmed that addressing a European perspective in an urban context also presents challenges for a national institution. The global flux of migration is quite visible in Marseilles (Témine 1991), so the planning of the museum inevitably involved taking a stance with regard to European discourse on borders and immigration. The specific geographical location – Marseilles, which has high levels of unemployment and a young population with large proportions of migrants, is moreover on the periphery of France – made this perspective and accent an obvious choice. MuCEM highlights that the mapping and narration of migration are not solely dependent upon a museal collection and the intentions of curators. Work on the new permanent exhibition of Berlin’s Kreuzberg Museum also illustrates how the location of an exhibition affects its nature and focus. Organised according to the ways migration has influenced the city’s architecture, infrastructure and atmosphere, this work devotes especial attention to the Kreuzberg neighbourhood, revealing, for instance, how the domestic and economic structure surrounding the Görlitzer station ever since its construction has been marked by those who arrive and stay permanently. In the nineteenth century, mainly Silesians and other migrants from areas to the south and east of Berlin settled here; but by the 1960s and 1970s the neighbourhood had become a destination for workers recruited from Turkey. The older permanent exhibition, mounted in the early 1990s, used personal mementos to flesh out individual stories of migration; more often than not, the focus was not the urban space itself but rather structural contexts, historical continuities and political conditions. By contrast, the new exhibition seeks to highlight overlapping

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temporal strata, the reality of migration in familiar urban locations and the coexistence of diverse everyday worlds. Migration is mapped on to the urban space to scale. The melancholy and emotion embodied in objects that migrants brought with them are overlaid with a conception of migration as a socio-historical phenomenon that transcends individuality and affects both people and places. This brings the museal space and the urban space into a relationship, an approach that seems especially suited to the issue of migration. This interweaving is also visible in related formats, such as the Route of Migration that snakes through North Rhine-Westphalia, following a series of significant places, objects and museums.8 As chapter 4 has shown, several such routes now wind their way through the EU. They involve transnational cultural and historical phenomena that, by transcending particular regions, define them as European: While working on the transborder continuity of actions, it is necessary to come up with definitions of the border (material, communal, historical, linguistic…) in order to understand them better and prepare the ground for reconciliation. By choosing places of gathering, symbolic cities of European routes, even of territories that knew the suffering of confrontations, they also illustrate a posteriori the complexity of confluences. … While following the voyage of the explorers, the methods of conquest, the consequences of colonisation, the characteristics of settlement or migration, they enable the interference of layers whose purely synchronic reading would give only one aspect of sedimentation.9

This work tracing the mobility of ideas, things, conflicts and people in history is coordinated by the European Institute of Cultural Routes, a body that works for the Council of Europe. Its mission is to sensitise and educate ‘European citizens’, promoting a European consciousness through the identification of a specifically European cultural heritage that is clearly distinguishable from a non-European heritage. Since the target here is an imagined ‘European’ public whose ‘other’ is entirely absent, the ambivalence of this undertaking is quite striking when seen in the context of the exhibitions discussed above, which are explicitly directed to this absent ‘other’. The routes are supposed to locate that which is genuinely European and demarcate a European cultural space that is distinct from other spaces. But these journeys extend this idea ad absurdum, for how can a much more diffuse European external border restrict the movement and development of people and ideas indifferent to national boundaries? A transnational conception of migration puts the whole idea of genuine unambiguous attachment into question. The different approaches and themes in the exhibitions show that it is not primarily geographical properties that are attributed to Europe, but

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instead social hierarchies, a political agenda and historical borders. All the examples introduced here move, explicitly or implicitly, within a complex framework made up of urban everyday life, national discourses on migration and European policy on integration and borders. From a European standpoint, they mark out a European space and demarcate the blurred outline of this historical and political entity, thus conforming to a tendency that has recently gained traction in the social sciences and elsewhere (Geppert et al. 2005: 17): ‘Beyond academic discourse this unanticipated, although not accidental, boom can only be properly understood in the context of globalisation and Europeanisation, and acceptance of the simultaneous existence of multiple modernities. Spatialisation … is apparently designed to aid in “placing” things, pluralising modernities and bringing coherence to diversity’. In the case of migration, ‘placing things’ means opening Europe up to other parts of the world. In place of a discourse insisting on the uniqueness of the European continent, many recognisable lines of connection make Europe one global region among others. Whether this happens in a locally organised museum in the North-eastern Aegean, a designer exhibition in Venice, a communal museum in Berlin or a temporary exhibition in Munich, the items exhibited and their associated texts weave stories into history.

Exhibiting Migration as a Cultural Practice of Europeanisation The aim of this chapter was to explore the close relationship that migration and mobility have with the ongoing process of Europeanisation in a museal setting. How is migration represented, and where? What issues form the focus, and how are they presented as issues that lend shape to Europe? Exhibitions have highlighted argument over the issue of migration, treating it as the expression of societal Europeanisation discourses even when these discourses do not necessarily link explicitly to Europe, or even the EU. Clearly, most of these exhibitions have marked out the relationship between the physical and geopolitical borders of Europe and the symbolic distinctions between one’s own and the other, treating migration less as an exception than as a social constant. The idea of a Europe of nation states founded upon the idea and norm of demarcation and settlement looks fragile in this light, just as the reflexive Europeanisation evident in these migration exhibitions undermines received ideas of Europe and its symbolic geography (Rodrigues 2011). Maps are a central presentational form in numerous contemporary European exhibitions on migration. Lines and arrows across these spatial rep-

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resentations depict the multilayered geography of Europe. Maps indicate Europeanisation as a cultural practice in two ways: they provide an overview of political structures and dynamics that influence migration and mobility to and within Europe, thereby cultivating a consciousness of a European context; and they question familiar ways of seeing by playing with the conventions of geographical maps. Maps in migration exhibitions consequently produce the paradoxical effect of highlighting the borders of Europe as fixed political and metaphorical entities while also blurring them, relativising Europe’s significance as a continent and a political structure. Maps create a sense of uncertainty in these exhibitions by questioning the status of Europe as a ‘homogeneous space’ (Rogoff 2000: 21), regardless of whether this space is conceived in terms of knowledge, geopolitics or history. Analysis of the different ways objects are built into exhibitions demonstrates that the aim of museal representation of migration is rarely to present an unambiguous narrative. The treatment of even the smallest element of museal representation, the object, suggests that Europe is a diffuse entity whose relative importance has to be constantly re-created through museal narrative strategies and arrangements. Though still displayed traditionally in illuminated cabinets, objects are increasingly being used to unsettle those who look at them, prompting self-examination. This too can be considered part of the Europeanisation process, for as a cultural practice it does not seek to establish a unique meaning. This chapter also covered the general composition of the migration exhibition, which uses journalism, art and film to communicate a central idea and often does not involve objects in collections themselves, but more experimental approaches. Similarities in approaches chosen for different exhibitions indicate that their organisers share a common discourse that seldom emphasises the distinctions between types of exhibition and forms of representation. At the same time exhibitions contribute to a discourse on the museal representation of migration in Europe. This cultural practice of Europeanisation does not run counter to the three-dimensionality and materiality that are special qualities of the museal; instead, the curators of such exhibitions establish a general overview of the nature and purpose of the exhibition. Their differing approaches to, and thematic focus upon, migration highlight the way these exhibitions create Europe as a space, elaborating the various dimensions of this political and cultural entity. The case of migration, where local, regional, national and global conditions and developments mingle, involves the opening up of Europe. Instead of a discourse meant to represent the unique properties of the European continent, mu-

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seum visitors see instead the many threads that make Europe one global region among many – as seen, for example, in the Museum of London (Figure 16). Migration exhibitions therefore represent a turn away from the universalistic stance that originally led to the emergence of the museum in Europe, as outlined in the introduction to this volume. Both Joachim Baur’s conclusion (2009a: 16) that ‘migration museums are a paradigmatic expression of a transnationalisation of cultures of memory’ and Mary Stevens’s view (2008), based on her study of the CNHI and its French context, that the contours of the nation state are being redrawn apply to our context with little modification: making migration the object of an exhibition in Europe not only creates a transnational space but also fosters Europeanisation as a cultural practice, one often distinguished by its self-reflective stance and claim. The universalistic claim that places Europe at the centre of the museum has proved to be context-bound, and thus neither universal nor beyond question. Migration exhibitions also contribute to a cultural practice of Europeanisation by placing Europe’s diffuse borders in a larger context that is not necessarily explicit. Migration as a local or global phenomenon, together with global flows (Hannerz 2004, 2003) as cause and condition of transnational social spheres in Europe, forms an idea of Europe that continually ‘blurs its boundaries’ (Beck and Grande 2007). If the lines of mobility and migration from Europe’s past are overlaid by those from its present, then Europe appears as a project whose boundaries have been constantly undermined and re-formed by human routes that transgress frontiers clearly marked on maps, equipped with clear crossing points and patrolled by the boats of FRONTEX, and reshape an interior structured by the nation state and the ties of citizenship. Societal argument over migration to and within Europe has created a discursive restlessness. Museal representations of migration contribute to an ongoing process of European societies’ reflexive self-understanding. These representations generate movement between seemingly timeless, immobile display cabinets, revealing the ongoing processes of construction and deconstruction that lead to a distinction between one’s own and the alien. Migration exhibitions also question a central plank of national and European policy: that of settled residence. National, regional and urban stories can be mobilised to portray this idea as ripe for reversal. Karl Schlögel was one of the first to note that [m]any questions arise once the idea of settled residence is no longer taken for granted. It is not only a question of asking why so many people migrate, but more the opposite: why they stay when there are so many reasons to go. One really has to

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ask why an intense discussion of globalisation excludes the issue of the globalisation of migration. (2006: 15)

Since then, migration exhibitions have initiated just such an inversion. Although those covered here have not won a mass audience, they have helped make museal spaces into ‘schools of alienation’, in Peter Sloterdijk’s (1989) phrase. When Europe is imagined from its periphery and the precarious, disregarded existence of migrants makes them protagonists of Europeanisation, then the work of the museum activities as ‘xenology’ (Sloterdijk 1989) can raise questions worth answering. As part of the processes of Europeanisation, migration exhibitions also raise further questions that will merit closer examination in the light of future migration museums and exhibitions. But one should bear in mind that beyond the walls of the museum in Europe, a political debate rages around the treatment of migrants arriving in the south of the EU. The crises to which this contributes unsettle Europe’s societal foundations in turn, prompting reversion to the national. Migration exhibitions, by portraying individuals and tracing the courses of their lives, distinguish themselves from the dominant view in the news media of migration as a mass phenomenon in which individual migrants’ decisions are effaced. In the meantime, the particular EU agencies concerned do their utmost to keep migrants from entering EU territory. How will this policy, and that of the EU member states, affect general discussion of migration and Europe? Exhibitions such as Crossing Munich and Migropolis demonstrate that migration and mobility within Europe are taken seriously, but this does little to alter the semantic connection of ‘migration’ with those who travel, under the most precarious conditions, to Europe from outside its borders. But do not such migrants embody all the qualities required of Europeans living and working in a global region characterised by freedom of movement? It seems quite ironic that within the EU, the figure of the mobile employee – flexible, polyglot, capable of living in all kinds of places – has become an ideal (Vonderau 2003), whereas that of the immigrant is treated as an exception and a problem. How do the protagonists of these European migration exhibitions relate to this ideal, and to a situation in which demographic change, constant shortage of skilled workers and business’s global search for ‘high-potential’ staff interlock? These grey areas in the discourse about the EU, mobility and work must be studied, for although they differ from one member state to another, they all belong in a common global context. The common themes and approaches in European migration exhibitions are also a basis for closer examination of the significant historical and se-

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mantic interconnection between immigration and emigration. Such exhibitions cannot eliminate the tension between the idea of integration as adaptation or a melting pot that eliminates social differences and conflicts, and a focus upon transnational milieus, but they do expose it. Today the EU is dominated by argument over immigration, but regional and national differences – between Greece and Sweden, Romania and Ireland – should not be overlooked. Migration exhibitions represent a point of departure for examining the various historically and economically conditioned semantic fields and cultural arenas of migration in Europe. Understanding the geography of Europe – the imagined, symbolic and physical borders of Europe – not as something given but as a Denkordnung or ‘metonymic structure’ (Rogoff 2000: 16) inevitably raises the question of the connection between the material and the metaphorical contours, traditions and delimitations of this Europe.

