History defaced: Heritage creation in contemporary Europe

The obvious place to start is to consider what is meant by heritage. Its roots lie in the French word for inheritance, but its use in the terms we are considering today is recent: my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, admittedly nearly 30 years old, does not include any definition of heritage that relates to culture, history or national identity. UNESCO, in drafting the 1972 World Heritage Convention, used the qualifiers ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’, and defined the former in relatively limited terms as monuments, groups of buildings and sites.[1] In our time, the word has lost those qualifiers and become ubiquitous, replacing its older and less proprietorial alternative, ‘antiquities’, which had served for centuries to describe ruins and other valued traces of the past. The rapid rise of heritage is accounted for, and driven by, the continuing extension of the concept. So, where the Convention focused on ‘architectural works, works of monumental sculpture and painting, elements or structures of an archaeological nature, inscriptions, cave dwellings and combinations of features, which are of outstanding universal value from the point of view of history, art or science’[2], we now see a far broader approach.

Specifically, the scope of heritage has expanded far beyond what was envisaged in 1972 as being of ‘outstanding universal value’ to encompass the entire fabric of the past, from prisons and hospitals, to farms and factories: social history is fashionable, even if it must be differentiated as such, and there is scarcely a trace of a life lived that cannot now qualify as part of heritage. As a result, the temporal boundaries of heritage have been brought to the threshold of the present, so that yesterday’s newspapers are not simply tomorrow’s fish and chip papers, but the next layer of an insatiable local history archive: the Library of Congress – which is selective – adds 7,000 items to its collection each day.[3] Anything from a cereal packet to popular music relics now has its dedicated museum, and the ‘heritage industry’ identified by Robert Hewison nearly 20 years ago grows unabated.[4] Most enterprisingly of all, heritage has freed itself from physical reality, embracing, according to UNESCO in 2003, ‘oral traditions and expressions, including language […]; performing arts; social practices, rituals and festive events; knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe; [and] traditional craftsmanship’.[5] Thirty-five years earlier, a symposium of French curators had published an even simpler definition: ‘Heritage is all the natural assets or assets created by man without restriction of time or place’.[6]

Clearly, heritage is big – indeed so big that the old object-centred approach is of little help in understanding what heritage might mean; and that word ‘mean’ is key, because in reality, and despite the ideals of international conventions or the ambitions of the industry, most of the fabric of the past is not designated, or understood, as heritage. Instead, in reality, heritage is what we say it is. It is the past we value, the past we have a use for. So we should understand heritage as the combination of material and immaterial goods, their interpretation and their use. This being so, it is necessary to make a distinction between heritage and history. This is not as easy as it might seem, because both use narrative to find meaning in the past, which is not, of course, a narrative. In doing this, the historian, fallible though she may be, is constrained by evidence. As John Arnold puts it: ‘History is “true” in that it must agree with the evidence, the facts that it calls upon; or else, it must show why those “facts” are wrong, and need reworking.’[7] But heritage is history unbound by evidence, interpreted through faith not reason, Bacon’s ‘history defaced’. According to David Lowenthal, ‘heritage clarifies pasts so as to infuse them with present purposes’.[8] The crucial aspect of heritage is that it is believed to represent a deeper truth, more important than mere facts: it is history that ought to be true. Historians may question the key myths of nationhood – did Marie-Antoinette really suggest that the starving should eat cake? – but evidence is irrelevant to symbolism. Heritage belongs to the world of Plato’s noble lie, the unifying myths that – according to some – are essential to the effective functioning of a stable society. Heritage must not, therefore, be mistaken either for the neutral remains of the past, as most heritage bodies imply, or for the tested narratives of history, what Arnold calls ‘true stories’. Rather, it is how people interpret evidence of the past for present use; and one of those uses is to define themselves.

At an individual level, identity starts with family situation and relationships, all the things, tangible and intangible, that we inherit by the chance of birth. But it is also shared, derived from a sense of common experience, perspective and values. Recognition of self within the social group, and recognition of belonging by others, is a process in which heritage is a vital tool. It is for this reason, above all, that heritage is a site of contestation and even conflict, and as the inheritances, individual and social, of those people who constitute a state become more complex and diverse, it is not surprising that the tensions between different interpretations of the past – and their meaning for the present – become more evident. Heritage is a branch of culture as much as a branch of history because its interpretations are conceived specifically to define and express identitary values. Like culture, but unlike history, it claims, implicitly or explicitly, a transcendent authority. Like culture, but unlike history, it has a limited interest in reason. However, heritage does have characteristics that set it apart from other manifestations of culture, the most important of which arises from its association with inheritance. European culture is founded on ideas of acquisition, development and cultivation. One can become a cultured person; one can learn to understand and appreciate art, music, or ballet; as Bourdieu has shown, one can accumulate cultural capital.[9] In that sense, at least, culture is arguably a democratic concept, still heavily influenced by Enlightenment values, despite the practical inequalities that lie in the way of its acquisition and control.

