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Paper short abstract:

Beyond stories of enlargement and accession, Europeanization is premised on violence, the reproduction of symbolic geographies and gradients of Europeanness. Heritage is such a bordering practice through which borders are reworked, based on proximity to an ideal of Western European history.

Paper long abstract:

Europeanization is routinely described as a process by which borders are displaced and transformed through various rounds of enlargement and accession. However, this march of Europeanization is premised on violence, the reproduction of symbolic geographies, and gradients of Europeanness. In remaking borders and places, Europeanization also actively excludes and adversely incorporates ethnicities, histories, and places. As such, a decolonial anthropology of Europe has to complicate the sanitized story of the EU as a liberal, benevolent post-war project, and to center the epistemic, symbolic and material violence of Europeanization processes. Heritage is such a bordering practice. European heritage-making is intrinsically racialized, classed and gendered, and that it leads to the reproduction of what I call ‘multicultural monoculturalism’: particular ethnicities, histories and places are valorized and marked as (almost)‘European’, depending on their proximity to an ideal of Western European heritage and history, while others are excluded from those narratives. I interrogate the ways in which urban forms and built environments become heritage in EU-supported cultural interventions in the East and South of Europe, more particularly in Sibiu, Romania and Cordoba, Spain. In order to reinscribe Europeanness in EU cultural interventions, both Sibiu and Cordoba put forward a multicultural, multiethnic and peaceful history of the city – narratives that evacuated historical violence and erasure of these ethnicities, while downplaying their contemporary contributions and erasures. Europeanization does not unfold solely as expansion and inclusion, but through the epistemic and material violence of monoculturalism and through multicultural fantasies that evacuate(d) the violence of these processes.