Edited by Marjet Brolsma, Robin de Bruin, and Matthijs Lok
Eurocentrism in European
History and Memory
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AMSTERDAM UNIVERSITY PRESS
Eurocentrism in European History and Memory
FOR PRIVATE AND NON-COMMERCIAL USE
AMSTERDAM UNIVERSITY PRESS
Eurocentrism in European History and
Memory
Edited by
Marjet Brolsma, Robin de Bruin, and Matthijs Lok
Amsterdam University Press
FOR PRIVATE AND NON-COMMERCIAL USE
AMSTERDAM UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cover illustration: The tympanum of Amsterdam City Hall, as depicted on a 1724 frontispiece
from David Fassmann, Der reisende Chineser, a serialized fictional travel account whose
Chinese protagonist ‘Herophile’ describes his travels through Europe in letters to his
emperor. The satirical use of the foreign visitor to describe Europe’s politics and culture was
a typical device of Enlightenment literature. The image shows the world’s four continents
bringing tribute to the Stedemaagd or ‘City Maiden’ of Amsterdam. Europe, the only
crowned continent, is depicted as superior to Asia, Africa and America. Here, in contrast to
the original tympanum, Europe is placed not on the all-important right of the City Maiden,
indicating her seniority over the other continents, but on her left. Above the tympanum
appears the mythological figure of Periclymenus, one of the Argonauts, who was granted the
power of metamorphosis by his grandfather Poseidon.
Source: Beeldbank Stadsarchief Amsterdam. See also: David Faßmann, Der auf Ordre und
Kosten Seines Käysers reisende Chineser […], Part 2, fascicule 3 (Leipzig: Cornerischen Erben,
1724). The image is discussed by Michael Wintle, The Image of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009), 263.
Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden
Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout
isbn
e-isbn
doi
nur
978 94 6372 552 1
978 90 4855 055 5 (pdf)
10.5117/9789463725521
686 / 694
© Marjet Brolsma, Robin de Bruin, and Matthijs Lok / Amsterdam University Press B.V.,
Amsterdam 2019
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.
Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations
reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is
advised to contact the publisher.
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A Collection of Essays in Honour of Michael Wintle
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Table of Contents
Foreword
9
Joep Leerssen
1 Introduction
11
Marjet Brolsma, Robin de Bruin and Matthijs Lok
Part I
History & Historiography
2 The Past and Present of European Historiography
25
Between Marginalization and Functionalization?
Stefan Berger
3 The Fragmented Continent
43
The Invention of European Pluralism in History Writing from the
Eighteenth to the Twenty-first Century
Matthijs Lok
4 Eurocentrism in Research on Mass Violence
65
Uğur Ümit Üngör
5 Muslim EuRossocentrism
79
Ismail Gasprinskii’s ‘Russian Islam’ (1881)
Michael Kemper
Part II
Literature & Art
6 David’s Member, or Eurocentrism and Its Paintings in the Late
Twentieth Century
105
The Example of Vienna
Wolfgang Schmale
7 Women Walking, Women Dancing
Motion, Gender and Eurocentrism
Joep Leerssen
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121
8 Shakespeare, England, Europe and Eurocentrism
141
Ton Hoenselaars
9 Being Eurocentric within Europe
157
Nineteenth-century English and Dutch Literary Historiography and
Oriental Spain
Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez
10 The Elephant on the Doorstep?
179
East European Perspectives on Eurocentrism
Alex Drace-Francis
Part III
EU & Memory
11 A Guided Tour into the Question of Europe
195
Jan Ifversen
12 Constructing the European Cultural Space
223
A Matter of Eurocentrism?
