EUROPEAN CULTURAL SPACE IN THE EUROPEAN CITIES OF CULTURE: Europeanization and cultural policy

This article considers the role of European Union (EU)¹ cultural policy within the process of Europeanization. Recent accounts of Europeanization conceptualize it as a societal transformation, pointing to a reconfiguration of cultures, identities and forms of governance (Borneman and Fowler 1997; Beck and Grande 2004; Delanty and Rumford 2005). To understand this process, the study of public policies is particularly relevant, as they can be viewed as key technologies of subjectivation: ‘[P]olicy increasingly shapes the way individuals construct themselves as subjects. […] Changing styles and systems of governance are reconfiguring the relationship between individual and society’ (Shore and Wright 1997: 4–5). This applies to cultural policies in particular, as the fostering of specific ‘cultural’ identities, instrumental to the creation of fully socialized citizens, is one of their objectives (McGuigan 2002; Miller and Yudice 2002).

Cultural policy is a relatively recent addition to EU competences, as part of the attempts to create ‘a citizen's Europe’. Since the 1980s, a series of ad hoc actions and programmes has been introduced. These have mainly been either symbolic actions or funding schemes for the support of locally generated initiatives. Encompassing both approaches is the yearly award ‘European City of Culture’ (ECOC): one of the oldest, most successful and representative EU cultural initiatives. The ECOC is the EU's most direct attempt, both practical and symbolic, at creating a European cultural space, and therefore is chosen here for closer inspection. Tracing the development of EU cultural policy in general, and of the ECOC in particular, this article provides an analysis of the peculiar EU official discourse in the field of culture, and of the interpretations and uses it has stimulated. This will show that the minutiae of cultural policy-making are never far removed from far-reaching discourses on European identity. How the gap is overcome, rhetorically and practically, provides a strategic vantage point for analysis. The national solution to the dilemmas of cultural policies is the obvious term of reference, state protection and promotion of a national culture having been part and parcel of the ‘modern state as educator’.² Europeanization – both the process and the study of it – has been generally haunted by a normative comparison with nationalization. The national cultural space has been (imagined as) given by a binary correspondence of space and culture, territoriality and peoplehood (Calhoun 1994). As we shall see through EU cultural policy, the ‘European cultural space’ may precisely require new ways to think of spatiality in its connection to culture and identity formation (Robins 1999; Mc Neill 2004).

In what follows, I shall start with a short history of how culture was progressively introduced within the EU fields of competence, according to a peculiar policy style and with an explicit narrative of European identity. This prompts an analysis of the concept of culture and of ‘European cultural space’ that inform the new policy. The first two sections are dedicated to this, based both on direct document analysis and on the relevant literature, thus delineating also a map of current interpretations and questioning the well-known EU rhetoric of unity in diversity. This will be further explored in the following sections where, based on case-study research, I will present in some detail the European City of Culture programme. This will be observed both in its overall implementation and, further restricting the focus, in the exceptional edition of 2000, when in order to celebrate the millennium nine cities shared the title, allegedly bringing the European reconfiguration of space into full light. A key aspect of this approach is that it considers EU cultural policy not only from the point of view of policy makers and official aims, but also from the point of view of its recipients, without assuming them to be passive. It also addresses how the type of policy – or the style of the imagination – affects what the European institution can try and diffuse, and the type of interpretations/imaginations open to recipients. As a case of diffuse but direct contact with the EU identity-building narratives and policies ‘at the margins’, the ECOC provides access to interpretations of Europe away from the European élites of Brussels.