But one cannot acquire a heritage: it is given, fixed at birth. Heritage claims an essential, and ineradicable, difference between someone born in a village, or a country, or a faith, and someone who has chosen to make their life within that social and cultural framework; and that distinction, paradoxically, disadvantages the person who has freely chosen an identity, making a conscious commitment to a place, a group or a set of values. In this world, a migrant can only ever be an honorary member, an affiliate whose status, whether welcomed or merely tolerated, is always at risk of revocation. The root of this widely held but rarely acknowledged idea is in the reasonable idea that the past (which heritage claims to be) cannot be changed. And it is true that what has happened cannot be made to un-happen: The Norman Conquest of England happened; so did the Reformation, the Slave Trade and the Treaty of Rome. But, we can, of course, control how we tell the past. What we think about the Norman Conquest, the Reformation, the Slave Trade or the Treaty of Rome – whether, indeed, we think about them at all – is not fixed. Take one relatively minor, apparently innocuous instance: the place of Strasbourg cathedral in the story of Gothic architecture. The building stands essentially the same, but its interpretation by French and German art historians has changed over two centuries, and whether it was seen by them as a European or a national achievement has been a symptom not only of culture, taste and art theory, but of the relationship between their countries.

If the influence of heritage were limited to the information contained in Michelin guides, it would be of limited importance. But the concept ranges much more widely. For example, Samuel Huntington’s simplistic and disturbingly fashionable thesis of the clash of civilisations is founded on the notion that ‘Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion’.[10] It is underpinned by the vague belief that these characteristics are inherited and therefore, like the past, beyond the possibility of change. Or consider Turkey’s candidacy for membership of the European Union. Since its emergence from Ottoman ashes in 1923, the state founded by Attaturk has consistently chosen to situate itself within a secular, European culture, replacing Arabic with Latin script, adopting a democratic political framework and disestablishing Islam as state religion. It joined the Council of Europe within three months of its creation, and applied for membership of the EEC in 1959. It continues to accept European cultural norms, recently abolishing the death penalty and the special status of so-called ‘honour killings’, legalising education in Kurdish and establishing a Kurdish television station.[11] The Turkish state has more to do if it is to meet best practice across the European Union, though the same could be said of member states; but Turkey has proved, over 80 years, a steadfast commitment to acquiring the cultural values and capital of its European neighbours. It is striking then that those opposed to Turkish accession ignore these cultural gains, resorting instead to its supposedly different heritage as a justification for refusing entry. Most recently, Frits Bolkestein, the outgoing Dutch EU Commissioner, turned to a historical event which has become a mythic cornerstone of central European heritage when he argued that if Turkey was admitted ‘the liberation of Vienna in 1683 would have been in vain’.[12] There is, unfortunately, widespread ignorance of Turkey’s place in European heritage, as the Eastern half of the Hellenic and Roman worlds and the root of Orthodox Christianity, as there is of the ancient and rich Islamic cultural influence within Europe. But the point here is the way in which heritage is used to oppose cultural and political effort: in this game, the heritage card trumps all. Turkey is the key test of European commitment to cultural diversity for two reasons. First because there is no challenge to Europe’s political and ethical values. On the contrary, Turkey has shown steady commitment to them, maintaining democracy much longer than many of the existing members and making changes in its social fabric that none of them would accept. Secondly, because Turkey’s admission would make a decisive shift in the balance of the EU, with people of Islamic faith making up perhaps a fifth of the population by 2050.[13] It seems that Europeans, despite their bold claims to uphold universal Enlightenment values, are willing only to accept the integration – even on their own terms – of a few, relatively powerless minorities. Heritage, expressing the tribal sense of belonging, wins out over culture.