Claske Vos
Index
245
List of Illustrations
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5
Figure 6
Figure 7
Figure 8
Maître Leherb, Europe (1981/1982)
Left: The Gradiva relief. Right: Dancing Maenad
Domenico Ghirlandaio, Birth of St John the Baptist
(1486-1490)
Panel no. 6 of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Bilderatlas
Publicity photograph for La bayadère (Nationale Opera
en Ballet, 2006)
Panel from Hergé, Coke en stock
Mata Hari performing (1905)
Debra Paget in Das indische Grabmal (1959)
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105
123
125
126
128
129
133
135
Foreword
Joep Leerssen
A discipline is a working community of specialists: academics who apply a
specific method to a specific corpus. Disciplines are much less stringently
def ined than specialisms. A discipline, as a working community, can
bring very diverse types of specialists together. All they need to share,
minimally, is a common f ield of interest, such as gender for women’s
studies, language for linguists, the past for historians, or Europe for
European studies.
Unsurprisingly, such a working community with diverse specialisms will
spend a lot of time trying to clarify and specify the nature of their common
working ground. What is gender? What is language, and how does it work?
What can we know, reliably and relevantly, about the past? And what does
the ‘Europe’ in European studies stand for? Such self-questionings are the
starting point of theory; all theories start in trying to explain what we
think we are doing. Why do we consider certain things more important
than others? What knowledge, what themes of interest, do we highlight or
prioritize in our teaching programmes?
But there is also something else that binds disciplines and academic
working communities together, and that is the human factor. Working
communities are precisely that – communities: groups happy to share
information, groups eager to communicate, to exchange ideas, to deliberate
together. Working communities are about people sharing, not just a field of
interest, but also a certain esprit de corps. The very different specialists assembled in these pages share, not only a general interest in things European
or transnational, but also specific sense of collegiality and sympathy around
the person of Michael Wintle.
Michael Wintle has for decades given guidance and leadership to the
diverse, multispecialist discipline of European studies. Both within the
departmental setting of Amsterdam and in the wider field, nationally and
internationally, he has been a quiet, slightly reserved, but highly appreciated and authoritative f igure in our deliberations and in our tentative
trajectory towards something like a theory. His study of cartography, of
Eurocentrism, of the interplay between cultural representation and power
politics, have given us fruitful (and what is more: workable and sensible)
ideas on what the ‘Europe’ in European studies stands for. The fact that
such diverse specialists are here gathered, in these pages, is a tribute to
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10
JoEp LEErssEn
Wintle’s role in uniting us into a working community, both through his
sterling academic inspiration and through his capacity to inspire sympathy
and collegiality.
Libri amicorum, in the present publishing climate, are the sort of collected
volumes that hardly dare to speak their name anymore. But a book this is;
and friends we are.
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1
Introduction1
Marjet Brolsma, Robin de Bruin and Matthijs Lok
The Theft of History
In his polemical work The Theft of History (2006), Cambridge anthropologist
and comparative sociologist Jack Goody fiercely critiques the – in his view
– pervasive Eurocentric biases of much historical writing. Goody castigates
the often implicit idea that the history of Europe is unique and different
from other parts of the world. In his view, phenomena such as capitalism,
democracy, individualism, feudalism, and even romantic love – often put
forward as uniquely ‘European’ developments – are not present only in
European history, but can be found in some form in different societies all
over the world.2 Even the idea of uniqueness is not unique to the European
continent – ‘a hidden ethnocentric risk is to be eurocentric about ethnocentricity’ – as ethnocentrism is a part of all societies and partly a condition
of the personal and social identity of their members.3
A false ‘divergence’ between a ‘free Europe’ and a ‘despotic’ and unfree
Orient was conceptualized in the age of antiquity.4 According to Goody, this
Orientalist notion of difference was reinforced by the voyages of discovery
and the return to classical antiquity in the Renaissance and nineteenthcentury industrialization and imperialism. Peter Burke has, for instance,
questioned the unique character of the European Renaissance, pointing out
1 This edited volume would not have been possible without the commitment and enthusiasm of
the European studies staff at the University of Amsterdam. We would like to express our deepest
appreciation to Nienke Rentenaar, for her indispensable help in processing the manuscript, and
to Boyd van Dijk, Alex Drace-Francis, Artemy Kalinovsky, Sudha Rajagopalan and Jamal Shahin,
for their language corrections and valuable comments.
