This book explores how the European Commission faced the challenge of enlargement. Based on extensive interviews, the work provides a lively and readable picture of life within the Commission, exploring how thousands of newcomers were recruited and socialized and how they changed the organization, including its gender balance.

Creating and Governing Cultural Heritage in the European Union: The European Heritage Label provides an interdisciplinary examination of the ways in which European cultural heritage is created, communicated, and governed via the new European Heritage Label scheme. Drawing on ethnographic field research conducted across ten countries at sites that have been awarded with the European Heritage Label, the authors of the book approach heritage as an entangled social, spatial, temporal, discursive, narrative, performative, and embodied process. Recognising that heritage is inherently political and used by diverse actors as a tool for re-imagining communities, identities, and borders, and for generating notions of inclusion and exclusion in Europe, the book also considers the idea of Europe itself as a narrative. Chapters tackle issues such as multilevel governance of heritage; geopolitics of border-crossings and border-making; participation and non-participation; and embodiment and affective experience of heritage. Creating and Governing Cultural Heritage in the European Union advances heritage studies with an interdisciplinary approach that utilises and combines theories and conceptualizations from critical geopolitics, political studies, EU and European studies, cultural policy research, and cultural studies. As such, the volume will be of interest to scholars and students engaged in the study of heritage, politics, belonging, the EU, ideas, and narratives of Europe.

This volume offers a critical inquiry into the ever-evolving notion of cultural heritage and the way it has been made accessible, governed, and protected by the institutional, operational, and legal structures of the European Union.

The areas of media and cultural policy offer a unique prism through which to understand wider processes of European integration. Questions of European identity, citizenship and community or polity-building clearly resolve themselves as questions of the (non-)emergence of a European ‘communicative space’. At the same time, as a more specific area of policy study, the role which has or may be played by the European institutions themselves in the fostering of such a ‘communicative space’ raises questions as to both the effectiveness and the legitimacy of their interventions. This volume in the European Studies series brings fresh, interdisciplinary insight into this relatively understudied area, making the case for a renewed look at the trajectory of cultural and media policies in the EU. Distinctively, the collection offers a historical and socio-political analysis of major media policies in the European Union, allowing for the contextualisation of recent developments; turns its attention to areas largely neglected by scholarly publishing, such as the press, the culture of the newsroom, and the role of media in an enlarged Europe; and addresses media and cultural policies as an interrelated part of EU construction, through questions of identity and political representation. Media and Cultural Policy in the European Union will be of interest to scholars and students of Cultural and Media Studies, European Studies, and European Integration, as well as appealing to broader Social Science audiences concerned with the politics and policy of cultural diversity.

Culture is one of the most complex and contested fields of European integration. This book analyzes EU cultural politics since their emergence in the 1980s with a particular focus on the European Capital of Culture program, the flagship of EU cultural policy. It discusses both the central as well as local levels and contextualizes EU policies with programmes of other European organisations, such as the Council of Europe. By asking what "Europe" actually means for European cultural policy, the book goes beyond the confines of official organizations and the political sphere, to discuss the contribution, impact and appropriation among a more diverse group of actors and participants, such as transnational experts, local bureaucrats, cultural managers, urban dwellers and the visitors. Its principal aim is to debunk the myth of Brussels as the centre of cultural Europeanization. Instead, it argues that European cultural policy has to be seen as a relational, multi-directional movement, involving a wide variety of stakeholders and leading to conflicts and collaborations at various levels. This book combines the perspectives of political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and historians, at the intersection between EU, urban, and cultural studies, and changes our understanding of ‘Europeanization’ by opening up new empirical and conceptual avenues. Challenging the dominant interpretation of European cultural policies, The Cultural Politics of Europe will be of interest to students and scholars of European studies, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, historians and cultural studies.

By giving the European Union a say in cultural matters, the Member States' governments set out to create a 'Europe of the peoples', the idea being to make people in Europe aware of their shared history and values, to make them more aware of European culture and Europe's heritage, but at the same time to cultivate their awareness of local and regional cultures. More specifically, the point was to foster cultural exchanges within Europe, enable the public at large - and artists and culture professionals in particular - to get involved in European projects, to encourage creativity and to make culture accessible to the greatest possible number of people.

This book explores what drives value politics and the way in which it redraws political conflict at EU level. Based on case studies and analyses of statistical data, the book shows what the uses and roles of values have been at EU level over the past decades in both market-related policies and in identity, cultural and morality policies. It challenges the common assumption that the latter is more driven by value conflicts. The research shows the intrinsic similarities between all policy areas regarding the agency and limits of values as drivers of change or continuity. It argues that European values are a broad and flexible symbolic repertoire instrumentalised to serve as a resource for mobilization, legitimation/delegitimation, the conquest and conservation of power. This book will be of key interest to both scholars and students in European studies/politics, comparative politics, public policy, political theory, sociology and cultural studies, as well as appealing to professionals of European affairs within and around the EU institutions.