Towards Inclusive Notions of Cultural Heritage and Identity: The Role of Heritage Sites in Building National, European and Global Identity

Over the past century, much research has been devoted to investigation on how cultural heritage has been used in the construction of nation-states and national identities. Currently an increasing focus has been placed on the complex global history of transnational and entangled heritage practices. Today researchers are describing cultural heritage as a discursive creation referring to its reflective and constitutive character, i.e. heritage is constructed within, not above or outside representation. The misrepresentations and arbitrary appropriations of cultural heritage, in turn, feed the societal tensions and the cultural heritage has become a tool of politics that articulates in the current contests of what it is that represents Europe as a cultural macro-region built on the mutual cultural and historical relationships of diverse peoples. The analysis presented in this paper is part of a broader H2020 collaborative research project called “Cultural Heritage and Identities of Europe’s Future” (CHIEF, Agreement No. 770464). It is based on the field research (2019-2020) in heritage sites where semi-structured qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted with the experts in the field of cultural management and young people visiting heritage sites in UK, Latvia, Croatia, Georgia, Turkey, Spain, Slovakia, India and Germany. The objective of the proposed presentation is to analyse the role of heritage sites in building national, European and global identity. The presentation is aimed at: (1) providing an overview of the mutual dynamics of different means and approaches to cultural heritage by the state and the civil society sector; (2) discussing the young people’s engagement with the past in the cultural heritage sites. The discourse on cultural heritage demonstrated various layers of cultural heritage policies and civic society endeavours employing the cultural heritage agenda: those acknowledging the global cultural heritage agenda; those positing the cultural heritage in a broader cultural space; those with particular concerns to negotiate the past; those publicly endorsing the regional-self; as well as those that reappraise the rigidity of nation-state boundaries, ethnicization of the past, and majoritarian trends by attempts to involve young people in formation of the cultural heritage agenda and providing them with not just possibilities to gain knowledge on the past, but also with the inspiration for shaping their futures and envisaging the goals that are more inclusive with respect to people. The young people’s engagement with the past via the cultural heritage agenda apparently does not follow a single course of the modern nation-state concerns of establishing a national narrative by giving a voice to the local relics and legacies. The localities seem always able to negotiate and modify that voice, which clearly speaks for the different pasts than those marked by the petrified collective identities.