THE EUROPEAN CONTROVERSY - IS THE EU A TRUE COMMUNITY OF CULTURES?
THE EUROPEAN CONTROVERSY - IS THE EU A TRUE COMMUNITY OF CULTURES?

Summary/Abstract: The main focus of my Ph.D training is the preservation of cultural heritage. Within this topic I pay attention to three main fields: historical preservation in Hungary, in the European Union and the world heritage. In my first year as a postgraduate student I was able to analyze the history and the development of this protection in Hungary. After studying the history of Hungarian national historic monuments, buildings and current legislation I came to the conclusion that the aformentioned fields were established long after they had been in Western-European countries. That is why I have decided to look for inspirations and samples for comparison from the European Union. It is rather evident to the wide public, that the European Union is an economic and political community. It is however quite an intriguing task to examine if it is truly a community, a community of different cultures. With the help of scholarly comparison of the initial ideas stemming from the founders of the European Union and the present state of culture I expect to find some answers pertinent to this question in this article. By giving the European Union a say in cultural matters, the Member States’ governments set out to create a ’Europe of the peoples’. According to this idea they want to make people in Europe aware of their shared history and values but at the same time the local and regional cultures must be cultivated also. More specifically, the point was to encourage cultural exchanges within Europe by establishing European projects to inspire creativity and to make culture accessible to the greatest possible number of people. I hope that by this paper I can prove that the European Union is more than an economic or political community.[...]

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