Although Europe is often accused of lacking shared myths, EU cultural policy can be claimed to have its origins precisely in a myth, that of Jean Monnet saying: ‘if we were to do it all over again, we would start with culture’. Betrayed according to many by the sheer contrast with the actual Monnet-method (Shore 2000: 42–4) – whilst there is at least one direct claim to paternity³ – this saying deserves the status of myth precisely in the face of contrary evidence: scholars still report it, stressing that ‘[w]hether Monnet actually pronounced this phrase is of small importance. Its extraordinary impact shows that there is a high level of identification with it. We should ask ourselves the reasons for this’ (Banus 2002: 158). These reasons have to do with the need of legitimation for a cultural policy, and for the place of culture in European integration it presupposes, that had actually already started outside Treaty dispositions. In the first European Communities – from the ECSC to the EEC – culture was intentionally excluded. The dominant neo-functionalist approach to integration did not entail a comprehensive union and the creation of a fully-fledged new European subjectivity, on the assumption that forms of social and cultural integration would come about, eventually, by ‘spill-over’. However, although it is only recently that we started to hear another mythical saying: ‘Europe is made, now we have to make the Europeans’, the latter have been in the making since the beginning.⁴ Or at least since the late 1970s, when thanks to the never fully sedated federalist vision of European integration, heralded in particular by the new democratically elected European Parliament, measures towards the creation of a ‘people's Europe’ to balance the technocratic one found their way onto the agenda.⁵ This step was backed by the Declaration of European Identity of 1973 (CEC 1973) and by the influential Tindemans Report of 1975 (CEC 1976), establishing a link between a European identity and advances in political integration, and making suggestions that contained the nucleus of a cultural policy. So from the late 1970s to the early 1990s a policy style was devised – recognized as characteristic of sectors where European competence is merely complementary to the national one because ‘sensitive’ for issues of identity and sovereignty (Majone 1996) – of incremental development. This has been based on the creation of both a debate, through the issuing of public documents, and on fostering a ‘demand from below’, through programmes of direct grants. The debate sets culture in the agenda, and the support stimulated within the cultural sector legitimizes European intervention. However, still exceeding explicit competence at European level, culture was a disguised sector of intervention that had to ‘pass’ under some of the statutory fields of competence of standing treaties. It has taken until the Maastricht Treaty – and three European Commission Communications (CEC 1977, 1982, 1987), the Solemn Declaration on the European Union (CEC 1983) recommending cultural action as a means towards the fostering of a common identity, and the subsequent flurry of initiatives of the ‘People's Europe’ campaign⁶ – for cultural action to gain a legal status.

The Treaty on the European Union (TEU) (signed in Maastricht in 1992, amended in Amsterdam in 1997), states: ‘The Community shall contribute to the flowering of the cultures of the Member States, while respecting their national and regional diversity and at the same time bringing the common cultural heritage to the fore’ (TEU, Art. 151, 1). EU competence in cultural matter is now legitimated, but it is also limited to co-ordination, integration and support initiatives. These are interventions not dissimilar to what was done before, so that analysts, and the EU itself, often still deny its being a proper policy (Forrest 1994; Delgado-Moreira 2000; Littoz-Monnet 2003).

The initiatives that gave substance to the new legal framework were, first, the new cultural programmes launched after Maastricht in the second half of the 1990s – Kaleidoscope for cultural co-operation, Raphael for cultural heritage and Ariane for publishing and reading – and, subsequently, the Culture framework programmes: Culture 2000 (2000–2006), now just Culture Programme (2007–2013). Their overall rhetoric is that of the protection of the ‘common cultural heritage’, together with the promotion of a better knowledge and awareness of the cultures of the European peoples (strictly in the plural), whose variety is the richness of Europe. Their strategy towards these ends still follow the thread of the previous approach, although at a more ambitious and allegedly encompassing level. This involves financial support for projects of cultural co-operation and exchange across Europe, according to what in the evaluation criteria of the Culture programmes is called ‘European added value’. This is defined as a project's European dimension, typically measured in terms of actual co-operation (organizational, institutional, financial) and exchange with partners of different member States (PLS Ramboll Management 2003). A system of direct grants to various cultural actors, operating at the local level, is thus still the heart of the EU cultural policy. Earlier initiatives, such as The European City of Culture, have in fact been easily integrated in the framework programmes.

Still, this policy is explicitly informed by a far-reaching narrative of European cultural identity, claiming that cultural policy is there to protect and the same time foster it.⁷ As we read in the document which established Culture 2000:

Or similarly, in the new Culture Programme started in 2007:

The gap between the very general and ambitious rhetoric and the scattered measures can be seen as problematic; however, it is not until we disentangle the meanings of culture that the EU struggles to keep implicit that we can qualify that gap, as we shall see in the next section.

