1 We have heritage, therefore we are: an introduction to heritage in a diverse Europe

By Mathilde van Dijk, Andrew J. M. Irving and Todd H. Weir

The title to this chapter is a rephrasing of the French philosopher Descartes’ famous dictum ‘I think, therefore I am’. It sums up why heritage is not only important but also indispensable for a community to carve out its place in the contemporary world. A shared past – or rather, the narrative that people share about this past – defines individuals as members of a community: as Frisian, Catalan, or Roma; as Dutch, Spanish or European, for example. Here, we chose examples of minority and majority ‘ethnicities’, but the same would apply to people of different religious faiths, sexualities or gender identity. In each case, the question of the relation of minority and majority heritage and identity imposes itself on the issue of heritage and identity as such. The notion of a shared heritage not only anchors the members of each community in their own history but acknowledges that this is a part of a larger narrative about the past. This opens new directions for future understandings, whereas before the very existence of minority heritage may have been considered irrelevant. One concrete example is the creation of Muslim and Jewish heritage trails in the UK, which highlight the long presence of these minorities in a region that many may presume to be exclusively Christian.^[1]

This chapter serves as an introduction to heritage, beginning with a history of the concept and how its definition has developed in recent decades. Changing concepts of heritage and its relation to religion will also be discussed in connection to recent developments in Europe, notably the changing attitude towards religion due to secularization, and the increasing ethnic and religious diversity of Europe. Changing policies and practices around heritage will also be highlighted. Here, the impact of international organizations is important, specifically the agreements made by UNESCO and the European Community. Despite the fact that it has not yet been ratified by all member states, the Council of Europe’s 2005 Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (known as the Faro Convention) exerts a great deal of influence on visions and practices of heritage. Arguably, the most important development is how access to and living one’s heritage has come to be seen as a human right. All of this leads to a changed perspective on what heritage is, who has heritage and on the role of the heritage expert.

What is heritage?

Heritage is first and foremost a narrative: an ideological appropriation of a historical site, event, practice, concept, person, object, which recruits it as a symbol of a community’s identity as well as an explanation of its current status.^[2] Heritage is not only a story that is told, however. Heritage is lived. It is practised by maintaining rituals, such as going through the usual motions of a religious feast, wearing specific clothes at life events (e.g. black at a funeral), attending the commemoration of a seminal event in a community’s history, or by restoring and adapting an ancient site or building.

Contrary to what is often supposed, heritage is not stable. Instead, practices and narratives evolve through creative processes of meaning-making by those claiming a site, event, practice, concept, person or object as their heritage. Such appropriations can also have a dark side to them. If one group claims a certain heritage, others may be excluded from it. Indeed, this can be a motivating factor in the heritage claim: the dispossession of others or the acquisition of other’s cultural property as one’s own.^[3] In this way, heritage is also deeply political: its narrative defines who can be counted as belonging to our community and who cannot.

This social and political nature of heritage is closely connected to the concept of ‘lieu de mémoire’ (site of memory). This is defined by the French historian Pierre Nora as: ‘A place, person or concept that summarises the identity of a group’.^[4] The very character of heritage as a narrative means that the significance of such sites of memory can change over time: they are dynamic and not fixed. Moreover, even at a certain point in time, sites can mean different things to different people and have differently interpreted points of reference. This is why Nora and his collaborators called the third part of their multivolume work on French sites of memory Les France. By using the plural article (les) before the singular word France, the authors indicate the plurality of visions of what makes France French, what France actually means.