2 Goody, The Theft of History, 2.
3 Ibid., 5.
4 See also: Said, Orientalism.
Brolsma, Marjet, Robin de Bruin, and Matthijs Lok (eds): Eurocentrism in European History and
Memory. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2019
doi: 10.5117/9789463725521_ch01
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Mar JE t BroLsMa, roBin dE Bruin and Mat tHiJs Lok
that in many parts of the world some sort of a return to a lost cultural golden
age can be observed.5 According to Goody, if a divergence exists between
the ‘West’ and the ‘East’, both economically and intellectually, this could
only have been a recent development that would prove to be temporary.6
Goody also deconstructs the notion of continuous and coherent ‘European
history’ starting from the ‘Greek genius’ and the classical world and essentially culminating in the contemporary Western World.7 According to
Goody, contemporary Europe has very little in common with the ancient
world. In his view, ‘antiquity’ was appropriated and ‘invented’ by Europeans.
(Early) modern Europeans projected their own image on the classical world,
remodelling ‘antiquity’ as their own ideal. Instead, ancient Greece had
been part of a larger Mediterranean world, the ancient Greeks had more
in common with Africa and the Middle East than with modern Europe.8
Other forms of historiographical Eurocentrism can also be discerned
next to the notion of the uniqueness as well as coherence and continuity of
European history. Gerard Delanty, for instance, defines Eurocentrism as the
‘arguments or assumptions, implicit and explicit, that the West is superior to
the rest of the world or the tendency to take Western experiences as the norm
by which the rest of the world should be judged’.9 Consequently, a possible
third bias of European historiography is its alleged universalizing claim.
In the first global histories of the Enlightenment, European development
begins to be regarded as the ‘model’ for all other histories.
Exemplary in this regard is Voltaire’s famous Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit
des nations (Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations), which was written
in the 1740s and 1750s, but published for the first time in 1756. Voltaire
started his description with developments in China, as a criticism of Catholic
universal histories which took the biblical creation as its starting point.
However, the stadial development of Europa into a ‘modern’ commercial and
urban society is seen by Voltaire as the horizon and end point of all human
societies.10 European history became the ‘norm’, whereas development in
5 Burke, The European Renaissance; see also Wintle, The Image.
6 Goody, The Theft of History, 2. On the divergence: Pomeranz, The Great Divergence.
7 For instance: Arjakovsky, Histoire de la conscience européenne.
8 Goody, The Theft of History, 26-27. See also: Bernal, Black Athena.
9 Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination, 178. Cf. Amin, Eurocentrism; Bhambra, Rethinking
Modernity; Blaut, The Coloniser’s Model of the World; ibid., Eight Eurocentric Historians; Latouch,
The Westernisation of the World.
10 Lilti, ‘La civilisation’, 156; Asbach, Europa und die Moderne im Langen 18. Jahrhundert.
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Asia and Africa, were framed as ‘exceptional’.11 The history of Europe, and
often more specifically – depending on the author’s nationality – national
histories of France, England or Germany etc., is regarded as pars pro toto
of a universal human development.12
In the nineteenth century ‘universal histories’ were even more Eurocentric
than their enlightened predecessors. Europe was seen by leading historians
such as François Guizot and Leopold von Ranke as the historical continent
par excellence. Following Hegel’s lead, the dynamic and evolutionary nature
of European history was contrasted by historians with the static or even
declining development of non-European histories.13 After World War I, an
increasing number of world histories were published which were mainly
dealing almost exclusively with developments in Europe and seeing Europe
as the route to modernity all other continents would eventually follow.14
A fourth form of historiographical Eurocentrism concerns the uses of
categories. As European history was the norm for all other modern histories,
the categories and periodization in which the history of the world was written were derived from European history. Global conceptions of time as well
as space have followed from European definitions.15 In his Provincializing
Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty criticized the supposedly universal value of
European historical concepts and their underlying imperial power structure:
‘[H]istoricism – and even the modern, European idea of history – one might
say, came to non-European peoples in the nineteenth century as somebody’s
way of saying “not yet” to somebody else.’16 In Chakrabarty’s view, therefore,
European history needed to be intellectually ‘provincialized’.