The metaphor of the European cultural space has been one of the first EU discursive devices to address culture without defining it, developed since its early steps in cultural policy. With the expression, two broad domains are addressed. On the one hand, it stands as the corollary of the European economic space it obviously evokes, thus as an area for the promotion of European cultural industries (with measures ranging from the movement of cultural goods and services to support of employment in the sector). Within the liberal framework of European integration, however, measures towards the ‘cultural exception’ from that framework had to find a rationale, which is what prompted a parallel, evocative use of the expression ‘European cultural space’ as a precondition for the emergence of solidarity among Europeans. The rationale is that a European cultural space where cultural goods are protected and promoted is legitimated because they are bearers of cultural identity. As we can read in the relevant Commission communication: ‘The sense of being part of European culture is one of the prerequisites for that solidarity which is vital if the advent of the large market, and the considerable changes it will bring about in living conditions within the Community, is to secure the popular support it needs (CEC 1987: 1). In advancing this deeper, but equally fuzzier, notion, the EU has been very cautious, always mentioning the diversity of cultures every time that unity was put forward, in order not to hurt the sensibility of national and local cultures (that is, of their powerful institutions). This resulted in an increasingly explicit discourse of unity in diversity.

The latter started to circulate in the second half of the 1980s, during the influential Delors's European Commission and at the same time as the first interventions in the cultural sector. It has constantly consolidated since then: ‘“Unity in diversity” […] has become the most influential expression of European identity today as is evidenced by a wide range of documents, speeches, and publications’ (Delanty and Rumford 2005: 56; see also Taylor 2001). It has become progressively formalized, being echoed in the quoted TEU article 151, elevated to the rank of official motto of the EU as united in diversity (adopted in 2000 by the European Parliament). This ‘saccharin concept’ of unity in diversity (Borneman and Fowler 1997: 495) has been widely criticized, mainly as either empty rhetoric or as hiding a centralizing hegemonic project (Wintle 1996; Passerini 1998). However, it remains the dominant ‘solution’, both official and academic (for a review see Delanty and Rumford 2005: 56–68). Elsewhere I have traced a parallel between the configuration of unity and diversity and competing theories of European integration (Sassatelli 2002), here I would like to show, first, its connection to different emphases in the notion of culture, and, second, its implications for how the relationship between culture, identity and governance is negotiated.

Whenever possible the EU keeps concepts such as identity and culture implicit, and when not possible it tries to provide ‘pragmatic’ definitions, rather than contents. This is evident in a key document such as the first report on community cultural action after Maastricht. Having set out to define culture, the report immediately retracts: ‘the concept of culture is a nebulous one which can vary from one school to another, from one society to another and from one era to another’ (CEC 1996: 3). Therefore, it continues, a restrictive version might exclude important ‘parameters that contribute to the formations of cultures’, whilst an all-encompassing one may be very difficult to handle at policy level. As a result, the report concludes that an institution cannot define a concept such as culture and should instead approach the question in a ‘pragmatic’ way, in the limits of what is formally present in official texts and policies. This type of recursive escape is bound to generate the critiques it tries to avoid. Interestingly this has happened within the EU itself. Notably, the Committee of the Regions (COR) has criticized this report precisely on the grounds of lack of definition resulting, according to the COR, in a de facto restricted notion and instrumentalization of culture. As a consultative body of local powers, the COR advocates instead a territorially bounded and local notion of culture ‘as a way of life peculiar to a specific community’ (COR 1997: 6). The articulation of the different internal voices of the EU brings to the surface the concepts of culture that, implicitly and by default, inform the final result. As already partially evident, in EU official documents, especially those establishing the several cultural and media programmes and thus framing the practices of cultural operators, two notions of culture dominate and are commonly elided, culture as a way of life and culture as the production of artefacts and events. In particular in the first period of EU cultural action, culture in the first sense was identified with national culture, following in this a common configuration that sees culture as a way of life connected to ‘thick’ identities, characterized internally by unity, and based externally on the reciprocal diversity of the various ‘cultures’. This notion ignites questions about the shares of unity and diversity within the European cultural space: here diversity is a matter of external relations, being framed as an obstacle to economic rationalization. It is tolerated, seen as an element of richness but also as a hindrance to successful communication, exchange and economic value. It is recognized as an unavoidable element, precisely because linked to national ‘traditions and identities’, but as these are seen in essentialistic and static terms, from the European perspective diversity so conceived remains a kind of necessary evil.