The current discussion around the monuments erected for colonial ‘heroes’ provides a good example of how heritage narratives change. In the Netherlands, the statue of Jan Pieterszoon Coen (1587–1629) is well known. The statue was erected in 1893 and was listed as a national monument (Rijksmonument) in 1965. It is located in the city of Hoorn, which used to host the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company, known in Dutch as the VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie), and Coen was the governor of the Company’s colonies in present day Indonesia. His main claim to fame was how he secured a VOC monopoly on nutmeg, mace and cloves, in a military campaign against the Banda Islands, in which these crops were grown. In the process, he largely massacred the local Bandanese population. Belatedly, his actions have been identified as genocide.^[5] Until very recently, Coen and the VOC were seen as hallmarks of the Dutch Golden Age in the seventeenth century, and thus as symbols of how the Dutch like to view themselves: entrepreneurial, adventurous, a benign global force to be reckoned with, bringing civilization through trade. In recent decades, however, the dark side of this narrative has been highlighted: colonialism, oppression, slavery and poverty for large sections of the population in Europe and the colonies. Increasingly, the removal of the Hoorn statue has been advocated by anti-colonialist activists and, at least as loudly, opposed by people insisting on the greatness of the Golden Age heritage and the immutability of Dutch identity. We may add that, in Coen’s case, it is surprising that he kept his status as a hero for so long, given that his cruelty has long been acknowledged.

Changing narratives around heritage can in turn transform the self-image of communities that tell them. The Faro Convention defines Europe as a pluralist society, in which many voices can be heard and the heritage of many communities can be expressed, whether these communities define their identity in ethnic, religious, linguistic or other terms. This is a radical shift from the traditional vision of a Western Europe shaped by the early medieval Carolingian Empire, which both (briefly) unified much of Western Europe and, at the same time, defined it as essentially Christian. This heritage was how the creators of the European Community envisaged Europe: as a culturally and religiously coherent region that roughly followed the shape of Charlemagne’s early medieval Christian empire.^[7] This view ended up playing a very important role in arguing against Turkey’s membership of Europe in the 1990s, despite the fact that that country’s constitution has officially been secular since the creation of the Turkish state after the First World War. Interestingly, in 2002, the German historian Heinrich August Winkler opposed Turkey’s membership of the European Union on the grounds of it not being a pluralist state, in view of its weak democracy, as well as what he saw as the lack of separation between secular and religious authorities. In a strange twist to the European heritage narrative, according to Winkler, this separation had been in place in Europe from the Middle Ages.^[8] In the meantime, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union, the European community far exceeds the boundaries of Charlemagne’s empire, including many countries much further east than Charlemagne or his immediate heirs could have hoped to dominate: Turkey’s membership of the European Union, meanwhile, is no longer on the agenda.

Cultural heritage: list-making and its implications

Heritage is a narrative, but who determines what is and what is not heritage? And how does this work in practice?

The 1972 UNESCO Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural Heritage and Natural Heritage might seem like an obvious place to begin to chart the development of contemporary heritage practice. The Convention was drafted, as its preamble notes, in view of the ‘magnitude and gravity of the new dangers threatening’ cultural and natural heritage: by this somewhat vague phrasing the document alludes specifically to the threats of the ‘changing social and economic conditions’ of the mid-twentieth century. In this dynamic geo-political context, the Convention defined world cultural heritage in relatively straightforward, concrete and listable terms such as ‘monuments’, ‘groups of buildings’ and ‘sites’ having ‘outstanding universal value from the point of view of history, art or science’.^[9]

The presence of lists in a Convention which also lays out just how a monument, group of buildings or site can come to be listed as ‘world heritage’ is not just a coincidence. In fact, this reflects a long tradition of inventorying treasured items that dates back to antiquity. Such lists of the valued objects and sites inherited (or appropriated) from the venerable past were sometimes drafted by the owners of the treasures themselves. Here, treasure lists serve as a means of communicating wealth and stability to their owners or to others, and, at the same time, as a record of what could be pawned or sold if need arose. In the Renaissance and early modern periods, collectors further developed techniques of list-making, using them to organize and to identify gaps in their encyclopaedic knowledge-oriented collections of valued objects.

Lists have also been drafted by people other than those who currently own the treasure. These inventories, produced with the efficiency of a tax office, have served to ascertain the number, nature, condition, value and whereabouts of the possessions of an individual, group or institution. If need or desire should arise, they could assist those in power in identifying and seizing the most valued objects and property of their subjects, dependents, or newly conquered groups. In these cases, the lists would be drafted by authorized experts such as art historians, archaeologists or cultural anthropologists. Laurajane Smith has defined this kind of list-making as the construction of an ‘authorised heritage discourse’, a monumentalized list of objects with narratives cast in stone.^[10]

The State’s instrumentalization of lists of valuable property during the dissolution of monasteries in Protestant lands in Europe in the sixteenth century, and especially in the wake of the French Revolution and secularization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was both a development and a perfection of this list-making heritage technique. By means of heritage/treasure lists, valued property formerly in private hands or religious communities’ possession was transferred to the patrimony of the State, which also employed the experts authorized to make these lists.