Conclusion

E E The Practice of Europeanisation in Museums M      E  . Their collections, exhibited objects and narratives develop public images of Europe’s history, its present and its future. Claus Leggewie has pointed out that they contribute in this way to a European memory that is both shared and divided (Leggewie 2011: 7). This European memory, he argues, is countered by four distinct ideal types of collective memory in postwar European nations: exclusion, inclusion, contestation and reticence. Leggewie sees in Europe a battlefield of memory cultures in which the simplified roles of victim and perpetrator persist. In his view, only a genuine European public sphere has the potential to address old conflicts in a manner that neither glosses them over nor becomes excessively preoccupied with them. Instead, what binds and what divides Europeans in recent European history should receive equal treatment. Without adopting Leggewie’s bellicose battlefield metaphor, this book has dealt with divergent interests, structures and narrative perspectives within the museal field. The European public sphere is subject to differences in the available resources and power, and actors have unequal access to it. The museums, collections and exhibitions that we have examined highlight and clarify such differences between centre and periphery, but also point up their mutual relationship. Of course, the museal field is hardly the most prominent or spectacular arena for public debates about Europe: the economic and financial crisis that started in 2008, for example, has highlighted much more consequential areas of conflicts within the EU. All the same, new museums, reorganised collections and temporary exhibitions testify to ongoing Europeanisation as a characteristic cultural practice of the museal field. The treatment of past and present cultural and social contexts in the museums and exhibitions discussed above highlights the growing importance

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of Europe and the EU. However, museums have not responded uniformly to the process of European political integration. Similarly, EU policy has not had a uniform impact on the use of collections and the construction of narratives, notwithstanding the occasional striking example. Europe is prominent in many statements and initiatives on cultural policy, and both museums and EU institutions seek to make Europe and its culture(s) tangible. However, agreement on what this means is not a given, since the two fields operate under differing logics and through actors with divergent aims. When the European Commission talks of Europe, for example, references to antiquity, Christianity and the Enlightenment are never far off; in museums, on the other hand, Europe takes on a different shape. Chap- ter 4 illuminates the difficulties of attempting to create a European metacollection, as in ICOM Europe’s publication Reflecting Europe in its Museum Objects, where even a common item like a blue rubbish bin is imbued with a European significance. Chapter 5 shows how the National Museum of Scotland, as a regional museum, took a different road by emphasising the importance of the EU internal market for local entrepreneurs. And in the discussion of the Merica exhibition in chapter 6, Europe figures only as the point of departure for migration to the New World. In other words, the varied and diffuse discourse revolving around Europe in the museal field has, according to Banu Karaca (2010: 125), created a new form of rhetoric: ‘Thus, while we can find a conflation of culture and politics, that is, “culture talk” in the EU sector, the cultural sector has increasingly been “talking Europe”’. This rhetoric is reflected in the ways exhibitions and other cultural projects seek financial support, and in the ways institutions and initiatives pool their resources. Chapter 2 examines ‘culture talk’ in the political field and outlined its early attempts to reduce the EU’s legitimacy deficit, going back more than twenty years (Gordon 2010: 107f.) Behind efforts to promote new narratives of Europe or to develop European frameworks for existing exhibition narratives often lies a desire to use culture to reinforce economic and political integration. Institutional actors nearly always attach political expectations of some kind to the EU funding streams that flow in part to cultural institutions, among them museums and exhibition projects. Chapter 3 shows how EU initiatives are often attributable to the initiatives of key individuals, and how the multilevel structure of EU institutions and governance plays an important role. The cultural sector makes use of these mechanisms to provide ‘Europe’ and ‘Europe talk’ with a substance and purpose that the rhetoric of EU institutions often lacks. Europe and the EU are on the agenda, for better or worse, and the new narratives they can inspire might be of interest to a

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new public. However, initially they promise little more than increased consciousness of Europe as a symbolic category, historical phenomenon and political entity. Chapter 4 gives an example of this, the project Entrepreneurial Cultures in European Cities, which involved cooperation between institutions from eight different countries. The protagonists in this project were firms in Amsterdam, Berlin, Zagreb and elsewhere whose owners had a clear connection to migration. Europeanisation as cultural practice takes place in a culturally diverse Europe where national and regional traditions remain strong. Museums cannot avoid involvement in this context. The discussion of the European Route of Industrial Heritage in chapter 4 shows that no institution can work solely at a local, European or global level; rather, it must engage itself on several levels at once. In the museal field in EU member states and beyond, the political and financial scope for action varies, resources are unequally distributed, and interests associated with cultural policy diverge. And indeed, multidimensional asymmetric relationships prevail between the different initiatives of EU institutions and their reception in the member states and among cultural institutions. Europeanisation as cultural practice in museums has the ‘citizen’ in its sights – either as a voter, from the viewpoint of the EU institutions providing financial support; or as a visitor, from the viewpoint of museums as cultural institutions. Both roles call on citizens to develop a perspective on Europe, and an opinion about Europe. Both represent an effort to revive or stimulate public discourse about Europe. But creating an interest in looking at, thinking about and forming an opinion of an exhibition is not the same as voting or other forms of political activity. One could imagine EU institutions actually preferring a population that took active interest in exhibitions, instead of constantly criticising the EU for its alleged democratic deficit or for neoliberal elements of its policies, but still failed to turn out for elections to the European Parliament (EP). The House of European History (HEH) project and the Parlamentarium that opened in Brussels in 2011 appear to confirm such a view. The HEH project initiators’ reluctance to engage in broad public debate about the project is also suggestive. But it would not do justice to the variety of narratives in European museums and temporary exhibitions to merely treat them as so many attempts to head off the Euroscepticism that so often surfaces in discussions of the nature of Europe and of the EU. Our focus on actors and networks, collections and collecting strategies, narratives of European integration, representations of migration and the implicit frontiers of Europe has shown in toto that matters are far more complex. We have revealed connections between debates on Europe in

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academia, the public sphere and politics, all of which find expression in the museum. The individual discursive threads and the actual practices of Europeanisation cut across one another. Academic perspectives can link to, run in parallel or even conflict with those of the public, politics and the museum. Chapter 6 shows how migration exhibitions reflect these conflicting tendencies by, for instance, illuminating the political distinction between mobile citizens legally working in another EU country and socalled transit migrants, both of whom partake in the economic space of the EU. Chapter 4 discusses work on Europeana as part of a process of global competition that is relevant to EU discussions of copyright. Chapter 5 highlights the interconnection of regional and European discourses, where the South Tyrolean Museum of History, for instance, sets regional history within a larger European framework. Against this background, this concluding chapter will first review the institutional and social context of the museal representation of Europe as a cultural practice. It will then turn to the leading identifiable tendencies in the areas we have investigated. In the museal field, Europeanisation is practised first in the form of narrative openings and extension of existing museal narratives, second by focusing global phenomena upon Europe, and third through weaving together diverse political references, cultural traditions and social developments in collections and narratives. These avenues pose questions that go beyond the scope of this book but nonetheless merit a brief outline here. In conclusion we consider how Europeanisation might be approached from an interdisciplinary perspective, and what challenges and special opportunities this might involve.

Actors in the Europeanisation of the Museal Field As chapters 2 and 3 demonstrate, the constellations of actors in the museal field are far more complex than social science literature usually allows, focused as it is on political institutions and processes in Brussels, even though the EU itself has only limited subsidiary powers in the field of cultural policy. There is no simple dichotomy between an expanding horizon of objectives on the part of supranational institutions such as the European Commission and the EP, and an insistence on local, regional or national powers. This is clear from the use of actor-network-theory informed by Bruno Latour in chapter 4, and from the examination of strategies of representation in chapter 6. We consider institutions and the people working within them, as well as museal objects themselves, to be (different types of ) actors. Cases from the museal field demonstrate that pro-European elites

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everywhere see a cultural deficit in European integration, but that sceptics and critics of the EU or specific policies also employ the museal field to criticise what they perceive as a neoliberal or imperial undertaking. Elites from regions that are characterised by strong identity and have substantial legal and political powers have repeatedly argued that European and regional cultural identities are mutually reinforcing, and that by strengthening them, the central authorities of nation states, whether centralised or federal, can be kept in check. To this extent the museal field can be treated as an arena of European cultural policy that spotlights the political and social differentiation between integration in centre and periphery, as well as the wide range of actors taking part in processes of Europeanisation. This treatment sheds light on important impulses that originate at the periphery, identifying domestic European conflicts and differences. Chapter 5 shows how the exhibition C’est notre histoire! met with difficulties during planning for its staging in Poland, necessitating revision and extension of its perspective. One of the migration exhibitions discussed in chapter 6 was created in the Northern Aegean at a point where migrants entered the EU. When the exhibition moved on, along with the immigrants, it provided a regional perspective on the EU border regime for audiences in Germany and the Netherlands. Upon consideration of museums on the fringes of the EU, along with museums that occupy a marginal position among European museums, one conclusion is quite evident: political and cultural elites in the so-called core European countries are much more tightly networked and have powerful knowledge of the EU, its formal and informal institutional procedures and ways of instigating or getting access to funding. Those involved in any transnational and European negotiations share broader pro-Europe political convictions and an underlying faith in the societal influence of museal representations. They often hope to gain financial or institutional support and benefit from European museums’ exchanges concerning successful practices. Their motives often derive from domestic discourses and conflicts, such as the desire to contain nationalist populist parties and their rhetoric, and they reflect competition over new topics and discourses among cultural institutions within and across states. Within this fluid constellation of state and societal actors, the issue of Europeanisation as cultural practice concerns less what already exists than what should be created. Two utopian aspirations meet at this point. The intersection between the project of a politically integrated Europe and the museal field where ideas of future social orders are negotiated and represented is what attracted us to the idea of studying Europeanisation as

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cultural practice in the museal field, and hence to analysing the sometimes implicit linkages and strategies of adaptation among diverse institutions as the interaction and negotiation of European themes. This interaction is significant within and across the larger EU, far beyond the so-called core Europe. Our observations and analysis of the strategies and effects of Europeanisation as cultural practice have established that the larger discourse about the turn of European memory towards the future has begun to shift. Europeanisation involves forcing as well as pushing – for is not any image of Europe also a forced image pushing certain elements into the shadow of collective memory, where they only play a minor role or are forgotten altogether? This book shows that Europeanisation is effected through the broadening, intensification and networking of museal narratives.

