European Identity between Flows and Places: Insights from Emerging European Landscape Policies

This article is a contribution to the debate on European identity. It explores the emerging field of European landscape policies, clustering around the European Landscape Convention (Council of Europe, 2000) as an interpretative key for representations of Europe as cultural ‘unity in diversity’, a formula that embodies the main institutional and public narrative of the identity of Europe. The article presents results from fieldwork research tracing the ELC’s discursive field, and the spaces for interpretation and action that it has opened up for actors within European networks and projects. It shows that whereas the official narrative may be reducible to a simplistic model of nested identities, from local to European, actors who have become familiar with it use their ‘European identity’ in more complex ways, displacing binary cultural and spatial logics — unity vs. diversity, places vs. flows — that still mostly inform theories of identity.