It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the world heritage lists employed by UNESCO arose out of nineteenth-century national and colonial practices of listing objects, sites and monuments to be acquired, preserved and restored, and then selectively, strategically displayed. The way in which these objects are presented provide an additional narrative for the collectors. For instance, in the large collection of Ancient Egyptian antiquities in the Louvre Museum in Paris, Egypt is portrayed as an empire, a kind of forerunner of the French colonial empire as it fought the English for domination of Egypt in the early nineteenth century. Moreover, Ancient Egypt is presented as a forerunner of ‘world civilization’ rather than as strictly localized Egyptian, let alone Middle Eastern or African heritage. In this, as in many other cases, ‘world civilization’ seems to be shorthand for Western civilization. Occasionally, the appreciation of Egyptian ancient heritage has gone hand in hand with blatant racism: inspired by the Egyptology of his day, the nineteenth-century Irish-American labour activist John Campbell ascribed Ancient Egypt’s success as an empire to the whiteness of its people.^[11] In the meanwhile, it has become clear that in certain dynasties the pharaohs must have been dark-skinned as are many Egyptians today.^[12]

In this regard, what was new in the UNESCO Convention’s definition of heritage was the idea that such things could not only be outstandingly valuable, but that their value could be ‘universal’. The notion of ‘universal value’ remains controversial, however, for it tends to elide the question for whom exactly these objects and sites have such heritage value: in this case, it is argued, they are valuable for all. Seemingly avoiding the difficult question of for whom the heritage is more directly significant, of more pressing, identity-forming, or urgent value, it posits a universal pertinence for all that risks either being so vague as to suggest direct significance for no one, or submerging the particular needs, claims, and desires of specific stakeholders (in, for example, source community) in an imperial sea of general significance.

As the briefly sketched history of list-making teaches us, however, the question for whom is important because it focuses attention not only on who gets to decide what is valuable as ‘heritage’ and what counts as value in the first place, but also on who is benefitting from such a decision. In short, the qualification ‘world’ or ‘universality’ often seems to mask a Eurocentric (and Christian/secular-centric) approach to what counts, with consequent benefits for those peoples who identify with these alleged European values. Current maps of what has been acknowledged as UNESCO listed world heritage show, in fact, a preponderance of sites in Europe and, to a lesser extent, North America, almost as though comparatively little heritage of value (or at least of ‘universal value’) is to be found in other parts of the world.

Perhaps we might better say then that ‘heritage’ is not so much a definable list of sites and monuments but the act of listing itself. This is indeed what some contemporary scholars of heritage have argued. Laurajane Smith has gone so far as to state that: ‘There is really no such thing as heritage’ at all.^[13] Behind her deliberate provocation lies a serious point. Instead of considering heritage as some kind of inherent, objective quality, or list of things, it is more useful to think of heritage as a kind of social practice (involving powerful language use) that both expresses and creates the values and meanings of what we retain of the past in the present. Moreover, heritage is also bound up with relations of power. We might say we should focus at least as much on the power in the act of list-making as on the items on the list themselves.

We noted above the ways individuals or groups can use the attribution of ongoing value to things from the past as a means of acquiring and boosting their own power. As political power shifted in Europe from kings and princes to nation-states and colonial powers in the nineteenth century, the heritage-listing of things from the past transformed from bolstering the central power of ruling individuals to being used to foster sentiments of identity and pride in the nation among its citizens. Heritage was at times explicitly used to instil reverence for select valued examples of the history and identity of the nation (or city, or village, or other group) in ordinary women and men, and to discern and communicate to others what and who ‘matters’ – and what/who does not ‘matter’ – both at home and abroad.