Europeanisation as Broadening At first sight, clear parallels are visible between the process of European integration and the emergence of nation states in the nineteenth century. However, museums demonstrate the degree to which the conditions of cultural integration have changed. The museum as a place of representation – as a particular genre of representation – cannot be invented anew, since a very large number of museums in Europe are already dedicated to all kinds of conceivable objects, themes, regions and eras, and new museums emerge on an almost daily basis. Moreover, democratic European societies today need a different way of legitimizing what is collected, preserved, studied and exhibited, for the crisis of representation that has developed since the 1970s has affected museums too. The constructivist narratives of national histories demand comparative and transnational contextualisation, and Europeanisation presents the possibility of just such a broadening. This becomes most obvious when exhibitions target EU policies with great symbolic value for European societies. Among these is fisheries policy, which time and again is used to exemplify irreconcilable national interests and the unequal struggle of ecology with economy. What is caught in Denmark is determined by legal conditions set in Brussels, and as chapter 5 shows, anything concerning this topic in a museum will therefore involve the EU. The same is true of migration, given its broader capacity for social change; this issue has long been a matter of international cooperation, disputed and coordinated at the level of the EU. In this case the sometimes implicit national framework of the museum is a diadvantage, since as such it cannot adequately address this issue. Chapter 6 also demonstrates that

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broadening can be a threat to social premises: treating mobility and transitional migration as normal rather than primarily as a fragile exception would undermine traditional assumptions upon which EU policy is constructed, such as a settled existence. The ambivalence in this broadening takes centre stage when European traditions and policies associated with the memory of the Holocaust and the representation of war and suffering are the explicit object of museal narratives. As chapter 5 shows, the Europeanisation of the memory of the Holocaust must ultimately involve different groups of victims. Further, it should also involve debate on the identity and nature of the perpetrators across Europe. Beyond dedicated Holocaust museums, an apparent trend today is to treat all Europeans as victims of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes and ideologies. Here the approach taken in museums coincides with a wider cultural and academic emphasis on experiences of suffering and loss, rather than on those who inflicted it. This involves displacing national traditions of remembrance that have long either silently coexisted or been irreconcilable. The work of displacement seeks to reconnect these traditions and thus avoid arbitrary reduction of the complexity of history and the consequent public indifference, or feelings of powerlessness. In the museal field, Europeanisation also takes the form of a cultural practice related to real developments in the museum. One element of this is the trend of individualising museal narratives, exemplified in chapter 5 by museums and memorials devoted to the European founding fathers. Museums and exhibitions foreground individual human experience to stimulate and reinforce public interest, and particularly to appeal to a younger audience (Kaiser 2012b). The aim of participative narrating is to draw the museum visitor into collective authorship. By dialoguing with visitors, museums try to align the expectations and aspirations of the audience with the professional ambitions of curators. Participative collecting creates a similar effect behind the scenes in the museum. But whereas involving the public in collecting strengthens the sense of political and aesthetic participation in the museum, it also undermines traditional, regionally or nationally rooted strategies of collecting. Europe is not yet but could become a new point of reference in this regard. In any case, Europeanisation in the museal field clearly is increasingly connected to the demand for greater participation and inclusion. In this way museum curators can legitimate their own action and work. By regarding the activity of collecting as a participative enterprise that permits the development of different narrative perspectives, they also demonstrate their willingness to be inclusive in developing changing museal

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representations. Such inclusiveness implies a potential for conflict, not least in that it reveals absences. As chapter 6 shows, migrants have become more and more integrated into museal narratives about Europe and even come to play a leading role, in striking contrast to their hitherto marginal involvement in the actual making of such exhibitions. The broadening of perspective involved in the cultural practices of Europeanising the museal field also downgrades a narrowly national context. Anyone who wants to become involved in museum work does so increasingly as a collector or narrator, and in so doing creates more space for Europe in display cabinets or multimedia installations. The lack of coincidence in historical experience among the now twenty-eight EU member states and their citizens represents a significant barrier to the creation of a consensus on the museal narration of Europe and its contemporary history. Nonetheless, any argument for exclusively and narrowly national historical narratives has lost its force, especially in Western Europe. There is now a stronger sense that transnationalisation, Europeanisation, globalisation and the new historical knowledge related to these processes have moved argument on. Further, museums have now implicitly developed narratives of a future that escapes a national framework.

Europeanisation as Intensification Europe is only one conceptual, political and cultural entity among others to which museal representations and narratives can relate. Is the EU, or Europe in general, the most suitable reference point for these representations and narratives? Because Europe has conceptual competitors, its interpretation requires ongoing legitimation in museums, academic discourses and above all politics. It remains to be seen whether Europe will turn out to be a temporary point of reference that gradually becomes irrelevant in a global context, or whether it might eventually succeed in creating a kind of middle ground for the connection of human lives to global phenomena. Achieving the latter would make Europe a spatial museal category in which historical continuities, new social developments and state structures could be represented and linked together. In addition, as a medium-sized entity in global perspective, Europe could also lend social and societal conflicts greater clarity. A high level of economic interconnection and progressive political institutionalisation could make this likely, but it remains an open question, given debates over European identity and the efforts to find European solutions to global problems. Concepts such as ‘global history’ also

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imply provincialising Europe, which would require major change of the museum as an institution, interconnected as it is with a strong tradition of European universalism and the historical process of nationalisation. Nevertheless, the museal field demonstrates how limitation and intensification give Europe a clearer shape. This is most obvious in exhibitions where curators seek something that appears genuinely European, or where borders are at issue. The quest for the former runs through both the exhibition C’est notre histoire! and the EP’s Parlamentarium, where video interviews allude to the transnational, read European, aspects of everyday life. The Schengen European Museum contrasts global migration with the disappearance of internal European borders. In Turin, photographs from an extradition camp bear witness to the geopolitical influence of the EU. The appearance of Europe in museal narratives of mobility indicates how cultural institutions steeped in national traditions seek to bring order to global relations by defining social and symbolic spaces, assigning people and structures to them and reducing diffuse movements to clear lines. But in so doing they create a contradictory impression, for when presented as a manageable intermediary helping to bring order to the world, Europe itself shrinks and dissolves, becoming open to question. As shown in chapter 5, the reverse effect is visible in the museal representation of large technology projects, which exaggerate the EU’s minor role in a multilateral and global field. One particular form of limitation specific to the museum field can also effect Europeanisation. The collecting done today with an eye to the future takes place in a European framework, a departure from the usual collecting tradition. Nowadays, universalistic claims and perspectives work only as a contrast when museums extend or reorganise their holdings. As chapter 4 shows, the individual, passionately curious collector attempting to appropriate the world by amassing objects no longer dominates. For some time now it has no longer been possible to pursue the work of collection on an encyclopaedic scale. This raises a central question: which objects and collected items can, whether temporarily or permanently, be called ‘European’? Europe enters the picture when the structures and dynamics of globalisation confront the waning national model of the museum. However, many of the examples introduced in the preceding chapters illustrate that Europe is frequently thought of only as a space of transnational connections. This is evident in the case of Migropolis, presented in chapter 6, as well as the motivation behind Europeana to counter the economic supremacy of Google as a representative of the Americanisation of world markets. Where the nation seems too small and the world too large, transnationalisation is a promising perspective that seems open to the creation of

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a plausible narrative. Certainly it presents less of a problem to call museal topics transnational rather than genuinely European, since the latter strategy invites conflict. Hence Europeanisation in the museum often seems to be a rather vaguely specified regional variant of transnationalisation, as chapter 4 showed with the European Route of Industrial Heritage and the restructuring of the European lending system. Do museums and exhibitions devoted in some way to Europe actually seek to promote a stronger identification with Europe and the EU? Can they, or ought they to do so? After all, museums were originally invented to produce a sense of identity. A considerable number of academics have for some time been preoccupied with the question of what European identity might or ought to be, or whether the term is even useful at all or should be discarded. Klaus Eder (2005) has for instance distinguished between two aspects: an identity linked to European civilisation, and one linked to European integration and the EU. The progressive transnationalisation of museal space could probably foster a strengthened perception of Europe among museum visitors. But the distinction that Eder makes between a European civilisational and political identity is more easily stated theoretically than applied to the museum. Especially the new Brussels exhibition narratives of the EP’s House of European History and Parlamentarium visitor centre aim precisely to blend identification with and loyalty to the EU with a more diffuse European civilisational identity. For now it remains unclear whether, how and to what extent the twenty-first-century museum can contribute to the formation of individual identities at all, let alone to a stronger collective identification with Europe or the EU. But the limitations and intensification of representations and narratives certainly have the potential to highlight the continuous change in and constructed character of such collective identities.

Europeanisation as Networking It seems that Europeanisation as cultural practice in the museum field reveals ambivalence, asymmetry and difficulties in settling boundaries. Europe not only regularly appears wherever it is difficult to draw political, cultural or social boundaries, but is also present in museums and exhibitions where the boundaries between genres become blurred, or where narrative forms and narrative substance are interwoven. Substantively, regional museums like the one in Meran show how historically formed local spaces can link their view of themselves and the world into a European narrative, and in so doing marginalise the nation, or nations. From this perspective,

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Europe represents the possibility of creating new relationships between the region and larger historical, political and social contexts. Such relationships in turn cause societal discourses like those found in museums and exhibitions to gradually detach from the container of the nation state. The history of a particular milieu or region takes the form of a (transnational) history of interconnection – as an histoire croisée (Budde, Conrad and Janz 2006; Macdonald 2003; Werner and Zimmermann 2002). The networking of the museal field also takes place behind the scenes, where the prospect of collection mobility transforms the organisational context of curatorial work, at least in theory extending possibilities for the narrating of history through objects. In addition, the boundaries between genres, for example between art and objects in historical exhibitions, are increasingly blurred as the traditions of collecting, sorting, systematising and displaying established in the genuinely European institution of the museum become connected across national borders and genres. Within this movement of broadening, intensification and networking, we focus upon the museum. Museums in Europe treat Europeanisation as a step in a process of transnationalising knowledge and perspectives. This approach reveals both stark inequalities in the distribution of power and incompatible traditions of remembrance. The actors involved develop a Europe-oriented rhetoric corresponding to these circumstances. They talk of Europe without wishing to define Europe, and direct museal representation more towards the transnational. As public cultural institutions, museums contribute through their work to a discourse about a supposed European identity, developing new questions about the necessity or character of such an identity with respect to objects, issues and regions. The establishment of Europe as a category of museal work hinges on reflection upon this category: Europe becomes conceivable only when placed in relation to other orders and narratives.

