International relations and the populist-nationalist challenge to the protection and valorization of tangible and intangible cultural heritage

1. CReW
Cultural Relations at Work - Jean Monnet project
Reinforcing cooperation on cultural heritage in the EU Neighborhood South
The Royal Society, London
(October 22-23, 2018)
International relations and the populist-nationalist challenge to the protection and
valorization of tangible and intangible cultural heritage
Speaker: Prof. Richard Higgott, VUB – Institute of European Studies
In the last three years I have been working as a research professor on an Horizon 2020 project on
European Cultural and Science Diplomacy (EL-CSID, European leadership in cultural, science, and
innovation diplomacy). In this context, I am going use international cultural relations as a hosting
metaphor to cover the waterfront of international cultural activity, arts, education, tourism, and
science and the creative industries, including cultural heritage. Also in this period I think I developed
a reputation in Brussels as a bit of a Cassandra when it comes to looking at the faith and fortune of
European international cultural relations and cultural diplomacy, and by Europe I do mean the EU.
Mine is an unfortunate reputation, because I am intensively supportive of an attempt to enhance
European leadership through international cultural relations. I am very supportive of the activities of
Ms. Federica Mogherini and her staff and I want this strategy to succeed, but the problem is, through
the lenses of my specialty as a scholar of international relations, I am sensitive to the obstacles that
such a strategy and policy inevitably faces in the contemporary era. I am a liberal internationalist, I
want enhanced international cooperation, I am as many of you one of those “suspect cosmopolitans”
who believes in contact beyond borders. What I want to do here is to outline to you the reasons why
I think this is a difficult game to play, to recognize the constraints in which scholars and practitioners
find themselves.
The mood has shifted dramatically in just four years, from the time of the 2014 Preparatory Action
Report on Culture in European External Relations. You may remember it was called “Imagine the
world towards cultural global citizenship”. The report was extremely upbeat about the potential to
enhance European international cultural relations, including cultural heritage. The report set the
ground for the 2016 Joint Communication, adopted in 2017 by both the Council and the Parliament.
The Communication argued that we were in a time of unprecedented transformation and growing
global interdependence, that we should focus on the strength of Europe’s culture and the role that
they should play in the EU’s external relations and the governance of global interdependence,
supporting the so-called liberal international order boosting Europe’s crucial role in that order. Implicit
in this strategy was the assumption of soft power diplomacy and the embodied growing salience of
cultural relations, practices, and diplomacy could join more traditional approaches to diplomacy to
enhance the EU standing. The 2016 Communication quite specific identify international cultural
relations as a significant element in the EU’s wider foreign policy strategy, and bodies sitting between
state and society (EUNIC, Cultural Diplomacy Platform, More Europe) were clearly intended to be
important part of this process. They sit, I would suggest, in an ambiguous position. All resist the idea
that they are formally engaged in cultural diplomacy as opposed to international cultural relations.
this distinction is not as clear-cut as these organizations would like to affirm. As soon as funding
comes from member states or the EU, the notion of autonomous intercultural relations has to cede
ground to a relationship suggesting a role as an instrument of diplomacy. Although not explicit, it is