Alongside this authorized, expert and disciplinary use of heritage, the listing of sites, monuments and objects has also served other ends. Neil Silberman has helpfully summarized these as follows.^[14] Firstly, heritage-making serves as a means of putting us in touch with eternity: the listing of objects, landscapes and sites from the past that are of value to us in the present can answer a human quest for ‘tangible contact’ which satisfies what Silberman calls a ‘transcendent metaphysical belief’; by which he means an occasion for communion with enduring ‘patterns of human destiny’ through the sites and objects of our forebears.

Secondly, Silberman argues that the listing of such objects and sites has, from the outset, stimulated visits by both pilgrims and tourists. It is often the experience of visiting these sites and landscapes (rather than expert or authorized knowledge about the value of the objects themselves) that is of primary importance to such visits. Heritage can provide the visitor and viewer with an important opportunity to escape from every-day present-oriented routines and demands, and to connect with something of more long-lived and broader significance for their identity. Of course, we should not romanticize this heritage experience too much. Both tourism and pilgrimage can be, and often are instrumentalized and monetized, and become just another opportunity for marketable entertainment, a political instrument, a new labour market or a chance for consumption.

Thirdly, despite the instrumentalization of heritage by dominant powers and ideologies, and despite the authority of the experts, it has become clear that they can also serve as a means of resistance. As Silberman notes, diverse groups excluded from the power structures that favour the élite – whether they be marginalized because of ethnicity, gender identity, religion, occupation, legal status, place of origin, physical ability, language – have successfully marshalled heritage listing as a means not only of preserving their own past and present identity but also claiming public space and a voice. Heritage practices help these groups to communicate to others what matters to them, and to reinterpret or contest the monuments valued by the majority.

Again, the appropriation of Ancient Egypt as heritage provides a rich example of how this can work. Recently, controversy regarding the status of this heritage exploded under the influence of increasing Egyptian national self-confidence, African-American appropriations and recent developments in Egyptology that criticize the colonial origins of this discipline.^[15] In relation to the former, the lavish celebration for the official opening of the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo in 2021, in which 22 royal mummies were transported from the colonial-era Museum of Egyptian Antiquities (1901) to their brand new venue in an extravaganza entitled ‘The Pharaohs’ Golden Parade’, is an example of how the current government of Egypt is claiming Ancient Egypt for its own.

In 2023, two events acted as proverbial sparks that ignited a powder keg. Firstly, the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities (Rijksmuseum voor Oudheden, Leiden) organized an exhibition entitled Kemet: Egypt in hip-hop, jazz, soul & funk, about the appropriation of Ancient Egyptian themes and visual culture in popular music genres, as performed by world famous Afro-American artists and featuring images of singers such as Beyoncé and Rihanna in the garb of famous Egyptian queens. Such actions were seen as connected to a desire to appropriate the great civilizations of Ancient Egypt as African by definition and therefore as a part of African-American heritage. Ancient Egyptian heritage was thereby used as a means to resist the marginalization and under estimation of African Americans to the present day. Such Afrocentrism has itself been described as a mirror image of the Eurocentric colonial appropriations of Ancient Egypt, which long determined visions of Egypt and African civilizations. Instead of ‘civilization’ being deemed as coming out of Europe, it now originates in Africa.^[16]

Secondly, in the same year as the Leiden exhibition, Netflix aired the docudrama Queen Cleopatra (USA: Jada Pinkett Smith 2023), in which the Afro-British actress Adele James played the protagonist. This mini-series both stressed the blackness of Cleopatra’s supposed skin colour, and profiled her as a feminist heroine, whose story ‘resonates with every woman’, as Shelley Haley, professor emerita of Classics at Hamilton College, New York, posited.^[17]

The Egyptian government reacted furiously in both instances. As far as the antiquities museum in Leiden was concerned, it was punished by a withdrawal of their excavation rights at Saqqara. In no way would the Egyptian State condone a vision of Egyptian culture as African and therefore black.^[18] Their rejection of an exhibition about the Afro-American appropriation and use Ancient Egyptian visual culture, as well as their insistence on a light-coloured Cleopatra instead of the dark-coloured rendition in the Netflix series showed how the Egyptian State wished to distinguish itself from Africa, thus echoing, perhaps unconsciously, former colonial framing of Ancient Egyptian heritage.

