Becoming Europeans. Cultural Identity and Cultural Policies

Abstract

This book addresses European identity as an object of both theoretical and empirical investigation. At the theoretical level it focuses on the academic and institutional debate on European cultural identity. It places this debate in the broader context of Europeanization and the formation of a European society led by institutional projects since World War II, as well as within wider processes of globalization, the collapse of monolithic collective identities and the new centrality of the issue of diversity. At an empirical level the book explores two main case studies. The first concentrates on EU cultural policy and on one of its most representative actions, the European Capital of Culture programme, established in 1985. The second case study considers the Council of Europe, which since its foundation in 1949 has been based on a much more cultural approach, and its strategy of Europeanization through cultural co-operation, focusing on its recent European Landscape Convention, ratified in 2004.