So at the heart of modern concepts of heritage is a sleight of hand, where an essentially cultural process, open to every manipulation of power and ideology, is reconstructed as authoritative, no more than a popular branch of history. In the idea that heritage cannot be acquired, but only inherited, lies its power. There is much that human beings cannot change about themselves, despite the extension of medicine and science. But it is also clear that people do change many things considered fundamental to identity: sex, nationality, religion, political allegiance and so on. Heritage claims to place limits on this by reserving some aspects of identity to those who are born within – or appear to conform to – certain fixed parameters. Lowenthal has described the nation as ‘a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbours.’[14] Feelings of historical legitimacy, often articulating the perceived injustice of a people’s present, expressed through and fed by nationalist heritage projects, were central to European conflicts throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries. In the 21^st, under the benign and democratically-inclined imperium of the European Union, such tensions have not gone away but been absorbed within the post-modern nation state. Increasingly, people direct hatred at their actual neighbours: fellow citizens who are perceived not to share a common heritage and the mythic values that it embodies. This is most obvious where there is a marked ethnic or religious difference, and can be seen throughout the continent, from the run-down housing estates of England to the streets of Holland, and the marginal spaces left to Roma people in Central and Eastern Europe. But it does not depend on such differences, as is evident in tensions between social groups in Spain, Belgium and elsewhere, expressed strongly through the 19^th century language of heritage. It is not surprising then that cultural monuments, the symbols of heritage differences, were such a focus of attack during the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s.

In a national space so strongly defined in ethnic and cultural terms, rather than in more explicitly political ones, it can be very difficult for immigrants and others perceived as outsiders to establish the legitimacy of their identity and participation. Where rights are, or are believed to be, linked to being rather than doing – whether they favour minority or majority groups – things get dangerous. In this, as a migrant society, the United States has experience that Europe should consider, to the extent that it is at least possible there to express a cultural link to another part of the world without being seen as disloyal to the ideals, values and polity of the state or commonwealth. Of course, one shouldn’t idealise this hyphenated American identity – African-American, Irish-American, Korean-American and the rest – not least because of the fissiparous identity politics with which it has become associated. Catharine Stimpson has observed ‘how corroded and divided civic life in multicultural America can be’, arguing that ‘we are fractionating ourselves into smaller and smaller components, splitting the meaning of “public” and “community” more and more finely in a hyperactive social mitosis.’[15] None the less, and bearing in mind these dangers, it seems desirable that there should be a clearer distinction between cultural and political affiliation than has yet been achieved in most European countries, where, for Ziauddin Sardar, ‘multiculturalism has been so unsuccessful because it is offered as a one-way traffic.’[16] The significant exception to the vast expansion of heritage’s domain is the cultural heritage of immigrant communities, which is still not conceived as such. At best, it appears in galleries and on stages as a sub-set of contemporary culture, often on subtly different terms to majoritarian artistic expression. At worst, it remains bound in ethnographical ties, or is simply not recognised at all. There are exceptions: the 50^th anniversary of the voyage of the Empire Windrush, the first boat to bring large numbers of Jamaicans to England, did see some celebration of Caribbean heritage (as opposed to culture) in Britain. But we are still far from recognising the heritage of immigrant peoples as integral to the national story, rather than colourful footnotes to it. As Stuart Hall said recently on BBC radio, ‘We want to get into contention with the national story in the way in which it’s told and say this story of the Black Diaspora, since the Windrush arrived in 1948, is as much part of what being English is, what the nation is about, as anything else; and if you tell the story without it, you’re simply leaving out half of it’.[17] Significantly, Hall speaks of the older identity of Englishness, rather than the political construct of Britishness, developed to allow associate membership of the old empire. And the point is valid: South Asian dance, for example, is now part not just of English culture but of English heritage, evolving subtly distinctive language and values that reflect the symbiotic relationship it has with England.

An acceptance of the mutability of heritage would require a mature recognition that heritage is not neutral, or even true. It is a version of the past, a selection of objects and expressions, which serves a purpose. As such, it is not surprising if both version and selection are contested. There will always be those who do not recognise or accept a particular interpretation: that they will often be in a local, if not an absolute, minority does not mean that they are wrong or, which is different, not entitled to raise objections. At present, such contestations are seen, if recognised at all, as unfortunate side effects of the process of heritage designation, conservation and interpretation. Even where monuments, such as castles or fortifications, are themselves the products of conflicts inescapably cemented into their very fabric, their interpretation normally adopts an anodyne implication that such problems lie in the past. But Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper makes a powerful case for the conflictual value of heritage, proposing the addition of a new concept of ‘streitwert’ to Riegl’s 1903 categorisation of the value of monuments. She argues that ‘a monument’s capacity to cause dispute/discord is not a failing but an inherent quality which can be measured in terms of both the fierceness of dispute and the intensity of the ensuing debate’. [18] In other words, the contested nature of heritage production could be seen as a positive space within democratic society, allowing different forces and interests legitimately to express values they hold important, as well as to question accepted views of the past and its influence on the present. Far from being risky, this is arguably less dangerous than promoting exclusive interpretations under the guise of objectivity. It is also good democracy.