However, thanks to the emphasis on the second notion of culture – culture as artefacts being produced and experienced – the EU has progressively come to see an asset in diversity. However, it has not renounced, as the shift in the concept would suggest, the connection with identity-building (a particularly clear example is the EU media policy, see Schlesinger 1997). As we have seen in the actual programmes put forward after Maastricht, diversity is now celebrated. It is not the same diversity though, as it is now connected to culture intended in the more restricted, aesthetic sense. Here diversity is a richness since it is about the multiplication of available cultural ‘goods’, whether high art masterpieces or popular ‘hits’. The interesting move by the EU is the appropriation for European identity of this latter sense, normally connected to a universal (or, for today's popular culture, global) rather than identitarian connotation. Common critiques of European identity as too abstract, lofty, intellectual and rational, rather than affective, can be linked to this unusual pattern.⁸ This interpretation is however a consequence of using the national template as a normative model. The EU itself falls prey of this ‘methodological nationalism’. But what the EU configuration of unity in diversity within culture shows is that we may need a new way of imagining the relationship of culture, identity and governance, the second point I want to raise in this section.

In the dominant account of the national imagination, that relationship is based on a reduction of the particular to the universal, conflating the broad and the restricted notion of culture as elements of a ‘civilization’, of which the state is the gatekeeper. Cultural policies, both liberal and dirigiste, are often legitimated as the defence of the national way of life (Lewis and Miller 2003: 5). The nation-state has done this with a clear option for unity and justifying the instrumentalization and regulation of culture as aesthetic artefacts (allegedly ends in themselves and ‘spontaneous’) in the name of culture as a specific way of life. This particular combination of culture and identity is not at the EU disposal, not only because of the persistence of nations, but because the very concepts of essentialistic cultural unities are today questioned (Ifversen 2002). The role that the institutional identity-building through culture can play is also affected, as it increasingly becomes less of a matter of a monolithic cultural content trickling down from institutional (political and cultural) élites.

EU cultural initiatives are easily (and superficially) reduced to attem pts at mimicking the nation, dangerous or pathetic, and thus beg criticism for the contradictions they face. Maybe because of this, critics have seemed contented with the mode of ideology-critique analysis. Having ‘unveiled’ the interests of the EU in maintaining a certain configuration – holding the national and local institutions at bay whilst increasingly deepening Europeanization – we think we have completed our analysis, and proved that configuration ‘wrong’. Hidden in this there is probably a (false) assumption that the process of imagination is anyway a falsity, and that unveiling means destroying. This is ironic, because the whole concept of imagined community (Anderson 1983) was instead conceived in order to stress the power of the social, and cultural, construction of reality. But more importantly, it prevents further analysis, beyond ideology-critique. The assumptions hidden in mottoes such as unity in diversity certainly need to be analyzed and connected to the institution's interests; however, their interpretation and practical use does not descend directly from those interests. Moreover, institutional rhetoric and its interpretations may be contradictory without this making them ‘wrong’ (as analytical concepts would); they work, although at a more sophisticated level, especially within a reflexive and polymorphic process like Europeanization, as everyday, tacit, heuristics. What should be addressed analytically is how they deal with contradictions (and what they perceive as such or otherwise), and above all, how they translate and transform in actual practices. An effort to address that is what guided my fieldwork research on the European City of Culture programme.⁹

‘It is time for our [the Culture Ministers’] voice to be heard as loud as that of the technocrats. Culture, art and creativity are not less important than technology, commerce and the economy’. This sentence, formulated in 1983 by the then Greek Minister of Culture, Melina Mercouri, is often emphatically reported, in another example of the mythologization of Europe (true to reality this time), in accounts of how the European City of Culture was born (e.g., quoted in Myerscough 1994: 1). The idea of an award to be attributed to a different European city each year was in fact launched in 1983 by Mercouri in Athens. This was at one of the first informal gatherings of the Member States’ Culture Ministers, then seizing the first signs of a possible development of cultural action at European level. Started in 1985 with Athens itself, the European City of Culture programme is today the most established and highest profile EU cultural initiative (Gold and Gold 2005). It claims to be not just a festival, but also a venue for exchange, debate, and reflection, with the two-fold objective of providing an occasion to showcase the city's culture in Europe and to attract attention and events from other European countries on site.