The criticism of the writing (and teaching) of modern history in general,
and European historiography in particular, was met with a response. In his
overview of European history, Europe: A History (1996), Norman Davies,
for instance, conceded that European history should not be mistaken for
universal or global history. For him, the ‘way forward’ was to pay more
attention to the interaction of European and non-European peoples and
11 Goody, The Theft of History, 66. For a criticism of the enlightened (Anglo-Saxon) historiography of the Spanish New World, see: Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New
World.
12 See the chapter by Stefan Berger in this volume.
13 Guizot, Histoire; Schulin, ‘Leopold von Ranke’, 147; Pasture, Imagining European Unity; Pitts,
A Turn to Empire.
14 Stuchtey and Fuchs, Writing World History.
15 ‘One major problem with the accumulation of knowledge has been that the very categories
employed are largely European’ (Goody, The Theft of History, 23).
16 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 8; Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination, 179.
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to use non-European sources for the elucidation of European problems.
However, according to Davies, ‘European history-writing cannot be accused
of Eurocentrism simply for focusing its attention on European affairs.’17
Davies was above all critical of the exclusive emphasis on (north)western
Europe in so-called histories of ‘Western Civilization’. The trend to exclude
‘Eastern’ Europe from the mainstream of European history started in the
eighteenth century but was reinforced by World War II and the coming of
the Cold War.18
Davies’ Europe: A History formed part of a larger wave of overviews of
European history that have appeared in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin
Wall and the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 and
that prioritize intra-European East-West historical relations.19 As Tony Judt
has pointed out, the reconfiguration of the past was a key element of the
political transitions that took place in Europe in 1990s: constructing a new
historical order was part of the attempt to create a new political order.20 The
new histories of Europe published in the 1990s and 2000s seem, above all, to
be a conscious or unconscious attempt to heal the division of the western
and eastern half and to construct a common past, in which the experience of
communism is integrated in the wider narrative of European history.21 This
also seems to been a main goal of the House of European History, erected in
Brussels in 2017. The histories of Europe, written in the 1990s and early 2000s,
could also be considered a reflection of the new dynamic in the process of
European integration, leading to renewed attention to European history.
The changes in the writing of European history since World War II are
part of transformations of a wider social or political ‘European memory’.22
Memory scholars as well as historians, such as Judt, have described how the
horrors of Auschwitz have become the key experience of European history, or
even a ‘foundational past’ since 1945.23 The memory of World War II became
the ‘European memory’ par excellence. However, some memory scholars have
also warned that the exclusive focus on the uniqueness of the experience in
17 Davies, Europe, 16.
18 Ibid., 19-42. See also the chapters by Drace-Francis and by Rodríguez Pérez in this volume.
19 Some well-known examples are: Davies, Europe; Mazower, Dark Continent; Judt, Postwar.
20 Judt, ‘The Past Is Another Country’, 108; Müller, Memory and Power in Post-war Europe.
21 Ifversen, ‘Myth and History’.
22 On the contested and problematic notion of ‘European memory’ and history, see Assmann,
‘Europe’; Pakier and Stråth, A European Memory?; Leggewie, ‘Seven Circles’; Rigney, ‘Transforming
Memory’; Pestel, Trimçev, Feindt and Krawatzek, ‘Promise’.
23 Judt, ‘The Past Is Another Country’; ibid., Postwar, 803-832: ‘Epilogue: From the House of
the Dead: An Essay on Modern European Memory’; Confino, Foundational Pasts.