But are state actors and museum professionals the only ones who can make and use heritage lists? The 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage radically expanded the range of list-able heritage items to include oral traditions, social practices, rituals, festivals, arts and the knowledge needed to maintain them. More significantly, however, it also afforded visibility to and recognized the integrity of groups that do not have the stability, resources or political power to produce or maintain their objects and sites of ‘outstanding’ value. In short, the 2003 Convention allows for the listing of heritage by communities irrespective of whether it is possible to ‘own’ the heritage as a piece of property.

This shift constitutes a radical democratization of heritage. It has facilitated and supported bottom-up heritage claims from minority and marginalized groups as they seek to identify and defend sites, objects, knowledge systems and practices of importance to them as a means of claiming a right to exist, to resist and to have and be part of a history. Since material heritage is now integrated into immaterial practices in the vision of heritage, the power of property owners (whether they be the state or individuals) is relativized, and the importance of small-scale, non-elite, non-majoritarian heritage practices is foregrounded.

In another sense, heritage sites and objects that address dark histories (the sites of atrocities, mass graves, incarceration, etc.) have also served to resist the temptation to forget the traumas of the past, to cover up mistakes and misdeeds, or to hear only the conciliatory stories of the victors. Such resistance to oblivion is, of course, not without its own contestation and counter-reactions.

Heritage and Religion: Connecting and Dividing

A large part of what is now regarded as heritage is connected to religion: a monumental church, a religious feast, as well as ideologies and practices rooted in religion. Heritage and religion are linked because of their connection to memory and tradition.^[19] The way in which a religion is lived is often rooted in the deep past, and in some historical religions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam, tradition is supposed to prescribe how they should be practised now, or may even be considered to be part of divine revelation. Despite their claim of providing universal truths, religious traditions are themselves narratives as much as heritage is; narratives which can and do change according to contemporary concerns. Under the aegis of Christian theology, for example, slavery has been both defended and opposed; the oppression of women approved and condemned.

Religion can act both as a connecting and a divisive force. Organized religions such as Christianity share a long history of schisms, in which those who ended up outside the dominant fold were often severely persecuted by those in power. Although, in Europe, people are no longer tortured or burned at the stake for their faith, it is striking how, during the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, those orthodox Protestant believers who opposed vaccination were increasingly othered as remnants of a primitive religious past. Such assessments neither took into account the participation of these groups in present day society nor the fact that other groups not considered ‘primitive’ opposed vaccination on other grounds, unconnected to a Christian identity. Another example is how, frequently, after several terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States, Islam itself is connected in the media and in political discourse to violence and as a natural Other versus European and Western civilization. This denies both the plurality of Muslim ideologies and practices and the long history of Muslims living in Europe as Europeans.

Religion continues to inspire strong emotions even in predominantly secular countries. Despite the fact that many Europeans now profess not to be involved in any religion or have any faith, it is striking how much they care about religious artefacts. This is why the French-Portuguese team of researchers Isnart and Cereales posit that religious heritage retains a certain sacredness despite the fact that it is no longer being used for its original purpose by the majority of users.^[20] While the medievalist and novelist Umberto Eco does not use the word heritage, he explains the attraction of medieval heritage in particular, by asserting that Europeans still ‘dwell’ in the Middle Ages, inasmuch as they may still enter the local medieval cathedral, either for prayer, if they are believers, or to stroll around and satisfy their historical curiosity as tourists.^[21] The response to the 2019 burning of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris shows how many people felt connected to this medieval religious building. Its destruction led to a worldwide, emotional response, as have other fires in churches on a more local scale. Churches were the scenes of life events and social and political events of importance: where one’s ancestors were baptized, married and buried, where important figures were crowned, oaths sworn and legal agreements made. Moreover, monumental religious buildings are often iconic hallmarks of cities and villages: objects seen from afar, meaning ‘home’. As for Notre-Dame, before the fire, it received over twelve million visitors per year, thus becoming a part of the life experiences of tourists and believers from all around the world. Yet, the mere relegation of a religious building to the status of heritage monument may be hurtful to believers, as it could appear to imply that this community’s beliefs and practices are a thing of the past, instead of a living tradition. While some religious groups may be keen to instrumentalize heritage-listing as a means of safeguarding their existence, raising their visibility, or of re-asserting lost public privilege, other groups may fear that their heritage is being used or trivialized by policymakers, tourist operators and heritage ‘experts’, who have little understanding of, or sympathy, for the religious motivations of the members of the community.