The ECOC can be considered a representative example of EU cultural policy for a number of aspects. At the policy-making level, these are its constant and incremental development and its loose character, especially as far as the cultural contents. The programme has in fact undergone several reforms, having being an intergovernmental action for 20 years and then become an action of European Commission's DGX from 2005. Its very name has been alternating between ‘European City of Culture’ and ‘European Capital of Culture’, the latter being the one favoured at the moment.¹⁰ Reforms have not really made the programme less loose however, at least until now. The role of the EU is limited to the conferment of the title, and of a small fund, to the selected city or cities each year, put forward by the respective national authorities; the design, financing and implementation are local.¹¹

As a result, at the level of implementation, European Cities of Culture have been very different in scale and scope, objectives and means. This has been readily phrased by the EU as perfectly incarnating the unity in diversity of Europe. Indeed the official mission is, not surprisingly, ‘to highlight the richness and diversity of European cultures and the features they share, as well as to promote greater mutual understanding between European citizens’. Also this cautious balancing of European and local is representative of EU cultural policy in general. The festivals set up by cities have become increasingly long, complex and ambitious, now mostly stretching over the all year and including initiatives that would not fit in cultural policy narrowly defined. Over the years, the ECOC has gradually attracted increasing public and media attention.¹² This success may arguably be linked precisely to the ability of the EU to maintain a low profile, thus avoiding the feeling that the programme invades the delicate sphere of cultural identities. But this sphere is, of course, precisely what the ECOC is targeted at.

This is evident both diachronically and synchronically. Synchronically, within each city's European relocation, as we shall see in greater depth in the next section for the 2000 edition. Diachronically, in the resulting map of Europe, delineated by the sequence of ECOC through the years. This map shows an initial series of cities bearers of the quintessential expressions of European high culture – Athens, Florence, Berlin, Paris and Amsterdam were the first five. This has also been linked to more or less explicit political objectives (the reclaiming of Berlin then still divided, and various rites de passage towards membership of the EU, as in the case of Madrid, Stockholm, and others, especially since 2000).¹³ This then gradually shifted, in parallel to wider developments in local cultural policies (Bianchini 1993), to a rhetoric of culture-led urban regeneration, progressively extending the concept of culture underlying the programme and making of the European framework the springboard for advancement within ‘a certain imaginary, symbolic hierarchy between the locales in Europe’ (Heikkinen 2000: 212). Glasgow 1990 is usually considered the turning point (García 2005). We could say that through participation in the ECOC programme, cities prove not so much to be European, but that they are becoming European, thereby also contributing to the definition of the term and of the process.

With the progressive consolidation of the programme itself, cities have increasingly used the autonomy left by its limited codification, resulting in great diversity from one year to another, an aspect that as we have seen has been celebrated by the EU. This emerges in the two reports commissioned by the EU to assess the first and second decades of the programme (Myerscough 1994; Palmer-Rae Associates 2004). Here, we are told that even if the ‘European focus’ of the cities is not fully satisfactory, the ECOC having achieved more in highlighting differences than in bringing the European dimension to the fore, what is desirable would not be ‘formula approaches, taking examples from each member state [that] have rarely proved artistically valuable and should be viewed with some caution’ (Myerscough 1994: 20). It is rather on cultural networking and international exchanges that hopes are placed: ‘The international visits […] were a practical contribution to “making the cultural unity of Europe”’ (Ibid). Because, as the more recent report confirms, ‘The richness but also the challenge of ECOC is that there is no agreed formula for a cultural programme, and the unique historical, economic, social and political context of each city cannot be ignored’ (Palmer-Rae Associates 2004: 14).

What we can see through the implementation of the ECOC programme is not only a map of the European cultural space taking shape, but also how that implies a reconceptualization of the cities involved and their culture as European. However, also thanks to the minimal regulation (and minimal EU financing), the programme gives space to an array of different approaches and contents: it then becomes a representation of how the European cultural space is held together by this diversity. Therefore, it also hints to the difference between the European and the national cultural spaces, between Europeanization and n ationalization. In the European cultural space, it is the attitude towards diversity that makes it European, not finding a common cultural content. In a way, this is intrinsic in the very name of the programme, and in particular in the position of the adjective ‘European’, which qualifies ‘city’ and not ‘culture’. ‘City of European culture’ would have been much more essentialistic, in line with the nationalization process, with which the reconceptualization of space in European terms does not compete. What the chosen, apparently more cautious, formula of ‘European city of culture’ does is to relocate the agency, rather than to appropriate the object (a cultural content) in European terms. It is thus to the actors directly involved that we should turn, to see how they translate all this into everyday cultural practice.