Europeanisation as Cultural Practice These observations suggest a need to study other aspects of Europeanisation as cultural practice in the museal field. First of all one could examine how museums handle the communicating function that cultural policymakers implicitly assign to them – or explicitly, in the case of the HEH in Brussels. Considering the audience and its assumed or actual needs, should specifically European discourses be promoted by museums and exhibitions, and is this possible? This avenue of study would lend a museological turn to the question of a European public sphere while also enabling exploration of

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the boundaries of narrative tolerance, something arguably more necessary in Europe than in local, regional or the majority of national contexts. A final question is how much room is available for subjective perspectives on Europe, and whether it is necessary to have a connecting thread providing some cohesion to narratives and representations. Secondly, and following from the foregoing, it would be worthwhile to pay more attention to the issue of citizenship in the museal representation of the EU. Considerable numbers of people live in EU countries in which they were not born, or live in EU territory without possessing citizenship of one of its member states. What shape does Europe assume, in terms of how museums, as publicly financed institutions, represent the experience and lives of these people, and how should these people be defined as a museum audience? This also involves the question of whether museal narratives of Europe could or should be altered if museums are to cater more for non-European visitors with the gaze of a tourist. Also possible, and going beyond the approach adopted in chapters 3 and 6, is, thirdly, a comparison with other cultural fields, institutions and genres that are similarly subject to the demands of EU cultural policy while also helping to shape it, each in its own way. Theatrical productions are a case in point here, as both larger theatres and smaller companies are increasingly involved in Europe-wide collaboration. This tendency is even more pronounced in the film industry, where the varied sources of finance influence locations for filming, so that images of Europe on movie screens influence ideas about European cities and regions. Fourthly, researchers could ask how, in the future, Europe will actually materialise in museum collections. The institutional location at the European, national, regional or communal level would be central in this regard. How does the idea of collecting Europe spread, what kind of resistance does it meet, and what consequences thus arise for exhibitions and cooperation with smaller museums that are already struggling to maintain their existing collections? A fifth line of study could examine how Europe is named and constructed by different interests in the museal field. Europe does not mean the same thing to everyone. It would be interesting to examine how museums reflect internal European differences relating to wealth and social security, experiences with democracy, EU membership, domestic federalism or centralism, and so on. Here one might examine the possibly serious differences between newer and older member states, between East and West, and between states that were hard hit by the economic and financial crisis and those that have come off relatively unscathed. Also worth investigating is the gap between successful European museums and institutions

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that receive less attention from the media, the public and academics like ourselves. Conceptualising and examining Europeanisation as a cultural practice as we have done in this book brings with it the risk of ending up with an image of both the field and Europe as relatively homogeneous. But even when museums direct their efforts principally to the educated middle classes, their institutional structures, traditions and forms of representation differ considerably. We were keen to study precisely this fragmentary character of Europeanisation as cultural practice. This book combines perspectives from the social sciences and ethnography, contemporary history, and cultural and museum studies – the academic disciplines that practice and influence Europeanisation in the museal field. Europeanisation as cultural practice is promoted even when it is studied, questioned and deconstructed. This volume is a result of our involvement in a practical experiment of jointly studying and writing from our far-flung locations in Portsmouth, Trondheim and Berlin/Lesbos, drawing upon the differences in our respective disciplinary perspectives upon Europe and seeking to make them productive. This interdisciplinary approach to our book, according to which our research and writing made use of common concepts and methods, has naturally led to some unevenness and variation. Thus, in chapters 2 and 3 we talk about state and societal actors utilising (policy) network terminology and literature, whereas chapter 4 draws upon Latour’s actor-networktheory, which allows the discussion of objects as ‘actors’, and chapter 6 deals in more detail with strategies of representation. We have tried to keep any remaining unevenness and variation as transparent as possible. Crucially, however, these qualities not only flow from the three authors’ different disciplinary backgrounds but are a necessary dimension of our particular focus on the two processes of musealisation and Europeanisation. Inevitably, for our subject, an interdisciplinary perspective was necessary to study both processes and their interaction. This book is thus a first attempt at something that will, we hope, generate more exciting research in the future.

Appendix 1 Interviews In the course of the research for this book we conducted sixty-eight interviews with the following museum directors, curators, politicians, etc. Assmann, Dr Peter, President, Austrian Museums Association, Linz, 28 November 2009 Badenoch, Dr Alex, Utrecht University, Inventing Europe Virtual Exhibit, Leiden, 15 January 2011; Wassenaar, 29 October 2010 Barry, Maureen, Exhibitions Officer, National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, 29 June 2009 Beier-de Haan, Prof. Dr Rosmarie, Director of Collections and Curator, German Historical Museum, Berlin, 19 October 2010 Benoit, Dr Isabelle, Tempora, Brussels, 17 January 2011; 14 October 2009 Berberih, Dr Aleksandra, Director, Museum of the History of the Twentieth Century, Maribor, 15 March 2011 Birkebæk, Frank, Director, Roskilde Museum, NEMO, Copenhagen, 25 September 2010 Byvanck, Valentijn, Founding Director, National History Museum, Arnhem, Wassenaar, 4 November 2010 Charman, Terry, Senior Historian, Imperial War Museum, London, 16 March 2010 Daglish, George, Curator, National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, 23 June 2009 Désveaux, Emmanuel, Academic Director and Project Director for Teaching and Research, Quai Branly Museum, Paris, 6 November 2008 (telephone interview) Devine, Prof. Dr Tom, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, 25 June 2009 Dumoulin, Prof. Dr Michel, Université Louvain-la-Neuve, Louvain-la-Neuve, 7 October 2009 Ewigleben, Prof. Dr Cornelia, Director, Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart, 25 November 2008 (telephone interview) Franz, Dr Corinna, Managing Director, Stiftung Bundeskanzler-Adenauer-Haus, Rhöndorf, 18 May 2010 Frlan, Damodar, Director, Ethnographic Museum, Zagreb, 7 February 2011 Gascard, Julien, Guide, Jean Monnet House, Houjarray, 9 June 2010

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Gaustad, Lars, Senior Advisor, Norwegian National Library, Mo i Rana, 10 October 2011 (telephone interview) Graf, Prof. Dr Bernhard, Director, Institute for Museum Research, Berlin, 17 November 2008 (telephone interview) Hagedorn-Saupe, Prof. Dr Monika, Deputy Director, Institute for Museum Research, Berlin, Linz, 28 November 2009 Hagel, Frank von, Researcher, Institute for Museum Research, Berlin, 28 October 2010 (telephone interview) Hebeisen, Dr Erika, Curator, Swiss National Museum, Zurich, 14 July 2010 Heiss, Dr Hans, Member of Parliament, South Tyrol Landtag, and free curator, Bozen, 20 October 2009 Hewitt, Nick, Historian, Research and Information Office, Imperial War Museum, London, 26 March 2010 Huovinen, Anja-Tuulikki, Secretary General, Finnish Museums Association, NEMO, Copenhagen, 25 September 2010 Itzel, Dr Constanze, Official, European Parliament, Member of the Academic Project Team, HEH, Brussels, 7 November 2012 Jungblut, Marie-Paule, Curator, Luxembourg ��������������������������� City History Museum�������� , Luxembourg, 6 July 2010; Trondheim, 5 December 2008 Kish, Ilona, Secretary General, Culture Action Europe, Athens, 9 November 2011 Kistemaker, René, formerly Curator, Amsterdam Museum, Amsterdam, 11 March 2011 Kleinig, Alexander, Director, Parlamentarium, European Parliament, Brussels, 19 October 2011; 29 October 2009 Kneip, Martina, Tourism Coordinator, Schengen asbl, Schengen, 6 July 2010 Kraus, Dr Dorothea, Personal Assistant to the President, House of History of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn, 28 April 2010 Kühnhardt, Prof. Dr Ludger, Director, Center for European Integration Studies, University of Bonn, Bonn, 30 April 2010 Lachner, Dr Helmut, Director of Collections, Technical Museum Vienna, 8 June 2009 (telephone interview) Lavens, An, Manager, BELvue!, Brussels, 28 September 2010 Mitrović, Vlada, Curator, Museum of Vojvodina, Novi Sad, 14 March 2011 Moratalla, Enrique, Director, Centro Cultural CajaGRANADA/Memoria de Andalucía, Granada, 30 June 2010 Mork, Dr Andrea, Academic Coordinator, HEH, Brussels, 16 October 2012 Negri, Prof. Dr Massimo, Director, European Museum Academy, Bertinoro, 23 October 2010 Nilsen, Trond, Secretary General, Norwegian Museums Association, Oslo, 6 February 2009 Plessen, Marie-Louise, free curator, Wrocław, 4 June 2009 Pluijmen, Elke, Curator, HEH, Brussels, 9 November 2011 Pomian, Prof. Dr Krzysztof, Academic Director, Musée de l’Europe, Wrocław, 4 June 2009 Pöttering, Dr Hans-Gert, Member of the European Parliament, Brussels, 11 November 2010

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Purday, Jonathan, Senior Communications Advisor, Europeana, The Hague, 14 January 2011 Rachewiltz, Dr Siegfried de, Director, South Tyrolean Museum of History, Meran, 20 October 2009 Rebolj, Jana, Head of Education Programmes, City Museum Ljubljana, 16 March 2011 Rodekamp, Dr Volker, Director, City Museum Leipzig, 2 October 2008 (telephone interview) Roženbergar Šega, Tanja, Director, Museum for Recent History, Celje, 15 March 2011 Schmidt, Dr Mária, Director General, House of Terror, Budapest, 24 January 2012 Schnabel, Dr Thomas, Director, House of History Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, 15 October 2009 Shatanawi, Mirjam, Curator, Tropenmuseum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 5 November 2010 Širok, Dr Kaja, Director, National Museum of Contemporary History, Ljubljana, 16 March 2011 Taylor, Marc, Director, British Museums Association, NEMO, Copenhagen, 25 September 2010; Athens, 14 November 2011 Thull, Jean-François, The House of Robert Schuman, Scy-Chazelles, 8 July 2010 Tietmeyer, Dr Elisabeth, Deputy Director, Museum of European Cultures, Berlin, 19 October 2010; 31 October 2008 Trüpel, Helga, Member of the European Parliament, 5 December 2011 (telephone interview) Vasström, Annette, Curator, National Museum, Copenhagen, 23 June 2010 Vovk van Gaal, Taja, Director, HEH, Brussels, Cambridge, 22 November 2012; Brussels, 9 November 2011; Amsterdam, 2 December 2010 Vuillaume, David, Secretary General, Swiss Museums Association, Copenhagen, 25 September 2010 Waibel, Claudia, Museum Education Officer, Stiftung Bundeskanzler-AdenauerHaus, Rhöndorf, 18 May 2010 Weide, Siebe, Director, Netherlands Museums Association, Amsterdam, and Chair, NEMO, Athens, 14 November 2011 Weiden, Wim van der, Chairman, European Museum Academy, Bertinoro, 23 October 2010 Weij, Astrid, Netherlands Institute for Heritage, Amsterdam, 5 November 2010; 28 November 2009 Wistman, Christina, Head of Collections, Jamtli Museum of Cultural History, Östersund, 24 June 2010 Witte, Prof. em. Dr Els, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, 6 October 2009 Zipsane, Henrik, Director, Jamtli Museum of Cultural History, Östersund, Linz, 28 November 2009 Zorzi, Beppe, Director, Fondazione Trentina Alcide De Gasperi, Trento, 19 October 2009

