Heritage diplomacy; an afterword

Back in 1995, I travelled to Kiev to stay with a Ukrainian friend that I had met in England. Complicated visa requirements, along with copious amounts of vodka, made it very clear that I had left Europe and entered a country navigating major social and political change in the wake of a collapsed Soviet Union. I was surprised then to hear war correspondents in 2022 describe Ukraine as lying at ‘the heart of Europe’. But in noticing that it was only ‘Western’ media outlets that used this terminology, I was reminded of how, and why, geocultural imaginaries such as Europe are contingent, fluid and constantly being remade, in this case by a military invasion and the analytics of its wider geopolitical consequence. Back in the mid-1990s, the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia meant that Europe’s frontiers were being defined around those countries located to the southwest of Ukraine, in the Balkans and Mediterranean. But then, as now, the idea of Europe was not merely geographical, but wrapped up in questions of civilisation, religion, values, and peoples. It was with such issues in mind that I read with great interest the articles presented in this special issue. Across a number of the papers we see how Europe as a concept is in constant flux and production, whether it be through webs of documentation that make up policy and bureaucracy, or through the valorisation of particular cities, the language of shared heritage oriented around certain values, or through efforts to build cultural and political ties with countries in other parts of the world. The two additional papers here nicely complement this analysis in their respective examination of China’s Silk Road engagements with Central Asia, and the role of UNESCO’s conventions in shaping ideas about heritage as a ‘public good’ at the global level. In reading the papers, I was reminded that they straddle two overlapping, yet distinct ways of approaching heritage diplomacy. The first is to frame it as a domain of practice, something that governments do as part of their ‘soft power’ strategy. Here, we can draw a parallel with those institutes for cultural diplomacy that have sprung up around the world in recent decades. Academic or think-tank, these institutes tend to view cultural diplomacy as an arm of government policy, and thus discuss it in terms of strategy, trends, innovation, or, perhaps, the loftier goals of peace and reconciliation. It is possible to think of heritage diplomacy in such ways, either as a separate, or sub field of the cultural. The second approach is to see heritage diplomacy as a conceptual framework, one that holds distinct critical purchase. Today, both terms, heritage and diplomacy, are used multifariously. This means that attempts to reduce this conceptual frame to a single sentence definition risks inadequately capturing the various ways it can be developed over time to interpret a multitude of events and contexts. Recent scholarship on diplomacy, for example, emphasises the need to move beyond state-centric analyses and instead incorporate other actors, namely non-governmental bodies, professional groups and for-profit organisations. I have always seen heritage diplomacy in this second way, given that, like the authors here, I see heritage as a socio-political process that codifies and orders, preserves and exhibits, reconstructs and erases, and serves as a medium through which ideologies are both advanced and resisted. For cultural heritage, it is also important that critical theory starts by challenging the everyday language of past, present and future as separate ontologies, and instead grapples with the ways in which each is continually remade by the other(s). It is in this space that we find the political, the ideological, the negotiation of power. With such thoughts in mind, the idea of heritage diplomacy then draws our attention to processes of representation, communication, and the building of collaborative INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURAL POLICY 2023, VOL. 29, NO. 1, 130–134 https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2022.2141728