What we have seen diachronically, is concentrated synchronically in the ECOC edition of the year 2000. This has been exceptional as nine cities, instead of just one, shared the title – ‘three form the South (Avignon, Bologna, Santiago de Compostela), three from the Centre (Brussels, Prague, Krakow), three from the North (Bergen, Helsinki, Reykjavik)’ – and have been officially called to associate and ‘organize a European cultural space for the year 2000’. A space, needless to say, characterized by unity in diversity and symbolizing ‘[t]he vision of a future unified European continent, consisting of diverse regions, nations and cultures yet comprising a cohesive and communicating whole’, as we could read in Prague ECOC 2000 website (Cogliandro 2001). More critically, one could point out that this was rather a typical case of European compromise, as in fact all the cities that were candidated were nominated following failure to agree on one (and surprising, not positively, the cities involved themselves). However, if many have seen a loss of focus due to the plural nomination, the European dimension has been brought to the fore, making this edition particularly relevant and worthy of deeper consideration (Sassatelli 2005). Here I will concentrate in particular on how the rhetoric of the making of a European cultural space as unity in diversity is interpreted by the individuals directly involved and translated into practice in the cultural programmes.

This means leaving official documents aside to concentrate on fieldwork findings, interviews with key informants and participant observation. The following are the words of the director of one of the ‘central’ ECOC, generally quite contrary to the choice of the plural nomination, and here answering a question on how a cultural programme would go about to representing European cultural identity:

This quote hints at how unity in diversity is appropriated but redefined; its ambiguity used to actually far exceed what the EU's had in mind. This had a very practical outcome, as indeed most cities, in the year 2000 and not only, scheduled a significant number of events dealing with non-European cultures, as well as projects with social, research or education finalities, where the cultural aspect was instrumentalized in multiple ways. In Bologna ECOC 2000, for example, ‘European’ and ‘extra-European’ projects were put under the same category of ‘multiculturality’. This may not seem so exceptional, but we have to remember that this is a programme started with Athens and Florence celebrating their contribution to the ‘great European heritage’. With the years, it has become more and more consolidated the practice of defining ‘European’ not in terms of a project's contents, but in terms of a ‘dimension’. That is, as a ‘cultural space’ created by the collaboration of several actors operating in Europe. This has been key in a reformulation of the role of diversity, in a way that both follows on from what was found at the level of EU central rhetoric and qualifies it.

The issue of the role of diversity – its being an asset or an obstacle – emerged explicitly during the interview with the manager of ‘European projects’ in the preparatory phase of Bologna ECOC 2000. Discussing the relationship of the nine twinned cities, he reported that even if efforts had been made to collaborate in the very creation of projects, shared projects were difficult: ‘because of cultural differences, a project that may be very interesting for a city, may be totally uninteresting for another’. Successful projects, he continued, were those with ‘international key’, explaining that by this he meant that they should involve an international active participation rather than having a European, or international, theme. As an example he mentioned Voices of Europe, a choir of young people from the nine cities, designed and organized jointly. Trying to understand the rationale guiding his distinctions, I enquired if in this case cultural diversity did not affect the result. The answer was revealing: ‘On the contrary. In this case cultural difference is used as a value’, and when this happens ‘working with people from Reykjavik, Praga, Santiago is easy after all. And you realize that, in fact, there is a common identity. Twenty, fifteen years ago this was unthinkable’.

The connotation of cultural diversity shifts, according to what concept of culture it implies. Diversity is an obstacle when connected, although implicitly, to a static way of life or worldview, making only certain themes or contents interesting. Diversity becomes positive when it means different voices and collaboration, when it is about cultural products that originate from diversity and imply a process of diversification (the process that makes it possible, in the words of my interviewee, to work with diversity and that frames identity in terms of this capacity to learn how to work with others). The interesting point is that we also see here – in a person who considered himself an Euro-sceptic – the same move we saw at the level of EU rhetoric. Diversity is first neutralized, because phrased in terms of cultural goods and of cooperation in the production of those goods; however, also thanks to this ability to cooperate, diversity is re-grafted to identity: in the words of my interviewee, living and working together is possible, and that has to do, indeed, with common identity as way of life. Many other interviewees in the ECOC 2000 display similar attitudes, always focusing on collaboration, whether seen as successful or unsuccessful in particular cases.