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World War II has brought to the fore a new kind of Eurocentrism. This new
Eurocentrism is no longer underscoring the ‘unique qualities’ but instead
the ‘unique evilness’ of Europe, and also its superior way of dealing with
war crimes and trauma.24
This notion of a uniquely European evilness is also the main feature of
‘Occidentalism’, a dehumanizing picture of the West that, according to some,
was born in Europe itself.25 Additionally, former communist countries in
Central Europe, and to a lesser extent Southern European countries, felt
that the exclusive focus on the memory of World War II and the victory over
fascism by Western European countries as part of the Atlantic alliance,
led further to the forgetting of the historical experience of other parts of
Europe.26
Others have pointed out that the exclusive focus on the memory of
the Holocaust has resulted in a Eurocentric forgetting of the colonial and
imperial past and the ways in which European history is entangled in
often violent ways with the other continents.27 As a result, European wars
of colonization and decolonization of which no one was proud could be
confined to a ‘memory hole’.28 This has hindered the view on ‘roads not
taken’ after the decline of European empires, such as lasting federal relations
between European metropoles and non-European overseas countries and
territories.29 Furthermore, it has obstructed our understanding of the deep
entanglement of nation-state formation in Europe and European integration
with imperialism as a fundamentally European endeavour. Until recently,
colonialism, neo-colonialism and postcolonial resentment were generally
excluded from European integration history.30 However, for proponents
of European unity such as Richard Count Coudenhove-Kalergi or Robert
Schuman, their community extended far beyond the European continent.31
Increasingly, historians of all backgrounds (history and memory scholars,
literature and art historians, and historically oriented cultural anthropologists and social scientists) turn to the study of global interconnectedness,32
24 Müller, ‘On European Memory’; See also the chapter by Üngör in this volume.
25 Buruma and Margalit, Occidentalism, 6.
26 Pakier and Stråth, A European Memory?, 1-14; D’Auria and Vermeiren, ‘Narrating Europe’.
27 Stoler, ‘Colonial Aphasia’; De Cesari and Rigney, Transnational Memory. On forgetting and
memory, see Erll, Memory in Culture, 8-9.
28 Judt, Postwar, 281.
29 Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation.
30 Legêne, ‘The European Character’.
31 Mikkeli, Europe as an Idea and an Identity; Hansen and Jonsson, Eurafrica.
32 Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt, 13.
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inspired by researchers such as Christopher Bayly, who have emphasized that
industrialization, urbanization, nationalism and the development of the state
were not just Western export products, but the results of global exchange
that reverberated throughout the world.33 In an attempt to overcome the
geographical ‘compartmentalization of historical reality’34 and the tenacity
of ‘banal’35 everyday representations of European superiority, historians of
Europe now focus increasingly on processes of global interconnectedness,
such as the interrelation of processes of decolonization with the post-war
European integration project.36 National history, today, can also be described
from a global perspective.37 Others, by contrast, have turned to local history
or a transnational regional perspective to write about Europe’s past.38
As Gerard Delanty has remarked, avoiding the charge of Eurocentrism
is not easy since the term lacks specificity and Eurocentrism is often an
all-embracing category that covers virtually the entirety of scholarship.39
Nonetheless, partly thanks to the work of Michael Wintle and other historians of Eurocentrism, ‘European historians’ have become more aware
of the often Eurocentric biases evident in the historical approach, of the
foregrounding of select topics, and the essentially problematic nature of
many currently used historiographical concepts.
Structure and Contents
This book has been edited with two objectives in mind: first of all it provides
a collection of essays in honour of Michael Wintle and his work. Secondly,
this book offers a state of the art overview with regard to Eurocentrism that,
for instance, would be useful as a textbook for students in European studies.
Evidently, the volume does not claim to be in any way comprehensive or
all-encompassing. Our goal in this volume is to explore and critically analyse
manifestations of Eurocentrism in representations of the European past
33 Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World; Stanziani, Eurocentrism.
34 Conrad, What Is Global History?, 5.
35 Billig, Banal Nationalism.
36 Pasture, ‘The EC/EU’. For some critical remarks concerning the surge of ‘global historians’,
see the chapter by Berger in this volume.
37 Hill, National History and the World of Nations. Cf. Moyn and Sartori, Global Intellectual
History.
38 Mishkova, Stråth and Trencsényi, ‘Regional History’; Kaiser and McMahon, ‘Narrating
European Integration’.
39 Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination, 178.
