Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Reasearch position paper 3of different cultures is now emphasised. European culture is thus portrayed as a“culture of cultures” which combine, in Gestalt-like fashion, to create a wholegreater than the sum of its parts. The message now conveyed in European Unionreports and policy statement is that “we” Europeans, with our shared historicalroots and common heritage, belong to a unified “European culture area”. As onemass-circulation European Union pamphlet puts it: “The city of Venice, the paintingsof Rembrandt, the music of Beethoven or the plays of Shakespeare are anintegral part of a common cultural heritage and are regarded as common propertyby the citizens of Europe.” (Bochardt, 1995: 73).The “culture area” concept originated within nineteenth-century anthropology andwas developed largely for the purpose of classifying objects in museums. Theresult was that peoples and their artefacts were represented as belonging to fixedregions and bounded cultures set apart from others by factors of race, religion, languageand habitat. Subsequently abandoned the following century as scientificallyflawed and ideologically compromised, the culture-area concept seems to havestaged a come-back in recent years, particularly in the discourse of EuropeanUnion policy makers if not among academics. However, in an era marked by theglobalisation of cultural commodities, unprecedented mobility of populations, andever-increasing transnational flows of information, goods and services, the culture-areaconcept is perhaps of limited use or value.At first blush, the goal of “unity in diversity” suggests that European Union policymakers have begun to embrace a more pluralistic and less instrumental approachto culture. Closer analysis indicates otherwise. The rationale underlying EuropeanUnion cultural policies appears to be less about celebrating “difference” orembracing multiculturalism, as promoting the idea of Europe’s overarching unitythrough that diversity. National and sub-national cultural differences are typicallyrepresented as the fragmented elements of a shared “civilisation”, whose originsare located in ancient Greece, Rome and Christendom.These ideas were further developed through various European Union-funded initiativesto design textbooks that portray history from a “European perspective”,thereby challenging the hegemony of nationalist historiography. This EuropeanUnion-sponsored attempt to rewrite history is epitomised by Jean-BaptisteDurosselle’s Europe: A History of Its Peoples (1990), although other historianshave also made notable contributions. 1 Durosselle’s 416-page opus, part textbook,part manifesto, presents the last three thousand years of European history asthe story of Europe’s faltering journey toward political union and federalism: agradual coming together in the form of the European Union, or what politicianscall Europe’s “vocation federal” (“federal destiny”). The chapters portrayEuropean history as the unfolding of an evolutionary chain of events, starting inthe Neolithic period before moving forwards in a march of progress throughGreece, Rome, Christianity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, industrialisation,colonialism, individualism and the rise of liberal democracy. European Union__________1. See especially Ahrweiler, 1993; Brugmans, 1987.115