ABSTRACT
The European Union funds diverse heritage conservation and promotion activities, but its core heritage initiatives, such as the European Heritage Label, are not funding instruments. However, the European Heritage Label is intertwined with the logic of economy in diverse ways. The focus of this chapter is the economic conditions of the European Heritage Label action and how these conditions impact its implementation and power dynamic between different actors. Other themes explored here are the European Heritage Label as a heritage brand in the making and how the logic of branding functions within the action. The Label is awarded competitively in a multi-stage application process. After receiving the Label, the sites continue to compete for local, national, and European visibility and prominence. As the European Union’s objective for the action is to increase Europeans’ feeling of belonging to Europe and the Union, and as the heritage sites are required to advance this objective through tough competition, we develop and apply the concept of neoliberal belonging to these intertwined conditions. Finally, we discuss the evidence in our data for the European Heritage Label’s relation to and competition for visibility and prominence with other international heritage brands.
