The “third wave” of the European integration process, often referred to as cultural Europeanization, includes various complex and disputed processes aimed at creating a particular European amalgam of knowledge, attitudes and values and cultivating a notion of a common European heritage and history that transcends national differences and contradictions in the interpretation of the past and the present in Europe. Cultural Europeanization can be perceived as a narrative operation: in it the EU, Europe and Europeanness are given meanings and made understandable through narrativization – using both verbal and visual narrative means.
Cultural Europeanization is put into practice in various EU cultural initiatives. During the past years the EU has launched several initiatives that seek to produce and promote the idea of a common European cultural heritage and a European collective memory and to foster a European cultural identity that stems from them. Various scholars have noted how this EU’s recent “move to history” does not lack political motives. Indeed, its political utility is in its affective nature: the emphasis on a common history and heritage is an attempt to appeal to people’s feelings of belonging, sense of communality and cultural and social attachments, thereby striving to justify the promotion of cultural integration in the EU.
This paper investigates the EU’s recent interest in a European cultural heritage, cultural memory and narration of history by focusing on recent initiatives of the European Commission and the Parliament, such as the European Heritage Label, the House of European History and Parlamentarium, and by discussing how heritage and history are narrated as “common” and “European” in selected exhibitions of case initiatives. Phenomenologically orientated visual and narrative analysis of the exhibitions focuses on their use of emotional contents and affective visual and narrative tropes as political devices in telling the story of EU Europe.
