The value of diversity: Culture, cohesion, and competitiveness in the making of EU-Europe
Item
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Title
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The value of diversity: Culture, cohesion, and competitiveness in the making of EU-Europe
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:ab35f88426c8:11251
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identifier
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11578
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Creator
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Bodirsky, Katharina,
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Contributor
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David Harvey
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Cultural anthropology | Social structure | Political science | European studies | Berlin | culturalism | European Union | state theory | state transformation | Turkey
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines a particular way of governing (through) "culture" as a means to reflect on the making of a "non-national" state form (EU-Europe) and its implications for social inequalities. The term EU-Europe highlights complex and often conflictual relations between European Union (EU), national, and regional governmental levels, and the study focuses on relations between the EU and the city of Berlin. The dissertation critically examines the development of a policy common sense that emphasizes the potential value of cultural diversity for economic competitiveness. Such value, it is assumed by policy-makers, can be realized by combining support to the creative and cultural industries with an approach to immigrant integration that respects individual cultural diversity, ensures equality of opportunity, and fosters intercultural dialogue. Because such interculturalism goes on the EU level hand in hand with a new narrative of EU-Europeanness, the study also "moves outwards" onto relations of EU accession established with Turkey where this has been articulated particularly clearly.;The study argues that interculturalist policy constitutes an attempt to overcome challenges to legitimacy and cohesion on EU and city levels by establishing "non-national" modes of belonging and entitlement that work with the neoliberal agenda that has dominantly informed EU-European state-making of the last decades. In selectively embracing cultural diversity, such policy is to turn "culture" from a problem into a resource in the making of "cosmopolitan" places conducive to capital. In Berlin, this has fed into processes of gentrification that serve the generation of rent and effectively void the "right to place" of populations marked through class and culture. In the politics of Turkey's EU accession, the claim that EU-Europeanness is defined through an embrace of diversity has in turn obscured and enabled EU support of the development of a Turkish "competition state.".;The dissertation furthers our understanding of contemporary "non-national" forms of statehood and of the ways in which these (re)produce inequalities between people and places. It is based on extensive analysis of policy and political documents, interviews with key policy-makers, attendance of policy events, and experience of local politics in Berlin gained during a stay of 12 months.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Anthropology
