ABSTRACT
Questions concerning regional cultural heritage have become increasingly crucial in Europe during the last few decades. The reasons are many. One is that regional issues have been highlighted within the EU. The EU has challenged, in different ways, the notion of the nation-state as the fundamental territorial geopolitical unit. There is, on the one hand, the aim of finding supranational forms of government and polity, at the same time as there is, on the other hand, a focus on intra-national regions as prime movers in the Union's development. Most attention is paid to economic issues, but also when it comes to questions like political representation, autonomy, and identity, the region is certainly on the agenda. To some writers the current processes are seen as a return to a geopolitical pattern that existed before the rise of the modern nation-states, and therefore there is reason to speak of a ‘renaissance for regions’. 1 This is thus a promising time to explore the relation between the nation and the region from the perspective of cultural and natural heritage, as this issue goes to the heart of how nations and regions are constructed in the public imagination.
