Understanding otherness through the prism of EU cultural policy: a case study

By carrying out a case study on EU cultural policy, the aim of this paper is to explore the possible ways of addressing and supposedly solving diversity-fear issues at both EU and local level. EU cultural policy, which is far from being a coherent policy domain, contains three main forms — essentialist, transnational, and cosmopolitan — through which cultural diversity issues and the fear of otherness have been addressed over time. I will reconstruct and analyze these modalities by carrying out a case study: the Festival of Europe (Festival d’Europa), which is a biennial event held in Florence during the month of May. I will focus on two topics: the origins of the Festival of Europe and the ideas of culture performed by local actors during the 2015 edition of the Festival. I intend to discuss how the EU and local institutions have directly or indirectly moulded the idea of cultural diversity from a top-down perspective. This analysis is complemented by a bottom-up perspective that analyses whether and in what way cultural actors have, consciously or unconsciously, recycled institutional discourses or developed new strategies of representing the issue of understanding "otherness” through the prisms of Europe and culture.