A Future for Europe's Past : The EU's Perceptions of a European Cultural Heritage, 1970-2020

The aim of this study is to analyze how the EU perceives a European cultural heritage and its role in the EU project during the period 1970-2020. These perceptions do something with the notion of ”the Europeanness” and are part of a narrative construction that expresses conceptions of a European place. This European place is a place beyond territorial locability and something that this thesis seeks to investigate. Attentions is brought to how changes in EU’s cultural heritage discourse are interwoven partly with notions of crisis, partly with renegotiation of a European diversity. Even though, during the 2010s, the EU begun to stress interconnections between ”the Europeanness” and its ”other”, I argue that this interconnectivity is based on a conception of a unique European past. In contrast to previous research I thereby highlight a paradoxical tension between the EU’s perceptions of a European past and a European ”today”. Moreover, this thesis goes beyond the dominant trend in cultural heritage studies and its preoccupation on what is declared to be a heritage, as well as the concentration on what EU wants us to remember. Thereby this study provides an alternative perspective on the EU’s construction of a European cultural community. It’s a perspective that gives emphasize to how a sense of European situatedness is created through notions of a European cultural heritage.