Arcipelaghi di città. Isolamento e urbanità nelle politiche culturali dell’Unione Europea

The article analyses the role of the European Capital of Culture scheme as a mean of Europeanization, considering the case of Pafos in the Republic of Cyprus. The study focuses on the use of the two words “island” and “city” by the technocrats of Pafos2017 in order to understand the main aspects of EU’s identity narrative. Eu- rope is indeed considered as a semiotic community, and cultural policies as dispositifs to homogenize the Europeans’ narrative’s grammar, rather than its contents. Pafians’ self–representation stresses Pafos’ distance and isolation from Europe as well as the rest of the island, placing the city at the bottom of a chain of asymmetric relation- ships, where Pafos is always at the periphery of another more central element. The only way to change this situation is the transformation of Pafos into a proper city. The idea of a proper city seems modelled out of the idea of “world–city”, a place where fluxes of globalization connect. Therefore, Pafos2017’s aim is to remove all the conditions that caused Pafos’ isolation. Even though “island” and “city” seem in opposition to each other, they resonate into the “unity in diversity” rhetoric, which turns the differences among the peoples of Europe from weaknesses to richness. The opposition between Europe and its Others is reshaped as a matter of modernity and backwardness. Europe then appears as an archipelago of modern, vivid cities, con- nected the one to the other above a sea of marginal and forgotten land, that couldn’t compete in the race for contemporaneity.