ABSTRACT
EUropean borders play a prominent role in the framework of European heritage. For instance, the decision of the European Heritage Label action specifies that the candidate sites have to show their cross-border or pan-European nature that goes beyond the national borders. In this chapter, we approach the European Heritage Label as a geopolitical discourse where bordering is constituted by a mixture of drawing, erasing, and crossing borders on various scales. We scrutinize bordering in the visitor interviews and ask how the interviewees use it to engage with the European Heritage Label and Europe. Since the European Union promotes the notion of ‘unity in diversity’, we analyze bordering from the perspective of intertwined notions of unity, diversity, and difference. We identified four categories of bordering in the data: (1) borderless Europe, (2) internal borders, (3) external borders, and (4) borderless world. On the one hand, a lack of borders appears both as an ideal and an ongoing practice: either the borders do not matter (any longer) or there is a vision and sometimes also a ‘strategy’ for removing them. On the other hand, the interviewees take the existing borders for granted and accept them as part of contemporary reality.