Diversity, Religion and Heritage^[22]

As is clear from the above, the religious landscape of Europe has become increasingly diverse. This diversity moves in different directions. As noted, from the 1960s, a growing percentage of the population considered itself non-religious, while at the same time, new religious communities comprising immigrants and converts have proliferated. A further complication is added by the fact that secular and religious individuals alike show a keen interest in both spirituality and spiritual practices as well as religious heritage. All three of these dimensions of religious diversification play into debates over heritage and European identity today.

Although sociologists no longer assume that religion simply withers away in the face of modernity, empirical surveys have demonstrated the reality of secularization, in the sense of leaving the church, taking the form of a widespread drop in church affiliation and attendance across Western Europe that began in the 1960s.^[23] Despite regional counter-currents of renewal after the fall of communism, the trend in the twenty-first century is clear. A 2015 Eurobarometer survey found that in Great Britain, the Czech Republic, Sweden and the Netherlands a greater portion of the population identified with non-religion than with the major churches. In Flanders, where over 50% of the population attended mass at least once a month in 1967, this figure had dropped to less than 10% by 2004 and has fallen even further since. In Catalonia, Catholic church participation dropped from 33.8% of the population in 1980 to 18.7% by 2007.^[24]

Yet, it should be noted that leaving the church, mosque, synagogue or temple does not necessarily mean leaving the faith, or rather, no longer having a faith.^[25] Nor does it mean ceasing involvement in both religious material and immaterial heritage. Sociologists of religion have identified a growing group of people who create their own eclectic version of religion, often mixing elements from diverse religious traditions; such as a Buddha sitting next to an image of the Virgin on a domestic altar. Many non-churchgoers describe themselves as ‘spiritual, but not religious’.^[26] This shows an enduring need for a transcendent sphere, a place beyond the daily experience. This need surfaces in the face of life-events such as birth and death; spirituality may offer a way to deal with these, as well as probe their meaning. Sources of spirituality originate in traditional religions as well as reinvented pagan traditions, and may also be rooted in popular culture; for example, cults around popstars or science fiction films.^[27] The latter creates its own heritage, often borrowing from religious traditions. The Jedi Knights in the Star Wars movies share, for example, characteristics of both Samurai and Chinese warrior monks, as well as aspects of the Christian monk knights of the Middle Ages.

Regardless of whether Europeans leave behind all connection with religion or reconfigure old practices in new forms of spirituality, their leaving of the traditional churches (or mosques, synagogues, or temples) has contributed to the material growth of the heritage sector. When people enter churches today, it is increasingly as concert-goers, passers-by or tourists, many of whom experience Christianity and church life principally as a heritage of the past, whether or not they have a personal connection, as something their parents or even grandparents were last actively engaged in. Secularization is changing the function of historic religious buildings, from being sites of liturgical practice to travel destinations, libraries, performance spaces or cafes. Declining memberships and disaffiliation have led to financial burdens for the owners of churches and synagogues, which, in some regions, has led to a crisis of ownership itself.

Secularization, in the sense of leaving the church, forms the backdrop to debates over heritage and national culture of the past century. In the interwar period, the notions of ‘Christian civilization’ and ‘Western Civilization’ that we encountered earlier in this chapter were also heritage concepts that Christian conservatives embraced to oppose secularism and socialism. The function of heritage in such political discourse was to remove religion from the hands of particular faith communities and make it the marker of a national or transnational identity. The relationship of civilization and religious heritage was front and centre in debates in the first decade of the twenty-first century over whether and how to include references to religion, and specifically, Christianity, in the new European constitution. Supporters of its inclusion faced off against advocates of laïcité and secularism who wanted ‘humanism’ identified as characteristic of European identity. The final draft of the preamble was a compromise, stating that the European Union ‘draws inspiration from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law’.^[28]

