Can Museums Help Build a European Memory? The Example of the Musee de l'Europe in Brussels in the Light of "New World" Museums' Experience

The important role museums played in the construction of nation-states in the late 18th century and in the 19th century generated an abundant literature. In today's word, these institutions of knowledge are unanimously recognized as lieux de memoire, capable of generating publics and, more or less successfully, self-identifying (mostly national) collectives. The present chapter intends to analyze how two history museums are projecting a questioning a sense of belonging and its problematic relation to a common present through the celebration of a common past. In particular, we are interested in how supranational identities are negotiated through these traditionally national agencies of culture in the exhibition C'est notre histoire!, held in 2007-2008 at the Musee de l'Europe in Bruxelles and at the National Museum of Australia, opened in Canberra in 2001. The National Museum of Australia will be regarded as an example of recent negotiations and dissents on an alternate post-national identity construction. It can allow us to revisit the idea of Europe's museums made of new uses, practices and discourses on multiple identities and groups who were traditionally forgotten in or excluded from a clear-cut national identity. It will also allow us to examine the scenographic representations of a European identity which can not be summarized as the juxtaposition of fixed national narratives and artefacts.