ABSTRACT
This provocation is a personal account of experiences of applying for and running a large EU grant (Critical Heritages of Europe – CoHERE) that responded to a politically instrumental call under the EU’s flagship Horizon 2020 programme. The instrumentalism of this and later calls sought to harness the potential of ‘European heritage’ as a resource for solidarity, countering crises of belonging, popular disaffection with the project of the EU, and fragmentation of groups and member states. However, the notion of ‘European heritage’ is a discursive means of giving apparently definite historical, geographical, and conceptual shape to an entity – Europe – which is indefinite. A range of official heritage institutions and designations in Europe do the geopolitical work of constructing Europe and European heritage in a circular logic: ‘Europe’ is because it has a heritage; that heritage is, therefore, discretely ‘European’. The chapter questions the responsibilities that academic and other researchers assume when responding to such political agendas, arguing for the need to embed criticality of their implicit and explicit geopolitical assumptions and terms of instrumentalism, and for heritage researchers to take positions overtly and reflexively.
