Paper short abstract:

Our paper explores the practices of constructing European belonging 'from below' in one of the most recent EU cultural initiatives, the European Heritage Label (EHL). We explore practices and meaning-making of 'doing European belonging' based on qualitative interviews with visitors at EHL sites.

Paper long abstract:

A deeper qualitative analysis of the notions of Europe and 'the European' among participants of EU cultural initiatives are rare. This paper scrutinizes how Europe and 'the European' are constructed 'from below' in one of the most recent EU cultural initiatives, the European Heritage Label (EHL). The initiative and its participants are examined using ethnographic methods based on field research conducted in eleven European Heritage Label sites in 2017 and 2018 that includes qualitative interviews with visitors and observations at the sites. Our analysis focuses on the objective of the EU's cultural policy to form 'a community of Europeans' and how the visitors of the EHL sites narratively, discursively, and performatively give meanings to this policy goal, i.e. the ideas of Europe and 'the European'. Our paper explores the practices of 'doing European belonging' through practices related to mobility and the everyday. The visitors' meaning-making processes involve complex ideas of borders and their transformations as well as belonging and non-belonging. They find various connections and similarities between people and cultural features in Europe, but also make distinctions between 'us' and 'them'. The visitor interviews are interpreted by using the concept of belonging, which, in this paper, is conceptualized as a discursive resource that constructs, claims, justifies, or resists forms of socio-spatial inclusion/exclusion (cf. Antonsich 2010). As such, it captures the desire for some sort of attachment to people, places or modes of being and the process of becoming more accurately than the concept of identity (Probyn 1996).