2. also clear from reading the Joint Communication and the Global Strategy statement that cultural
relations within and beyond the borders of the EU are also meant to be important in the mitigation of
the growing nationalist influence of Europe’s populist movements. The Global Strategy talks about
societal resilience, and the role of cultural activity in securing it, and specifically says: “cultural
relations will nurture societal resilience by deepening work to foster pluralism, coexistence, and
respect”. An alternative reading of the Strategy, and one most likely to be received beyond the
borders of the EU (cultural relations cannot be deemed to success unless seen through the eyes of
beholder), is that the real aim of this Strategy is to promote EU cultural values vis-à-vis the influences
of those other great players in the contemporary global search for influence, the USA and
increasingly China. There is nothing inherently wrong with such a strategy. There is a risk that the
promotion of a common culture may become politically inflammatory if seen as a bureaucratic
counter-weight to populist nationalist causes. I suggest the EU needs to stress softly both within the
EU and with third countries if it is not to fuel populist nationalist zeitgeist or generate backlash
towards cultural relations among its extra-European partners. A further aim, not always articulated,
assumes the driving activity in the cultural domain is that Europe’s history of accomplishments,
expertise, and influence will axiomatically be welcomed externally, at the same time advancing the
EU global engagement and external relations. it’s not by chance that Mogherini on more than one
occasion has referred to Europe as a “cultural superpower”. Using the language of superpower in
culture is not a smart move. Tragically, this is my major point, the new impetus for enhancing
European cultural relations, which I believe in principle is a great idea, emerged at that very time
when the socio-political and the socio-economic environment was undergoing an accelerated
process of change. That was, and I would argue still is, deeply antithetical to this endeavor. The
prospect of the EU to establish a central role for cultural relations, including activities such as cultural
heritage protection, and what it calls its soft core of external relations, are more difficult now that
perhaps any time since the end of the Cold War. The European foreign policy community assumed
that the international order was basically a liberal order. Indeed, EU policy still assumes that the
fundamentals of that liberal order still remains intact, and that the EU is a major player in that order.
With the changing economic and socio-political context, I have difficulty in seeing our ability to
sustain that order, and I’ll try to suggest why. Those specific events and the acceleration in societal,
technological, and political trends during the period 2015-2018 have produced a substantially
changed landscape to the EU’s international diplomatic relations. The rise of populism and
nationalism, while it has been around since the 2008 global financial crisis, began to get a serious
momentum across Europe beginning in 2015. The massive influx of refugees from the conflict in
Syria fed a growing hostility to migration; equally, the backlashes against the economic globalization,
especially liberal economic openness in trade gathered momentum in both sides of the Atlantic
following the election of Trump. The new landscape has significant adverse implications for the
successful pursuit of cultural relations via a European joined up strategy. The impact of this new
landscape has been to threaten many of the liberal democratic values and the cultural norms and
practices that the EU seems to promote in international affairs. This deteriorating environment has
been exacerbated by Brexit, rejections of the governments of Hungary and Poland of liberal norms,
dismantling the rule of law, challenging of the role of civil society, limiting the free media, restrictions
to academic and creative and scientific freedoms. I live part of the year in Budapest, and the tragedy
which is the Central European closure and the political environment under the Orban regime is really
depressing.
This negative urgence of populist nationalist zeitgeist drives modern diplomacy more than might
initially be assumed, and the normalizing tendencies advancing identitarian politics, and tragically
we are normalizing this behavior, and it was usually the cultural community that resisted the
normalization of these kind of tendencies, they basically had a deleterious effect. Cultural relations
and practices are increasingly constrained by more atomistic and competitive domestic national

3. environment. This sentiment round counter to those outlined in the EU’s 2016 strategic vision, and
the enhancement of these international relations via the use of culture. Many in the Brussels policy
community now recognize that the grand vision of the Communication was excessively aspirational
in the faith in the utility that they were placing in culture as an instrument of soft power in this changing
political environment. Let us also not forget that cultural policy remains a member state competence.
Advocates of enhanced cultural relations driven from Brussels have one hand tied behind their back
because they are sensitive to this member state competence. The potential resistance among
member states to a more centrally generated activity, brussels based champions have largely
forsworn the notion of a joined-up cultural or indeed science diplomacy. Equally, while considering
foreign activity has been given to the creation of frameworks for the development and management
of EU cultural relations, especially the introduction to secure buying-in form the wider stakeholder
community, this is not easy. The best example to do this of course is the important May 2017
Administrative Arrangement between the EEAS and EUNIC. Nevertheless they remain within the
EU as they always have been, a coordination problem, in which the interests of the main participating
agents -the Commission, the EEAS, the MSs, the principal stakeholders in international cultural
relations, in civil society- they do not always coincide and they will remain difficult to manage for as
long as cultural relations are principally a MS competence. Moreover, activities like the Friends of
the Presidency Group, in trying to articulate the strategy, do not seem to be going as well as it was
hoped and expected at the time that the Presidency was established. Perhaps the key test is the
provision of financial support for that policy. Brussels has not committed a major resource line to ICR
yet. Now, I understand there is some discussion at the moment about this but today funding to back
up the implementation of the strategy has not arrived. Most importantly, at the level of both strategy
and practice, attempts to grow EU external influence through culture are poor; it’s bad luck, at one
level identitarian populist politics are deeply unsympathetic to enhanced cultural interactions.
Let me conclude. I appreciate that your interest in this room are more focused and concrete than
those I have addressed in this presentation, and to counter my Cassandra attitude, let me note that
there is among the scholar community a healthy resistance by those refusing the attempts of leading
populists, nationalists, and their supporters, to attack the cultural industries and close down
international interactions. There is a community that is alive and well and is struggling to prevent the
normalization of these activities. Progress has been made in articulating a strategic approach among
some key players in the cultural relations community towards some of EU’s neighbors. In this
context, for those of you who have not seen it, I would recommend to you the report recently
produced by EUNIC on lessons learnt from an examination of their partnership between their clusters
and EU delegations in neighboring countries. The report details a range of excellent projects being
undertaken by them. So, there is work going on, in this difficult world we live in. I also drawn
encouragement from listening to the presentations this morning, which suggest that there is strong
support for the valorization and protection of cultural heritage. I suppose one message is that we
simply must not forget the manner in which the wider social, political and economic environment
remain a contextual inhibitor and cast long shadows along these endeavors. Thank you.