It is time that governments, agencies concerned with heritage, cultural bodies and artists, among others, began to rethink how heritage is imagined, defined and interpreted. Otherwise, and notwithstanding the rising calls for immigrants to ‘integrate’ better or adopt largely unspecified European cultural (as opposed to political) values, it is difficult to see how to avoid, intentionally or unintentionally, creating divisions within society and the body politic between those who belong and those who do not, those who can speak and those who cannot. Who defines heritage, and on what basis they do so, are crucial questions – too crucial to be left to chance, or to political opportunism.

That such rethinking can be done in practice, and not just in theory, is demonstrated by one project in the north of England. In 2001, Arts UK, a cultural agency based in Newcastle, launched a project called ‘Writing on the Wall’. Focusing on Hadrian’s Wall, the most important surviving Roman defensive structure, the project uses literature and public art to engage locals and visitors in reflection on the history and symbolism of this designated World Heritage site. A series of writing projects has begun along the 117 kilometres of Roman wall, leaving behind tangible and intangible traces of people’s reflections on this heritage. The programme will eventually involve writers from all the lands whose people once provided troops to guard this frontier, linking nearly 20 countries from Spain to Iran, from Germany to Tunisia. Crucially, this symbolic barrier between barbarianism and civilisation has been re-imagined as a locus of internationalism and diversity.

In the opening lines of his 1953 novel, The Go-Between, L. P. Hartley coined a resonant phrase, when he wrote that ‘the past is another country; they do things differently there’.[19] Its familiarity notwithstanding, the phrase contains a deep truth. The country that we inherit is not ours, unless we make it so. We cannot perceive, still less reconstruct the mental world that our predecessors inhabited. Our myths of heroic, or betrayed, ancestors are just that: myths. And, however necessary they may be, myths unquestioned are dangerous. We would be wiser to see that we share more with our fellow-citizens, with the neighbours of our time, than with these fantastic forebears, even though we seem to have a different heritage. Our true inheritance – the world around us – belongs equally to us all, and we must recognise that truth if we are to pass it on to those who come after. The past is indeed a foreign country: we should decide to live in our own, together.

References

Arnold, John H. (2000) History, A very short introduction, Oxford: OUP.

Bourdieu, Pierre, (1984) Distinction, A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London: Routledge.

Hewison, Robert (1987) The Heritage Industry, London: Methuen.

Dolff-Bonekämper, Gabi (2001) ‘Sites of Historical Significance and Sites of Discord: Historic Monuments as a Tool for Discussing Conflict in Europe’ in Third Delphi Encounters, The New Social Function of Culture and Cultural Heritage, Proceedings, Strasbourg, Council of Europe.

Hartley, L. P. (1953) The Go-Between, London: Penguin.

Huntington, Samuel P. ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ in Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993, v72, n3

Lowenthal, David (1996) The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, Harmondsworth: Viking.

Lowenthal, David (2000) ‘“European Identity”: An Emerging Concept’ in The Australian Journal of Politics and History 46.3 (2000): 314.

Poirrier, Philippe, ‘Heritage and Cultural Policy in France under the Fifth Republic’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2003 Vol. 9(2)

Sardar, Ziauddin (2002) The A to Z of Postmodern Life, Essays on Global Culture in the Noughties, London: Vision, p. 142.

Stimpson, Catharine R., ‘Introduction’ to Kramer, Jane (1994) Whose Art Is It?, Durham: Duke University Press, p. 22.

UNESCO (1972) World Heritage Convention.

UNESCO (2003) Convention For The Safeguarding Of The Intangible Cultural Heritage.

— (2004) Turkey in Europe: More than a promise? Report of the Independent Commission on Turkey, Brussels: British Council, Open Society Institute, p. 34; using UN population statistics, the Commission estimates that, were Turkey admitted to the EU, its population would make up 17.7% of the 28 member nations.