Alongside secularization, globalization is the second great cause of the transformation of the European religious landscape since the 1960s. What began with inner-European migration from Southern Europe to the booming economies of the North opened up into a global movement of populations. New communities arrived and brought with them their own diverse and evolving religious traditions from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, and foreign missionaries planted new churches and attracted European converts. Since the 1990s, migration to Europe is no longer concentrated on a few former colonies, but has become global and multidirectional. This has created European societies characterized by what the sociologist Steven Vertovec called ‘superdiversity’.^[29]

Migration has altered the political discourse around religious heritage. Until the 1990s, opponents of immigration generally made hay of the supposed cultural differences between ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ populations. Since the 1990s, however, religion has increasingly become a chief marker of difference. The case made against Turkish or North African migrants – most vociferously by the populist far right – has revolved around their Muslim identity. Yet, if one examines recent anti-Islamic rhetoric more closely, it becomes apparent that it revolves less around the opposition of Christian and Muslim faiths than the opposition between Christian heritage and Muslim religion. For example, during the 2019 elections for the European Parliament, Marine Le Pen referenced the Duomo in Milan, Leonardo Da Vinci and Jeanne d’Arc and stated ‘we will never accept to be dispossessed of this material and immaterial patrimony’. Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban called fellow populist Matteo Salvini from Italy his ally in the fight for the ‘preservation of European Christian heritage and against migration’.^[30] The heritage discourse has also allowed the populist right to construct anti-Islamic alliances. The early intellectual leader of Dutch anti-Islamism, Pim Fortuyn (1948–2002), extended this idea of a shared national-religious culture further, when he spoke of ‘Jewish, Christian and humanistic tradition’.^[31] This allowed Fortuyn (and since him many other Dutch conservatives) to claim tolerance – for example, towards homosexuality – and liberal attitudes as achievements of a Christian heritage. Heritage can thus allow the return of religion in secular form and bring the values of secular society into the logic of religious opposition.

Using heritage to forge a political alliance between secular and religious forces is most pronounced in populist rhetoric; however, it has also been widely employed by mainstream politicians to oppose a supposed ‘Islamization’ of European culture. Against such exclusionary uses of heritage as a means to isolate minority religious groups from dominant forms of Christian and secular heritage, there is a growing consensus among museum curators, heritage organizations and activists, including those belonging to minorities and other marginalized groups, that heritage, religious and other, must be made more diverse and more inclusive. They are now recalling long-obscured histories and giving them the breath of public life through their acknowledgement as heritage, and they are doing so from various directions, from above as well as from below. As noted, in the UK and elsewhere, innovative grassroots heritage efforts have created heritage trails: Jewish, Muslim, women’s and so on.^[32] In this way, minority communities are carving out their place in contemporary Europe.

Heritage as a Human Right: the Faro Convention and the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society

Increasing awareness of growing diversity and its impact on the multiple roles of heritage in different communities within European society has recentered what we think heritage is and its relevance for us. In contrast to the premise of the danger and threat posed to outstandingly valuable sites and objects by economic and social change – which, as we noted, drove the 1972 UNESCO definition – in a meeting in Faro in 2005 the Council of Europe proposed a new framework for thinking about and working in heritage that placed people and their values at the centre. In the Faro Convention, cultural heritage is defined broadly as:

Fundamental to this approach to heritage is the Faro Convention’s grounding in Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), which states, without qualification, that: ‘Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community’.^[34] Participation is understood broadly by the Faro Convention, not only in terms of who participates (everyone!) but what participation means. Participation is not a matter of simply engaging with pre-existing authorized heritage sites, monuments and practices; rather, participation includes the active ‘identification, study, interpretation, protection, conservation and presentation of the cultural heritage’ and ‘public reflection and debate on the opportunities and challenges which the cultural heritage represents’.^[35]

The implications of the Faro Convention for shared ownership of and responsibility for heritage, for dialogue and for democracy are still being worked through: the REBELAH Project, in which the authors participated, is one example of many trans-regional, national and local initiatives. Any idea that the Faro Convention is a panacea is quickly dispelled by tough questions on the ground. How exactly can a difficult, contested or obscure heritage provide a ‘shared source of remembrance’, as the Convention envisages?^[36] Who is in control of the ‘inclusive’ process? Is it not the élite, once again? What scale of inclusion are we talking about? Are the boundaries local, regional, national or European?^[37] These and other difficult questions will confront anyone attempting to use shared responsibility for and participation in religious heritage for social inclusion.

