Introduction: reflecting on heritage diplomacy

Abstract

Cultural heritage is an essential element in transmitting values, establishing narratives of historical and contemporary connectivity, and creating subjective and collective identities and a feeling of belonging. During the past decade, the potential of cultural heritage for state foreign policy and in international heritage governance has attracted increasing interest among heritage scholars. This potential, however, remains under-researched in the broader spectrum of international cultural relations. This special issue focuses on international cultural relations dealing with cultural heritage and culture in terms of heritage diplomacy. The contributors discuss the potentials and limitations of heritage diplomacy and how it could or should be approached in theory, policy, and praxis. The aim of the issue is to critically explore the previous research of heritage diplomacy, develop its theoretical basis and scope, and thereby extend the discussion to new topics and themes. To recognize the potential of cultural heritage for international cultural relations, it is helpful to conceptualize heritage as a presentist and future-orientated process through which realities are constructed from the selected elements of the past (e.g. Ashworth, Graham, and Tunbridge 2007; Harrison 2013a; Lähdesmäki et al. 2020). In this conception, cultural heritage is not an essentialist ‘fact’ but emerges when something is narrated, defined, and/or treated as such in a specific sociocultural context (van Huis et al. 2019). The conception underlines how all heritage includes dissonances regarding the stories told through it, the ways the past is represented, and how memories are used in public spheres (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996). This dissonance is not undesirable, but intrinsic to the very nature of heritage (Smith 2006, 82; Graham and Howard 2008, 3; Kisić 2016, 25) and crucial to its potential to look to the future. In this orientation to the future, cultural heritage has an active role: it ‘does’ things when actors discuss, manage, and use heritage for different purposes (Harrison 2013a, 2013b; Whitehead et al. 2019; Lähdesmäki and Čeginskas 2022). This capacity makes cultural heritage favourable ground for political projects; different meanings are attributed to heritage in diplomatic engagements, from the material and tangible to ideational structures (see also Giulia Sciorati 2023). Critical heritage scholars have often underlined the political dimension of cultural heritage. It functions as an arena for both manifesting and negotiating (dissonant) meanings, values and identities (e.g. van Huis et al. 2019; Kisić 2016; Harrison 2013a; Mäkinen et al. 2023). It may promote established worldviews and power hierarchies but also question them by offering space for deconstructing power asymmetries and creating novel dialogic connections between people. These different approaches to cultural heritage explain its utility for diplomacy. Diverse definitions have been attributed to diplomacy in scholarship and practice. The use of terms such as ‘cultural diplomacy’, ‘public diplomacy,’ ‘new public diplomacy,’ and ‘(international) cultural relations’ reflect the development of the term throughout time. While all terms foreground the relevance of culture in diplomatic endeavours for creating (chiefly positive) engagements between states and people to negotiate mutual interests, to maintain peaceful relations and a geopolitical status quo, the concepts may diverge on understandings of the roles in, governance and aims of diplomacy (see also Dâmaso 2021, 7–8). In this issue, the contributors predominantly take one of two approaches, to frame heritage diplomacy in terms of cultural diplomacy or (international) cultural relations. Cultural diplomacy can be understood as a more traditional approach to diplomacy, which assumes that the state remains the central actor and is preoccupied with advancing its foreign policy goals and using culture for nation-branding. In contrast, (international) cultural INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURAL POLICY 2023, VOL. 29, NO. 1, 1–8 https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2022.2141730