Culture can serve as locus of negotiation of difference within today’s European Union. It is a fact that European culture under the post-national regime is signified by an accelerating transnational exchange of cultural texts, artefacts and practices across the member states. Such culture understood as a space for exchange and deliberation of difference has the capacity to further European integration, as emphasized by Zygmunt Bauman in Culture in a Liquid Modern World. He asserts that culture should not just provide a means for disengaged ‘toleration’ of otherness (infamous multiculturalist discourse). Bauman claims that shared European culture is capable of serving as a space for mediation of divisive differences and creation of a sense of the European common born out of that dialogue. This is precisely how one can define European culture in post-national terms.

An increasing awareness of the vastness of European cultural register, its negotiation and contextualization, can bring new sheared understandings of what it means to be European today. The process rests on bringing a better understanding and appreciation of the uniqueness of its particular expressions on one hand and the commonality of underlining sensibilities on the other. At the same time, a post-national understanding of culture is aimed at rescuing it from the dynamic tension between limiting ethno-national singularity and equally one-dimensional uniformity of globalization. Preservation of local, regional, and national traditions and other cultural distinctions is much more feasible under the ‘umbrella’ of European culture, especially when faced with neo-liberal culture industry. Consequently, the role of culture in post-national terms is to cherish enriching particularities, however putting them in context of a mutual narrative. Critics of a post-national understanding of European culture have scolded it for being built de novo in disconnect with allegedly culturally insular member states. However, these objections see culture as totalising, and limit it to its either elitist or ideological dimension. In practice, searching for a shared comprehension of values and ideas through European culture actually embraces its longue durée, when it comes to national cultural legacies, as well as the transnational élite cultural continuum of modernity. Most importantly a post-national understanding of European culture renounces determinism and is envisioned to provide space for agency among producers and consumers of culture alike. Culture as the space for active negotiation of difference can have a profound role in furthering European integration. The question of its utility in creating social cohesion is being raised with growing frequency in the deliberations on the current state and the future of the European Union. It is invoked, inter alia, as a possible mean of bridging the ‘democratic deficit’, a crucial element of European identity, and a structural component of Europe as a social space. To have such impact European culture has to be a space for genuine reflection on its diversity and involve multiple actors in active deliberation between Europeans about Europe. European culture in a post-national sense can bring consciousness of its heritage, affirmation of its diversity, while transgressing the borders of particularity and become the space for dialogue on what it means to be European today.