As a practical result, it is not a European theme that makes the success of a European project – and my interviewees had no difficulties in listing examples of failed projects of that kind – it is active participation and collaboration. Comparing early draft programmes with the ones actually implemented, this impression proved exact: initially cities designed projects thematizing Europe (often they thought they had to), going as far as imagining a ‘Charter of European culture’ or debates on European culture and cultural policies. What the actual programmes contained as ‘European projects’ were instead the creation of networks, co-productions and the like, regardless of the theme. This is also, we should recall, both the EU parameter of ‘European added value’ in its framework programmes and more specifically the official interpretation of the ECOC mission. This parameter sets a frame that the ECOC 2000 local organizers I interviewed both adopt and exploit. This is clearly what the next quote shows. It is from an interview with one of the curators of a project called Europe in the box, a travelling contemporary art exhibition that was made of boxes, of fixed dimensions, inside and around which individual artists represented what their stay in a city that had previously been ECOC had inspired.

The open rhetoric of unity in diversity has allowed for an open character of the practices of the programme, often on the part of the EU itself struggling for coherence, as the very nomination of cities from non-EU member states (decided in 1992) shows. Or, to say it with yet another of my interviewees – a young project manager for Bologna ECOC 2000 – the objective of achieving a cultural space made of unity in diversity has far-reaching implications: ‘What we really need to do today is open the borders, letting people from Albania (but also Turkey, Ukraine, and …) to come and live and work and have children in Bologna and everywhere else in Europe. Only when there will be this freedom we will be able to speak of the “diversity and richness of European cultures”’.

Many will continue to dismiss all this as empty rhetoric that may just work, as the first interviewee quoted concluded, ‘on a totally symbolic level’. But there seems to be a need to reiterate that symbols are crucial in the framing of reality, and that not all symbols frame reality in the same way. The nation has been imagined as a culturally homogeneous community, and as a result enforced homogenization when required. The official EU rhetoric may be just a superficial celebration of regional or national differences, but this does not mean that it will be exclusively used and interpreted as such by the recipients of the policies. To explore this, the research on the ECOC has concentrated on the rhetorical space given by the formula ‘unity in diversity’, seeing how it works as both limiting and enabling. And not only rhetorically: as it has emerged for the ECOC 2000, this was reflected in the type of cultural contents that found a legitimated space within the ECOC events. The ECOC 2000 on a whole, and my interviewees in particular, seem to take the implications of unity in diversity in the direction of what some authors today call cosmopolitan virtue or cosmopolitan recognition of the other, based on a vision of (European) culture more as a project and a co-operative construction than in terms of inheritance of and belonging to fixed cultural contents (which is, incidentally, also the direction taken by influential academic notions of European identity, see e.g., Castells 1998; Brague 2002; Bauman 2004; Beck and Grande 2004). It may well be more the result of necessity than virtue, but in the European Cities of Culture the European framework could only obtain a wide acceptance on the condition that it would not impose a specific and exclusive content. Equally though, the local, even idiosyncratic diversity of themes is permitted and encouraged, as long as the frame that enables and limits them is European and as long as no single content tries to become hegemonic.

As we can see from the vantage point of the ECOC, the EU is becoming less and less apologetic in talking of a European cultural space as unity in diversity, less as a way to accommodate the nations and more as a manoeuvre, maybe just an intermediate one, towards a new style of imagining a cultural identity. Thanks also to the level of interpretation allowed and required on the part of ‘local’ (for want of a better qualifier) actors, diversity is less and less phrased in terms of difference among national, or local, bounded cultures, and increasingly as diversity within culture, constitutive of every cultural space. In this light, a European cultural space is neither singular, nor plural; neither about a layer of supranational unity above the nations’ diversity, nor merely about a ‘Europe of the regions’, the alternatives suggested by the comparison with the national model. Rather it is about a combination of concepts of culture and identity (and space) that neither sacrifices nor celebrates diversity per se, struggling (because it has not totally freed itself from the previous model) to redefine those concepts and focusing on the creation of unity as a project of social construction.

I would like to thank for their precious comments Jasper Chalcraft, Anna Triandafyllidou and the three anonymous referees.

Monica Sassatelli holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Parma. She has been Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence and she currently teaches sociology at the University of Ferrara. Her publications include Identità, Cultura, Europa (Franco Angeli, 2005), ‘The logic of Europeanizing cultural policy’, in Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Anna Triandafyllidou (eds), Transcultural Europe, Palgrave (2006) and ‘Nothing changes and everything changes. Change, culture and identity in contemporary Italian social theory’, in Gerard Delanty (ed.), Handbook of Contemporary European Social Theory, Routledge (2006).