ABSTRACT
The European Union began as an economic project that sought political agreement. Despite the promises of unity in diversity, the idea of shared cultural interests is still given lip service, humanitarian obligations have been trashed, and everything is sacrificed to the benefit of global economic forces. Many museums continue to display knowledge from the top down, and are reluctant to open themselves as places of public usership and collective practice. Communication has not tamed capitalism. On the contrary, it has enhanced some of its most regressive and individualist tendencies. The fantasy of the museum as a temple that provides succour to the elites, a display cabinet of global conquest, and an island detached from the flows of everyday life has ended. The challenge that confronts L'Internationale, and all the other institutions that have committed themselves to being part of a worldwide-movement of culture as a common good, is to imagine an alternative to the bad binary of welfarism or globalism.