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across disciplines – history, literature, art, memory and cultural policy – as
well as offer different geographical perspectives. We have looked, especially,
at the role that imaginings of the European past since the eighteenth century
played in the construction of a Europeanist worldview and at the ways in
which ‘Europe’ was constructed in literature and art.
The first part of the book, on history and historiography, opens with a chapter
by Stefan Berger chronicling the history of European history in past centuries. At
the end of his contribution, Berger discusses the danger of the marginalization
of European history as a subdiscipline between global history and national
history. In the next chapter, Matthijs Lok argues that the pluralist narrative of
European history has a strong, but often implicit and overlooked, Eurocentric
dimension, and should be examined more critically by historians of Europe.
The subsequent chapter, by Uğur Ümit Üngör, discusses two strands of
Eurocentrism in mass violence research: ‘Holocaust uniqueness’ and Orientalism. In the former approach, Europe is set as an example, albeit a negative
one. In the second line of thought, the genocidal violence of non-European
Others is constructed as cruel and inefficient. This first part of the volume on
history and historiography is concluded by Michael Kemper, who shows how
Ismail Gasprinskii, the founding father of Muslim cultural reform in Russia,
successfully made use of clichés about European haughtiness and Islamic,
especially Asian-Islamic, sincerity in his 1881 essay ‘Russian Muslimhood’.
The second part of the book, on Eurocentrism in literature and art, opens
with a critical analysis by Wolfgang Schmale of the depictions of the six
continents by the Austrian painter Maître Leherb (1933-1997), who continued
the tradition of the continent allegories, popular since the sixteenth century,
in a contemporary way. Subsequently, Joep Leerssen argues in his chapter
that part of the Eurocentric imagination of the Orient involves the phantasm
of a world where (in sharp contrast to Western mores) religion and sensuality
overlap. Located on that interstice are often the figures of dancing Oriental
maidens, whose dancing is the sort of motion that is directionless. This
type stands in contrast to the Western, Eurocentric heroine with a sense
of purpose and directionality. In the third chapter of the second part, Ton
Hoenselaars argues that four ways of interpretation of ‘Shakespeare’ and
‘Europe’ should be distinguished, and that these together constitute the
phenomenon of ‘Shakespeare as a European site of memory’.
In their contributions, Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez and Alex Drace-Francis
show that the term ‘Eurocentrism’ may also be considered to include West
European discourses on sub-regions within Europe. Rodríguez Pérez
identifies the construction of a strong North-South division in nineteenthcentury English and Dutch literary historiography. This polarity is further
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Mar JE t BroLsMa, roBin dE Bruin and Mat tHiJs Lok
complicated by an association of the South with the Oriental Other. DraceFrancis shows that certain aspects of East European discourse on Europe
may also be considered as a variant of Eurocentrism, as they foreground
the centrality and symbolic power of something called ‘Europe’ while
simultaneously often minimizing the role of ‘eastern’ influence in the region.
The topic of the third part of the book is Eurocentrism in memory
from institutional (EU and Council of Europe) perspectives. Jan Ifversen
describes two different versions of Europe in two transnational museums:
the Schuman House and the House of European History. The exhibition in
the first museum is based on the myth that Europe exists to avoid conflict
between nations, while the Europe exhibited in the latter is a Europe split
between expansion and crisis, between unity and division, between peace
and war, between democracy and dictatorship. European integration is not
salvation as in the case of the Schuman House, but a project to tame the
destructive forces that also belong to Europe. Finally, Claske Vos describes
the ambiguity of EU intervention in the field of cultural policy. On the one
hand EU intervention is hegemonic and the result of Western normativity; on
the other, it provides a cultural space in which actors can freely manoeuvre.
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About the Authors
Marjet Brolsma, Assistant Professor of European Cultural History, University
of Amsterdam
M.Brolsma@uva.nl
Robin de Bruin, Assistant Professor of Modern European History, University
of Amsterdam
R.J.deBruin@uva.nl
Matthijs Lok, Assistant Professor of Modern European History, University
of Amsterdam
M.M.Lok@uva.nl
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AMSTERDAM UNIVERSITY PRESS