Introduction: Europeanizing cultural heritage

In the introductory chapter, we explain the core aims of the book and its point of departure for scrutinizing the European Union’s heritage politics, identifying an existing gap in research that the book seeks to fill. First, we explore how cultural and social changes of societies since the late twentieth century have influenced the practices and processes of heritage and public commemoration in Europe and how this transformation has enabled new actors, such as the European Union, to enter the ‘realms of memory’. Next, we address diverse challenges that the European Union and Europe have faced in the 2000s and suggest that the Union’s increased interest in cultural heritage functions as a tool to respond to and tackle their unwanted effects. We then introduce the European Heritage Label and describe how our ethnographic field research regarding it was conducted. We conclude by explaining the structure of the book, its core themes, concepts, and theoretical frameworks – multilevel and participatory governance, critical geopolitics, participation, heritage dissonance, embodiment, and affect theory.