Ethnographic Approaches to EU’s Participatory Governance

Culture can be considered as one of the underlying ideas that have motivated the building of the European Community and the EU. Through its cultural initiatives, the EU seeks to enhance citizens’ participation in the Union and thereby gain their support for the EU integration to strengthen its legitimacy. As such, the cultural initiatives are embedded in the EU’s participatory governance. Indeed, in its recent cultural policy discourses, the EU has increasingly emphasized citizens’ participation. In this paper, the notion of participation is investigated through an ethnographic research focusing on EU’s cultural heritage policy. This ‘ethnography of Europeanization’ comprises participant observation and interviews with both practitioners and visitors of selected cultural heritage sites. It enables recognizing diverse conceptions of participation and the possibilities and problems related to it in the micro-level realities of the sites, thus deepening and plurifying the understanding of participatory governance. Through ethnographic research, the paper examines EU's cultural policy as political action and as performative processes producing meanings, concepts and technologies of power. Ethnographic research sheds light to how practices, agencies, institutions, communities and governance arrangements constitute each other in the EU-integration and reveals tensions and breakages in seemingly unified discourses. It contributes to exploring relations between the EU-governance and citizens as well as the construction of the EU as a political and cultural community.