A  Museums and Exhibitions In the course of the project we visited and analysed the following ninetyfive museums and temporary exhibitions. We provide their name in English for those institutions that have an official English name. Alcide De Gasperi. Un europeo venuto dal futuro, exhibition, Udine etc., Italy (2010) America. It’s also our history!, exhibition, Musée de l’Europe, Brussels, Belgium (2011) Amsterdam Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2011) Anders zur Welt kommen - Werkstattausstellung zum geplanten Humboldt-Forum, exhibition, Altes Museum, Berlin, Germany (2009) BELvue!, Brussels, Belgium (2010) British Museum, London, UK (2009) C’est notre histoire!, exhibition, Musée de l’Europe, Wrocław, Poland (2009), Brussels, Belgium (2008) Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities, Oslo, Norway (2010) Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration, Paris, France (2009) City Museum, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2011) City Museum, Munich, Germany (2010) Crossing Munich, exhibition, Rathausgalerie, Munich, Germany (2009) Culloden Battlefield and Visitor Centre, UK (2009) Darwin. Kunst und die Suche nach den Ursprüngen, exhibition, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany (2009) D-Day Museum, Portsmouth, UK (2013) Destination X, exhibition, Museum of World Culture, Gothenburg, Sweden (2011) Deutsches Auswandererhaus, Bremerhaven, Germany (2010) Deutsches Museum, Munich, Germany (2010) Die Tropen, exhibition, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany (2008) Die Wiederkehr der Landschaft, Las Vegas/Berlin, exhibition, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Germany (2010) Eidsvoll 1814, Eidsvoll, Norway (2010) European Museum, Schengen, Luxembourg (2010)

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Faldstadsenteret, Trøndelag, Norway (2009) GDR Museum, Berlin, Germany (2008) Gedenkstätte Dachau, Dachau, Germany (2010) Gedenkstätte Stiftung Bundeskanzler-Adenauer-Haus, Rhöndorf, Germany (2010) German Historical Museum, Berlin, Germany (2011/2010/2009/2008) Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, Germany (2009) Heinrich-Schliemann-Museum, Ankershagen, Germany (2010) Helden, Freaks und Superrabbis. Die jüdische Farbe des Comics, exhibition, Jewish Museum, Berlin, Germany (2010) Historial Charles de Gaulle, Musée de l’Armée, Paris, France (2011/2010) Historic Dockyard, Portsmouth, UK (2013) Historical Museum, Frankfurt, Germany (2009) House of History of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn, Germany (2011/ 2010/2008) The House of Robert Schuman, Scy-Chazelles, France (2010) House of History Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, Germany (2010) House of Terror, Budapest, Hungary (2012) Imperial War Museum, London, UK (2011/2010/2009) Imperial War Museum North, Manchester, UK (2010) Intercultural Museum, Oslo, Norway (2010) The International Charlemagne Prize, exhibition, The House of Robert Schuman, Scy-Chazelles, France (2010), Brussels, Belgium (2007) Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Istanbul, Turkey (2009) Jamtli Museum of Cultural History, Östersund, Sweden (2010) Jean Monnet House, Houjarray, France (2010) Jewish Museum, Munich, Germany (2010) Kreuzberg Museum, Berlin, Germany (2010/2009) L’Assenza/L’Essenza dei Confini, exhibition, Museum of Resistance, Deportation, the War, Rights and Freedom (Museo Diffuso), Turin, Italy (2009) London Transport Museum, UK (2013) Luxembourg City History Museum, Luxembourg (2010) Migropolis. Venice/Atlas of a Global Situation, exhibition, Venice, Italy (2009) Military Museum, Belgrade, Serbia (2011) Miniatürk, Istanbul, Turkey (2009) Musée Carnavalet, Paris, France (2010) Musée du Trocadéro - Patrimoine/Architecture, Paris, France (2009) Museo CajaGRANADA/Memoria de Andalucía, Granada, Spain (2010) Museo Casa De Gasperi, Pieve Tesino, Italy (2009) Museu d’Història de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain (2011) Museum der Dinge, Berlin, Germany (2008) Museum for the Memory of the Flight from Asia Minor, Skála Loutrón, Greece (2011) Museum of Civilisations from Europe and the Mediterranean, Marseilles, France (2010, 2009) Museum of Cultural History, Oslo, Norway (2010)

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Museum of European Cultures, Berlin, Germany (2010/2008) Museum of History and Archaeology, Trondheim, Norway (2008) Museum of London, London, UK (2012/2011) Museum of Modern Art, Brussels, Belgium (2008) Museum of Recent History, Celje, Slovenia (2011) Museum of Resistance, Deportation, the War, Rights and Freedom (Museo Diffuso), Turin, Italy (2010) Museum of the History of the Twentieth Century, Maribor, Slovenia (2011) Museum of Vojvodina, Novi Sad, Serbia (2011) National Historical Museum, Athens, Greece (2011) National Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark (2010) National Museum of Contemporary History, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2011) National Museum of History, Sofia, Bulgaria (2010) National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, UK (2013/2009) National Museum Serbia, Belgrade, Serbia (2011) Natural History Museum, London, UK (2013/2009) Neues Museum, Berlin, Germany (2009) Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum, Linz, Austria (2009) Parlamentarium, European Parliament, Brussels, Brussels (2011) Prado, Madrid, Spain (2009) Qantara, Mediterranean Heritage, Paris, France (2009) Quai Branly Museum, Paris, France (2011/2009) Regional Museum, Maribor, Slovenia (2011) Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2009) Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, Belgium (2008) Science Museum, London, UK (2013) State Museum for Ethnology, Munich, Germany (2009) Stiklestad National Culture Centre, Trøndelag, Norway (2009) Southern Tyrolean Museum of History, Meran, Italy (2009) Swiss National Museum, Zurich, Switzerland (2010) Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2010) Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2009) Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK (2009) Übersee-Museum, Bremen, Germany (2010) Zwangsarbeit. Die Deutschen, die Zwangsarbeiter und der Krieg, exhibition, Jewish Museum, Berlin, Germany (2010)

N Chapter 1 1. See http://www.egmus.eu/index.php?id=88&no_cache=1. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 2. Le projet culturel de Musée de l’Europe. Retrieved 23 December 2013 from http://www.expo-europe.be/. 3. The Secretary General, ‘Note for the Attention of the Bureau. Subject: Project Aiming at Founding a ‘House of European History’”, PE 395.551/BUR (in possession of the authors). 4. ‘Conceptual Basis for a House of European History’, Committee of Experts House of European History, Brussels 2008, 8 (in possession of the authors). 5. Retrieved 27 December 2013 from http://www.competitionline.de/wettbe werbe/21303. 6. Wolfgang Tschapeller, ‘Erläuterungen Wolfgang Tschapellers zu seinem Entwurf im Jahr 2006’ (in possession of the authors). 7. Klas Grinell, ‘Den westfaliska ordningen’ (translated from Swedish by the authors). Retrieved 23 December 2013 from http://www.grinell.se/westfalis kaordningen.html.

Chapter 2 1. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+TA +P6-TA-2009-0213+0+DOC+XML+V0//DE. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 2. http://www.visitthecapitol.gov/. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 3. http://www.hieronymi.de/PDF%20Dokumente/Prgrammrede.13.2.2007 .DE.pdf. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 4. Committee of Experts, House of European History, Minutes of the Constituent Meeting of 3 March 2008, 06.93.2008 PV/714473EN.doc (in possession of the authors). 5. Europäische Kommission, Europäisches Kulturerbesiegel in allen EU-Ländern, Presseerklärung, 9 March 2010. Retrieved 23 December 2013 from http:// ec.europa.eu/deutschland/press/pr_releases/9045_de.htm. 6. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-11-613_en.htm. Retrieved 23 December 2013.

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Chapter 3 1. See, e.g., http://antira.info/; http://www.noborder.org/about.php; http:// www.kmii-koeln.de/index.php. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 2. http://www.network-migration.org/. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 3. http://www.trauttmansdorff.it/Das_Schloss.html. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 4. Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Transnationales Austauschprogramm für wissenschaftliche Volontärinnen und Volontäre: http://www.hdg.de/stiftung/austauschprogramme/. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 5. http://www.icom-europe.org/introduction.html. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. http://www.ne-mo.org/. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 9. Memo, Subject: House of European History, Kühnhardt to Pöttering 18 September 2007 (private communication by memo author). 10. http://assembly.coe.int/Museum/PrixMuseeCE/PrizeWinners.asp. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 11. Email information from Alfonso Guerra Reina, Office of Miguel Angel Martínez Martínez, MEP, 9 December 2010. 12. http://www.lending-for-europe.eu/fileadmin/CM/public/documents/policy/ Lending_to_Europe.pdf. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 13. http://www.peresdeleurope.eu/. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 14. http://www.iamh-aimh.org/11_qui.html. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 15. http://www.dhm.de/news/symposien/docs/symposium_flucht_programm .pdf. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 16. http://www.iamh-aimh.org/221_reso_europeen_en.html. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 17. http://www.europeanmuseumacademy.eu. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 18. Ibid. 19. Email from Hermann Schäfer to Wolfram Kaiser, 25 January 2011.

