The museum is intimately linked to the birth and peregrinations of nations. For some authors, this institution is considered one of confinement and exclusion in the way that Foucault analyzes prisons or asylums, or as a site whose modern origins date to its emergence as a public institution at the beginning of the 19th century. On the one hand, recent projects and realisations in European politics regarding the EU integration and enlargement show the growing importance of the expert figure in delivering the political message in a way that can be understand by non-expert and, at large, by citizens, in particular when addressing the building of a common European memory. On the other hand, recent opening of history museums show the need for rewriting or reconstructing European memories in allowing the civil society to question patterns and frames used so far by museum practitioners (curators, restorers...) for the pursuit of political agendas. Established by an initiative of a so-called civil society, the Musée de l’Europe in Brussels took ten years to come to fruition. Is this Museée de l’Europe a “contact-zone” (Clifford, 1997) where the civil society can question the knowledge produced and organized under the leadership of curators? As museums shift their focus away from being mere repositories for material culture, items and artworks, towards being a medium of communication and debates, multimedia formats and tools are irresistibly presented as conflicting with the maintenance of traditional power structures. Using the case studies of the Museum of Europe in Brussels, our presentation will deal with the new challenges museologists have to embrace, when related to conventions of display whose structures of power and authority were, in the cases of national museums, hidden and masked from view.