That need not be cause for despair. Contrary to the logic of heritage lists, the framework of participation anticipates what the ethnographer Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls ‘friction’: the ‘awkward, unequal, unstable and creative qualities of interconnection across difference’. Individual and collective rights to identify, benefit from and contribute to all kinds of heritage (from Grandma’s soup recipe to the Sistine Chapel) and the responsibility to respect the heritage of others will not be frictionless. But it is precisely these small and large-scale tensions that can remind us ‘that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power’.^[38] This, we might say, is the new heritage practice.

In Conclusion: Creative Heritage – Meaning-Making

Heritage is about meaning, about the narratives that are tied to sites, events, practices, concepts, persons, objects which form the grounding for personal and community identities. Having heritage, living it, listing it, reveals the presence of a community as a part of a pluralist Europe which conceives of itself as diverse. As such, heritage is continually being made and remade.

To work in heritage is to be involved in this process of meaning-making. Democratizing the process of meaning-making is the ideal behind the Faro Convention, which calls for all residents of Europe to be enabled to find and celebrate their historical roots in the societies in which they currently live, as well as in their places of origin. Community organizations can work alongside marginalized groups as they find their voices, and support them as they remember and imagine. In some situations, it may be helpful for such community-based organisations to act as a go-between, helping marginalized groups to enter into dialogue with organizations, institutions, and people that represent the dominant heritage, as it has been authorized by experts and cast in a network of power relations. By listening and working in this collaborative way, what used to be taken for granted as the heritage of the entire community, whether defined through ethnicity, nationality, religion or something else, can be opened up to reinterpretation by multiple voices. We can expand what is included under the umbrella of a shared heritage.

This creative dialogue is a path to democratizing heritage practices and hopefully recasting European heritage so that it is more inclusive. Heritage thus also offers opportunities for dialogue between different minority communities and between minority and ‘majority’ communities. Thus, heritage is no longer thought of as something produced by experts and given to the public through authorized sites of heritage transmission. Rather, it is the product of meaning-making between teachers and students, scholars and community activists, and ordinary people on the streets or in rural communities. Its place is not just cathedrals and museums; it can be practised in various locations, wherever individuals and communities want to combine and compare historical perspectives in a process of reflection and create a pluralist vision, which mirrors a diverse Europe.

This means that a new type of heritage professional is needed. Whereas in the past, heritage was in the hands of experts, the new heritage professional is much more of a mediator who specializes in helping communities engage in the co-creation of heritage. The new heritage professional, whether a teacher, an artist, a community leader or a museum curator, conscious of always being a member of a community creating heritage, plays a mediating role in a multi-sided process involving many voices. Moreover, whereas in the past, heritage professionals may have adhered to a strict separation between religious commitments and cultural heritage, now they need to have an open attitude towards any dimension of heritage, including its religious aspects.

Recommended for further reading:

For readers who want to learn more about heritage, particularly religious heritage, we recommend the following handbook, to which several members of REBELAH and MIRETAGE have contributed. It contains short, easily accessible articles and case studies written by scholars and practitioners on religious heritage in Europe today:

Todd Weir and Lieke Wijnia (eds.) Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Heritage in Contemporary Europe (Bloomsbury 2023). (accessible online via the Bloomsbury website:

https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350251410.

For additional scholarly discussions of religious heritage, we suggest the following works:

Ferdinand De Jong and José Mapril, eds., The Future of Religious Heritage: Entangled Temporalities of the Sacred and Secular (Routledge, 2023).

Ernst van den Hemel, Oscar Salemink and Irene Stengs, eds., Managing Sacralities: Competing and Converging Claims of Religious Heritage (Berghahn, 2023).

Cyril Isnart and Nathalie Cerezales, eds., The Religious Heritage Complex: Legacy, Conservation and Christianity (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Shu-Li Wang, Michael Rowlands and Yujie Zhu, eds., Heritage and Religion in East Asia (Routledge, 2021).