Chapter 4 1. http://www.geheugenvanoost.nl. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 2. Participating institutions were the Amsterdam Museum, the Amsterdam project Imagine Identity Culture, the Museum of Urban History in Barcelona, the Museum of European Cultures in Berlin, the Nachbarschaftsmuseum Berlin e.V., the Centre de Documentation sur les Migrations Humaines in Luxembourg, the National Museum in Liverpool, the Institut de Formation Sociale in Luxembourg, the City Museum in Tallin, the municipal Centre

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

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for Historical Research and Documentation in Volos, and the Ethnographic Museum in Zagreb. http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/sme/files/support_measures/migrant/ eme_study_de.pdf. Retrieved 23 December 2013. http://buurtwinkels.amsterdammuseum.nl/. Retrieved 23 December 2013. http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/09/1257&for mat=HTML&aged=1&language=DE&guiLanguage=de. Retrieved 23 December 2013. http://www.europeanalocal.eu/. Retrieved 23 December 2013. http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/digital_libraries/doc/ consultations/results_online_consult_dec_09.pdf. Retrieved 23 December 2013. http://europeana.eu/portal/thoughtlab.html. Retrieved 23 December 2013. http://www.musip.nl. Retrieved 23 December 2013. http://www.herplaatsingsdatabase.nl. Retrieved 23 December 2013. Ibid. http://www.erih.net/fileadmin/Mediendatenbank/Aktuelles/ERIH_Mitglie derbroschuere_deutsch.pdf. Retrieved 23 December 2013. http://www.culture-routes.lu/php/fo_index.php?lng=en&dest=bd_do_ det&id=00000264. Retrieved 23 December 2013. http://www.erih.net/de/download/informationen/allgemeine-informatio nen-ueber-erih.html. Retrieved 23 December 2013. http://www.erih.net/fileadmin/Mediendatenbank/Aktuelles/ERIH_Mitglie derbroschuere_deutsch.pdf. Retrieved 23 December 2013. http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/newsroom/cf/_getdocument.cfm?doc_id= 6453. Retrieved 23 December 2013. http://www.msuv.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=section&layo ut=blog&id=5&Itemid=2&lang=en. Retrieved 23 December 2013.

Chapter 5 1. Committee of Experts, House of European History, Minutes of the Meeting of 15 April 2008 (in possession of the authors). 2. Committee of Experts, House of European History, Minutes of the Meeting of 16 July 2008 (in possession of the authors). 3. Harald Rømer, ‘Note for the Attention of the Bureau, Subject: Project Aiming at Founding of “House of European History”’, n.d. [2007]; re Kühnhardt to Pöttering, Subject: House of European History, 18 September 2007 (in possession of the authors). 4. http://www.ipn.gov.pl/portal/en/35/1/Brief_history.html. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 5. http://www.erih.net/de/biografien/einleitung.html. Retrieved 23 December 2013.

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6. http://www.mondial-congress.com/locationfinder/pdf/Europeum.pdf. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 7. Committee of Experts, House of European History, Minutes of the Constituent Meeting of 3 March 2008, 6 March 2008 (in possession of the authors). 8. Committee of Experts, House of European History, Minutes of the Constituent Meeting of 3 March 2008, 6 March 2008 (in possession of the authors). 9. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=MOTION&referenc e=B6-2009-0170&language=DE. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 10. Memo, Subject: House of European History, Kühnhardt an Pöttering, 18 September 2007 (personal communication from memo author). 11. http://www.ecflabs.org/narratives. Retrieved 23 December 2013.

Chapter 6 1. http://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/policies/immigration/immigration_intro_ en.htm. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 2. http://www.migrationmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Migra tion-Museum-Proposal.pdf. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 3. http://www.transitmigration.org/migmap/. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 4. Discussions during 1993 in Budapest opened the way for a greater degree of coordination in European border controls (Tromei 2001: 168): http://www .icmpd.org/ABOUT-US.1513.0.html. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 5. http://www.muzej-rijeka.hr/merika/exhibition-design.html. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 6. http://w2eu.net/2010/09/13/pagani-last-good-bye/. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 7. Ibid. 8. http://www.migrationsroute.nrw.de/. Retrieved 23 December 2013. 9. http://www.culture-routes.lu/php/fo_index.php?lng=en&dest=bd_pa_det &unv=de. Retrieved 23 December 2013.

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I Adenauer, Konrad, 55, 65, 68, 120, 132, 134. See also Konrad Adenauer House (Rhöndorf ) aestheticisation, 88, 99, 103–9. See also collection strategies/challenges aggregator role, 92, 93–94 Amsterdam Museum, 78, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87 Anderson, Benedict, 16, 17 Badenoch, Alexander, 98, 102 Bauhaus Europa (Aachen), 26–28, 73, 74 Beier-de Haan, Rosmarie, 10, 69 BELvue Museum (Brussels), 127, 128 Bennett, Tony, 19, 85 Berlin ethnological collections in, 17 German Historical Museum and, 18, 30, 69 Museum of European Cultures and, 28, 30, 69 Technical Museum and, 81 biographical approach, 135–37 Birkebæk, Frank, 62, 72 borders/boundaries, 53–54, 74, 75, 78, 135–37, 141, 146–47. See also migration Borodziej, Włodzimierz, 56, 124 Braudel, Fernand, 119, 164 Brussels BELvue Museum and, 127, 128 Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency and, 38 European Parliament Visitor Centre and, 43–44 House of European History and, 23–26, 44–45, 52, 55, 56 political transformation, processes of, 2 See also Musée de l'Europe (Brussels) Cage, John, 1, 24 Center for European Integration Studies, 64, 151–52 Centre for the Documentation and Memory of Flight and Expulsion (BerlinKreuzberg), 69 C'est notre histoire! exhibition, 22, 25, 48, 56, 105, 113, 119, 120, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137, 139, 149, 150, 153, 166, 188, 192

Christian Democratic Union (CDU), 64–65 Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration (CNHI/Paris), 155, 159–62, 166, 167, 168, 181 City Museum (Munich), 155–56 Clifford, James, 16, 17 Cold War, 119, 120, 122, 124, 147 collection strategies/challenges, 77–78 aestheticisation and, 88, 99, 103–9 civic seeing, challenge of, 85 collection development perspective and, 81 common cultural heritage concept and, 77–78, 89 complete/permanent collections, challenges to, 82–83 contemporary collection policy/practices and, 80–83 coypright law, harmonisation of, 89–90, 92 cultural/economic value of collections and, 82 curatorial perspective, avant-garde movement and, 80 digitalisation and, 32, 41, 73, 88–94 encyclopaedic collection strategy and, 89 European collection, logic of, 109–12 Europeana digitalisation project and, 73, 88–94 Europeanisation processes and, 79, 87–88, 90, 91, 95, 96–97, 111–12 innovative museological practices, production of, 85–86 institutional social impact, collections quantity/quality and, 81–82 meaning of representation and, 83–84 modern European collection strategy, 78–79, 81, 112 musealisation process and, 110, 111–12 museum boom, commodification/ democratisation of history and, 80–81, 99 national identity, imperialist/totalitarian projects and, 78, 90 national museums, collection policy/practice and, 77, 87–88 partial sales of collections/deaccessioning and, 81–82 participative collecting, museum social competence and, 82, 83, 84–88

232 post-war 'idea of Europe', canonised objects and, 78 quasi objects and, 83 relational object, concept of, 83–84, 88, 95 reorganisation of collections, Europeanisation processes and, 79, 88 standardisation collection strategy and, 89, 92, 94 subjectivities of collectors/collected objects and, 77 themes, role of, 81 transnationalisation and, 88, 91, 95–103 virtual collection of objects and, 71, 86–87 See also Europeanisation; museal objects; musealisation collective memory, 16–17, 47, 105, 106, 116, 134, 138, 143–44, 147–48, 149, 150, 152, 184 colonial perspective, 17, 56, 160, 161 commodification of history, 80–81, 99 common cultural heritage concept, 37, 40, 45–46, 77–78, 89 communism, 104, 106, 122, 124, 133, 134, 146, 147–48 Conn, Steven, 6, 19, 81, 108, 138 constitutional patriotism, 123, 142–44 content aggregation model, 88–89 Copenhagen European Summit (1973), 36, 37 copyright protections, 39, 63, 89–90, 92, 187 Council of Europe, 34, 37, 61, 66, 73, 100, 178 Council of Ministers for Justice and Home Affairs, 162 Crossing Munich. Orte, Bilder und Debatten der Migration exhibition, 166, 167, 172, 174, 175, 176, 182 cultural entrepreneurs, 71–74 cultural transfer phenomenon, 7, 57, 64, 71 Declaration on European Identity (1973), 35, 36–37 democratisation of history, 80–81, 99, 121–22 Destination X exhibition, 166, 171, 172 Deutsches Auswanderhaus (Bremerhaven), 78, 171 digitalisation, 32, 41, 73, 88–94, 97. See also collection strategies/challenges; Europeana digitalisation project Elysée Treaty, 34, 45 Enlightenment, 6, 16, 22, 119, 185 Entrepreneurial Cultures in European Cities (ECEC) project, 84–88 ethnic conflict, 48–49, 123, 183 Ethnographic Museum (Geneva), 109 Ethnographic Museum (Zagreb), 85, 86 European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union (FRONTEX), 53–54, 154, 181 European citizenship, 40–42, 84–85

I European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), 31, 33, 41, 113–14, 120, 122, 132, 133, 135, 142, 145, 147 European Commission, 7, 8, 21, 22, 38–42, 45, 85 migration, management of, 154–55 political decision processes, citizen participation in, 40, 53 subsidiarity principle, member state legitimacy/security and, 45–47, 76 written history of, 55 European Community (EC), 36, 37 European Council, 38, 43, 45, 52–53, 63, 92, 100, 127, 132, 154, 163 European cultural/museum policy, 33 budgetary/funding levels and, 38, 39, 46, 48 collaborative research, funding for, 38 common cultural heritage concept and, 40, 45–46 Council of Europe, cultural initiatives and, 34, 37–39 cross-border cultural cooperation and, 34–35, 38, 41–42, 53 cultural objects, free trade principles and, 34, 37, 38–9, 40 culture building, top-down instrumental approach to, 35 Culture 2000 programme and, 38 Culture 2007–2013 programme and, 38–39, 42 Declaration on European Identity and, 35, 36–37 ethnic conflict, museum exhibitions and, 48–49 European citizenship, development of, 40–42, 84–85 European Commission preferences/policies and, 39–42 European Cultural Convention, signing of, 34 European Heritage Label and, 45–46 European Parliament preferences/policies and, 42–45 Euroscepticism and, 40, 41, 46 integration process, supranational institutions and, 33, 41–42 intergovernmental policy cooperation, open coordination approach and, 38 modernisation, contemporary perspectives and, 47–48 museum exhibitions, cultural legitimacy agenda and, 41–42 national consciousness, intellectual/ administrative elites and, 35, 50–51 promotional programme initiatives and, 37–39 regional autonomy, local identity/memory and, 47–50 state institutions and, 50–51, 52–53 subsidiarity principle, member state legitimacy/security and, 45–47

I supranational political system, parliamentarisation of, 33–34, 40, 43 See also collection strategies/challenges; European Union (EU); Europeanisation; museums; societal actors in Europeanisation European culture/society, 1–9 construction of, 3–4, 8–9, 84–85 industrial culture, musealisation/ economisation of, 99–100 migratory processes, European integration and, 11 See also European cultural/museum policy; European Union (EU); Europeanisation European Economic Community (EEC), 31, 34, 36, 37, 113–14, 120, 122, 128, 133, 145, 146 European Group on Museum Statistics, 15 European Institute of Cultural Routes, 100, 178 European Movement, 34, 52 European Museum Academy (EMA), 59, 70, 73, 75 European Museum Forum, 34, 70, 73 European Museum (Schengen), 74, 130–31 European Network of Museums (ENM), 22, 69–70 European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), 130 European Parliament (EP), 11, 21, 23, 42–45, 186 European People's Party (EPP), 55–56, 65–66 European Route of Industrial Heritage (ERIH), 95, 98–99, 102, 103, 112, 135 European Union (EU), 1 border controls and, 53–54 economic crises/structural reforms, social unrest and, 46–47 economic/political integration and, 4, 6, 7–8, 10 European citizenship, development of, 40–42, 84–85 Euroscepticism and, 40, 41 exclusionary policies/practices and, 9 free movement of goods/services and, 95–96 governance, contemporary forms of, 2, 3 homo europaeus, contemporary construction of, 9–10, 11 marble cake metaphor, divergent identity outcomes and, 10 national institutions, organisational convergence of, 2, 3–4, 6, 8, 10 parliamentarisation and, 33–34 political transformation, mutual processes of, 2–3 protectionist policy of, 114 social/cultural project of, 8–9 socio-economic relations, influence on, 2, 3 subsidiarity principle, member state legitimacy/security and, 45–47 transnational history of, 7–8 unity in diversity principle and, 7–8, 9, 10, 41

233 See also European Commission; European cultural/museum policy; European Parliament (EP); Europeanisation; musealisation Europeana Aggregators' Handbook, 93, 94 Europeana (digitalisation project), 73, 88–94. See also collection strategies/challenges; digitalisation Europeanisation, 2, 184 broadening of perspectives and, 189–91, 194 cultural foundations of, 2, 3–4, 7 cultural practice of, 4, 8–9, 25–26, 30, 31–32, 76, 88, 186–96 economic/political integration, process of, 2, 3–4, 6, 7, 8, 184–85 European identity, question of, 193 European society, construction of, 3–4, 8–9 Euroscepticism and, 186, 188 exchange/negotiation, mutual processes of, 2–3, 4, 10–11 field of actors/contexts and, 4–5, 6, 186, 187–89 future research topics on, 194–96 generation-specific experiences, temporal dislocations and, 3 homo europaeus, contemporary construction of, 9–10, 11 individual/social identification, new forms of, 4, 8–9 institutions, politics/policies of, 2, 4, 8 intensified historical continuities/social developments and, 191–93, 194 migratory processes, European integration and, 10–11, 179–83 modernisation, rethinking museums/ collections and, 30, 31–32 museal field, actors in Europeanisation of, 187–89 musealisation and, 4–5, 6, 20–21, 87–88 networked local spaces, European narrative and, 193–94 participative narration/collection and, 190–91 reflexive Europeanisation, 157, 159, 164, 165, 167, 169 social phenomenon of, 3, 6, 9–10 transnationalisation perspective and, 7–8, 9, 10, 30, 192–93, 194 See also collection strategies/challenges; European cultural/museum policy; European culture; European Union (EU); musealisation; museums; narration of Europe; pluralism; societal actors in Europeanisation; transnationalisation Europera, 1, 2, 24 Euroscepticism, 40, 41, 46, 186, 188 fascism, 122, 148, 149, 150 federalist tradition, 43, 46, 48, 50, 55, 65, 66, 127, 141, 195

234 Foucault, Michel, 19, 116, 157 founding fathers, 34, 42, 46, 68, 71, 115, 117, 119, 120, 131–35, 137 France curatorial training and, 59 national historical museum, identity crisis and, 8–9 republican model and, 123 See also Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires (MNATP/Paris); Museum of Civilisations from Europe and the Mediterranean (MuCEM/Marseilles) free trade principles, 34, 37, 38–39, 40 Friedensrolle installation, 105, 106 FRONTEX. See European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union frontiers. See borders/boundaries; migration German Historical Museum (DHM/Berlin), 18, 30, 74 Berlin symposium and, 69 European Network of Museums and, 69–70 integration, museal representation of, 114–15 globalisation, 32, 38–39, 46, 56, 95–96, 165, 179, 187, 191 histoire croisée, 60, 194 Hobsbawm, Eric, 35, 55 Holocaust, the, 42, 104, 121, 123, 125, 134–135, 143, 149, 150, 190 House of European History (HEH/Brussels), 23–26, 44–45, 52, 55, 56, 64, 65, 186, 193 branches of, 144–45 museal representation of integration and, 114–15 narratives/memories, permanent reservoir of, 138 See also House of History Committee of Experts report; narration of Europe House of History Baden-Württemberg (Stuttgart), 47, 49, 73, 126–27, 130 House of History Committee of Experts report, 117, 121, 122, 124 House of History of the Federal Republic of Germany (Bonn), 24, 27, 44, 57, 59, 64, 66, 69, 73, 74, 114–15. See also narration of Europe House of Robert Schuman (Scy-Chazelles), 48, 53, 68, 132, 133–34 House of Terror (Budapest), 148, 150 Hünnekens, Annette, 92, 93 Hütter, Hans Walter, 24, 44, 55, 64, 65, 66 idealism myth, 131–35 identity factory model, 4, 6, 16, 19 imagined community, 16, 17, 19 Imhof, Kurt, 20, 31

I immigration. See borders/boundaries; migration Imperial War Museum (London), 57, 104, 129–30 integration narratives. See European Commission; European integration narratives; European Parliament (EP); European Union (EU); narration of Europe International Association of Museums of History (IAMH), 69, 70, 74 International Committee for Collecting (COMCOL), 81 International Committee of Museums and Collections of Archaeology and History (ICMAH), 74 International Council of Museums (ICOM), 61–62, 63, 67, 69, 70, 74, 75, 81, 100, 109 International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), 100, 101 internationalisation, 59, 127 Internet content copyright law and, 89–90 Memories of East Amsterdam exhibition and, 82–83, 85 Neighbourhood Shops exhibition and, 86, 87 new information technologies and, 89 virtualisation of collections and, 71, 86, 87 See also Europeana digitalisation project Interreg III/IV funds, 38, 85 Jean Monnet House (Houjarray), 68, 69, 132, 144 Jungblut, Marie-Paule, 72, 73–74 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 31, 101 Kistemaker, Renée E., 78, 84, 86, 87 Knell, Simon, 16, 20, 81 Kohl, Helmut, 24, 65, 73 Konrad Adenauer House (Röhndorf ), 68, 132, 144 Korff, Gottfried, 7, 157, 158 Kosmopolis, Antonius, 62, 67 Kreuzberg Museum (Berlin), 168, 177–78 Kühnhardt, Ludger, 64, 65, 151 Landesmuseum (Zurich), 129, 139 Latour, Bruno, 79, 83, 84, 87 Leggewie, Claus, 6, 31, 143, 184 Lending to Europe programme, 67–68, 69, 71, 75 Lipgens, Walter, 54, 55 Lisbon Treaty (2009), 37, 38, 40, 43, 45 Littoz-Monnet, Annabelle, 37, 43 longue durée, 27, 28, 29, 102–103, 119, 164 Luxembourg City History Museum, 74, 142 Maastricht Treaty (1992), 6, 8, 37, 40, 41, 43, 46, 62, 129 Macdonald, Sharon, 10, 16 maps of migration, 159–65, 170, 176–78, 179–80

I Marquard, Odo, 15, 20 Mazé, Camille, 5, 21, 24, 29, 30, 70, 78 Member of the European Parliament (MEP), 21, 43, 66 Memorandum of Understanding (1996), 92 Memories of East Amsterdam project, 82–83, 85 Merica. Emigration from Central Europe to America 1880-1914 exhibition, 170–71, 185 MigMap, 162, 163–64, 165, 176 migration, 9, 11, 42, 154–55 active state/helpless migrants dichotomy and, 172–73 asylum procedures, one chance rule and, 163 coherent narrative, divergent political assumptions/beliefs and, 160, 165 collection strategies, object mobility and, 167–68 dispositif of transit migration and, 157 European citizenship and, 85, 172–73, 178 European cultural identity and, 61, 178–79 European Union migration regime and, 154–55 Europeanisation, cultural practice of, 179–83 exhibition design/composition, production of meaning and, 170–74, 180–81 frontier controls, abolition of, 154, 155, 163 hegemonic discourse, othering and, 157, 167, 172, 178–79 longue durée, graphic representation of, 164 luggage/alternative museal objects, representational power of, 165–69, 171–72 mapping migration and, 159–65, 170, 176–78, 179–80 migration exhibitions, experimental approaches in, 173–74 museal representation of, 54, 69, 78, 155–59, 162–65, 170 national border controls, de facto reintroduction of, 155 object mobility/patterns of consumption, reciprocal realities and, 166–67 patterns of migratory movements and, 160–61 places of migration, social/political spaces and, 174–79, 180, 182 reflexive Europeanisation, mobility as constant and, 157, 159, 164, 165, 167, 169, 181–82 refugees, border controls and, 53–54, 74, 154–55 small/medium-sized enterprises and, 85 temporary vs. permanent exhibitions, logics of, 158 transnational mobility, nation-state boundaries and, 156–57, 175–76, 178–79, 181 writing on migration, mobility turn and, 157 See also colonial perspective; refugee patterns; tourism

235 Migropolis. Venice/Atlas of a Global Situation exhibition, 166, 175–76, 182, 192 mobility. See migration modernisation, 30, 31–32, 47–48, 112 Monnet, Jean, 33, 41, 43, 68, 132, 133, 134, 135. See also Jean Monnet House (Houjarray) museal objects, 8, 10 alien objects, nationalisation process and, 17 epistemic objects and, 88, 95, 112, 169 knowledge of, 17–18 meaning of representation and, 83–84 national self-representation and, 16–17 participative collecting and, 82, 83, 84–88 quasi objects and, 83 relational object, concept of, 83–84, 88, 95, 112 subjectivity of, 77 See also collection strategies/challenges; Europeana digitalisation project; migration; musealisation; museums musealisation, 4, 17 alien objects, nationalisation process and, 17 collection strategies and, 110, 111–12 European Parliament contribution to, 43–44, 45 Europeanisation processes, influence of, 4–5, 6, 8, 10 future social orders, negotiation of, 6, 8–9, 11, 19 history/historicity, production of, 15–16, 17, 18 narrative content, determination of, 5, 6, 16 object 'Europe', contested construction of, 8, 10, 16–17 scientisation of museal collecting and, 17–18 subordination, hegemonic practice of, 17–18 See also collection strategies/challenges; European cultural/museum policy; Europeanisation; migration; museums Musée de l'Europe (Brussels), 21, 69–70, 117, 129 additive historical narrative and, 24 C'est notre histoire! exhibition, 22, 25, 48, 56, 105, 113 European cultural unity, representation of, 22, 23, 25 European history, teleological narrative of, 22–23, 25 European integration crisis, negotiation of, 22 Europeanisation, cultural practice of, 25–26 failures of, 23–26 funding sources for, 22 historians, role of, 56 House of European History and, 23–26 identity construction function of, 21–22, 23, 25 See also narration of Europe Museo Casa De Gasperi (Pieve Tesino), 47, 49, 68, 133

236 Museum of Civilisations from Europe and the Mediterranean (MuCEM/Marseilles), 28–29, 69 architectural design of, 29 Europanisation, cultural practice of, 30 longue durée of cultural/economic exchange and, 29 migration, mapping/narration of, 164, 177 modernisation, rethinking museums/ collections and, 30, 78 national ethnological museums, restructuring of, 29–30 non-European collections and, 29 regionalism movement and, 29 transnational narratives/conceptions, shift toward, 29–30 urban dimension of, 29 Museum of European Cultures (MEK/Berlin), 28 Discover Europe exhibition and, 30 Doner, Delivery and Design-Entrepreneurs in Berlin workshop, 88 essentialist representation of history and, 78 Museum of Resistance, Deportation, War, Rights and Freedom (Turin), 172–73, 192 Museum of Vojvodina (Novi Sad), 106, 107, 148 Museum of World Culture (Gothenburg), 5, 166, 171 museums, 15 alien objects, nationalisation process and, 17 container model of, 95 contemporary European iconography, features of, 9 contemporary functions of, 18, 20–21 cultural artifacts, salvaging/exhibition of, 15–16, 17, 19, 20 cultural transformation, catalyst for, 20 democratisation/popularisation functions of, 18, 20 Europeanisation processes, museal transformation and, 6, 8, 20–21, 31–32 future social orders, negotiation of, 6, 8–9, 11, 19, 20 growth/proliferation of, 6, 15, 19, 20, 80 history/historicity, production of, 15, 16–17, 18 history, possession/display of, 16–17 identity factory model of, 4, 6, 16–17, 19 imagined community, national spiritual principle and, 16, 17, 19 interdisciplinary perspective on, 7 international networks of, 7, 22, 64 museal objects, objectified history/culture and, 16–17, 18 museal perspective, nationalisation of, 17 narrative content, collective memory and, 16, 17 national integration, interpretation of, 6, 7–8, 19

I national self-representation and, 5, 6, 16–17, 19 political correctness and, 18 politics of interpretation and, 18–19 public sphere, structural transformation of, 18, 20–21 social/ethnic diversity and, 5, 20 transnational European perspective and, 8, 10 See also collection strategies/challenges; European cultural/museum policy; Europeanisation; museal objects; musealisation; societal actors in Europeanisation narration of Europe, 100, 113 art, autonomous narrative and, 108–9 biographical approach to representation and, 135–37 chronological narrative vs. thematic approach and, 116–17, 121 collective memory and, 143–44, 147–48, 149, 150, 152 community of values, narrative of, 122–23 constitutional order, pluralistic democracy and, 123–24, 142–44 cross-border lived experience, frontier barriers/bridge-building and, 135–37, 141, 146–48, 149 culture of peace and, 113 Day of Liberation narrative and, 122 deconstructivist narratives, comparative/ transnational contextualisation and, 140–42 discursive negotiation of narratives and, 151–53 East-West conflict, Communism vs. free democracy and, 122, 124–25, 147–48 economic/commercial dynamics, transnational markets and, 126–27, 134 ethnic groups/nations, relations among, 125–26 Eurocentric construction of history and, 116 European integration, motives/reasons for, 120, 122–23 European integration themes, museal spectacle of, 128–31, 153 Europeanisation of objects and, 109–11 Europeanisation, structural barriers to, 117–18 founding fathers, European idealism myth and, 131–35, 137 historical experience, conceptions of routes and, 101–2 integration, narrated history of, 113–14 intercultural understanding, cross-border relations and, 126 master narratives, barriers to, 144–49, 151 master narratives, emergence of, 140–44 master narratives, social meaning and, 115–16, 131

I museal representation of integration and, 114–15 national myths, deconstruction of, 139–44 pan-European empire, creation of, 114 participative narration and, 137–39, 190 personalisation trend and, 137, 138, 144 pluralistic/deconstructing narratives and, 116, 117 political decision process, Europeanisation and, 127–28 post-war integration prehistory, assumptions of, 122–23 right-wing dictatorships, support of, 122 technology requirements, transnational European cooperation and, 130–31 totalitarianism, integration narrative and, 149–51 transnationalisation and, 140–42 unity and conflict, alternating phases of, 118–21 unity in diversity mantra and, 117, 125–28 victim mythology, radical Europeanisation of, 121, 143, 150, 151 Year Zero and, 113, 119, 121 National Museum of Denmark (Copenhagen), 58, 60, 129 National Museum of Scotland (Edinburgh), 47, 59, 126, 127, 140 National Socialism, 54, 122, 123, 125, 148, 149 nationalism, 22, 50, 55, 119, 122 Negri, Massimo, 70, 72 Neighbourhood Shops exhibition, 86, 87 Netherlands Amsterdam Museum and, 78, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87 Collectie Nederland and, 97 collecting strategies, Europeanisation processes and, 97 digitalisation project and, 97 European Museum Academy and, 70 Lending to Europe programme and, 67–68, 69 National History Museum and, 60–61, 97 national museum, identity crisis and, 9 Network of European Museum Organisations (NEMO), 62–63, 67, 69, 72, 75, 96 non-governmental organisations (NGOs), 53–54, 75, 162 occidentalism, 54–55 Open Method of Coordination (OMC), 67, 97, 98 Parlamentarium (Brussels), 122, 135, 136, 145, 186, 192, 193 parliamentarisation, 33–34, 43 Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, 66 participative collecting, 82, 83, 84–88, 107–8, 190–91 participative narration, 137–39, 190 pluralism, 39, 60, 109

237 individual memory/opinion, pluralistic representation of, 139 master narratives and, 115, 116 national museums, transnational features of, 128 pluralist media democracy and, 135 pluralistic democracy and, 123 supranational constitutional order and, 123–24 transnationalisation of museal narratives and, 141–42 political correctness, 18, 30 Pomian, Krzysztof, 18, 20, 22, 118, 149, 150 Pöttering, Hans-Gert, 23, 44, 55, 64, 65, 66, 67, 122, 123, 144, 151 Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, 93 private patronage, 22, 52, 97, 168 professionalisation, 55, 59 Projekt Migration exhibition, 162, 164, 166 Reflecting Europe in its Museum Objects, 109, 111, 167, 185 Reformation, 22, 119 refugee patterns, 53–54, 69, 161, 162, 163, 173 See also migration relational object, 83–84, 88, 95, 112 Research Framework Programme, 38, 41, 42, 46 Robert Schuman European Centre, 68, 69 Route of Industrial Heritage, 99–100 Roženbergar Šega, Tanja, 107, 108 Schengen Agreement, 74, 114, 154, 155, 163, 174 Schengen European Museum, 115, 154, 155, 164, 192 Schuman Plan (1950), 44, 145 Schuman, Robert, 46, 48, 134, 145 See also House of Robert Schuman (ScyChazelles); Robert Schuman European Centre; Schuman Plan scientisation of acquistion, 17–18 Shore, Cris, 9, 35, 41 small/medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), 84, 85 societal actors in Europeanisation, 52–53, 74–75 autonomous historical research, professionalisation and, 55 boundaries, gradual dissolution of, 75 cultural entrepreneurs, intercultural competence of, 71–74 curator personal norms/political preferences and, 60–61 curatorial training, internationalisation of, 59, 73 democratic participation, political networks and, 75–76 funding/materials, access to, 53, 57, 64, 68, 69, 70, 71 histoire croisée, reciprocal/shared histories and, 60 historians, advisory roles of, 54–56

238 Internet projects, virtualisation of collections and, 71 joint cooperative exhibitions, curatorial benefits of, 60 Lending to Europe programme and, 67–68, 69 micro-networks, cross-border cooperation and, 64–68, 71, 75, 76 migration, museal representation of, 53–54 museum function, changes in, 57–58 museum networks, collaborative transnational objectives of, 68–71, 75, 76 museum organisations, lobbying/information exchange and, 61–64, 71 museum practitioners, structural conditions/ social factors and, 56–61 networks of cultural groups/organisations and, 76 non-governmental organizations, museum/ exhibition politics and, 53–54, 75 socialisation, disciplinary/professional fields and, 58–59 subsidiarity principle, multilateral cooperation and, 76 tourism, accommodations for, 57–58 transnational/global perspectives and, 56, 57, 59 transnational networks of, 53, 64–71 transnational tours, unity in diversity principle and, 68–69 travelling exhibitions and, 52–53, 74 See also European cultural/museum policy; Europeanisation; pluralism South Tyrolean Museum of History (Meran), 47, 48, 58, 125–26, 193 Spaak, Paul-Henri, 21, 132, 134 Spedition Schulz firm, 174–75 Spinelli, Altiero, 43, 46 standardisation strategy, 89, 92, 94 Sternberger, Dolf, 123 Stevens, Mary, 160, 181 storytelling. See narration of Europe subsidiarity principle, 45–47, 76 Swiss National Museum (Zurich), 57, 60 Tempora, 21, 22, 25, 69, 104, 113, 118, 119–20, 132, 133, 136, 149 Tietmeyer, Elisabeth, 57, 84, 86, 87 totalitarianism, 22, 42, 78, 118, 125, 148, 149–51, 190 Touriseum/Palace of Trautmansdorff (Meran), 58 tourism, 22, 38, 44, 57–58, 68, 99, 100, 103, 135, 141, 172, 175, 176, 195 transnationalisation, 88, 91, 95, 191, 192–93 aestheticisation and, 99 commodification/democratisation of history and, 80–81, 99

I cultural devaluation/revaluation and, 102 cultural routes, approaches to, 100–2, 103 deconstructivist narratives and, 140–42 European Route of Industrial Heritage and, 95, 98–100, 102, 103 European Union charter and, 95–96 Europeanisation processes and, 95, 96–97, 98, 99, 102, 103 global-local phenomena linkages and, 101–2 heritage for Europe, synthesised industrial culture/cultural industry and, 100 industrial culture, musealisation/ economisation of, 99–100, 102 International Council on Monuments and Sites, 100, 101 longue durée of European history and, 102–3 migration/object mobility and, 166–67 mobile history, mediation/presentation of, 101–2 mobilisation of collections, exchange practices and, 95–97, 98, 101 networks/routes of, 98–103 Open Method of Coordination framework and, 97, 98 relational objects and, 95, 96 See also collection strategies/challenges; Europeana digitalisation project; narration of Europe travelling exhibitions, 45, 52–53, 74, 156, 166 Treaties of Rome (1957), 25, 34, 128 unity in diversity principle, 7–8, 9, 10, 41, 69, 117, 125–28 van der Weiden, Wim, 70, 72 van Mensch, Peter, 81, 82 Vasström, Annette, 58, 60 virtualisation of collections, 71, 86, 87, 168 Vovk van Gaal, Taja, 44, 45, 124, 137, 152 Weij, Astrid, 67, 96 World War II European economic/political/cultural integration and, 3, 6 European integration, founding myth of, 104–6 historians, rewritten European history and, 54–55 neo-functionalist political science and, 33 post-war experiences, differences in, 104–5 post-war German assimilation and, 73 Year Zero, culture of peace and, 113, 119, 121 See also narration of Europe Year Zero, 113, 119, 121