Marlene Ritter is a Doctoral Researcher at SCRIPTS, holding a BA in Cultural History and Theory and Business Administration from Humboldt University in Berlin and an MA in Cultural Policy, Diplomacy, and Relations from Goldsmiths College in London. She is currently writing her dissertation on Western European image politics in the post-war years. Based on both textual and visual archival material, she analyses how early Western European organisations like the European Coal and Steel Community and the Council of Europe tried to establish and legitimise themselves, and why they had such a hard time doing so.

Title: Symbolic Borders and Tangible Boundaries: Branding Europe in the Post-War Era

Abstract: Borders and boundaries were central to the branding of Europe by early Western European organisations in the post-war era. Used for example in films and exhibitions, maps and borders defined and demarcated different visions of Europe. And the performative opening of inner-European borders became one of the most iconic gestures in the visual repertoire of Europe as a brand. These borders were depictions of material frontiers existing in the real world. But as this paper will show, they were also potent symbols for the cultural reinvention of Europe after World War II. For the self-image of Western Europe in the post-war era was defined by the boundaries drawn between a liberal, united, future-oriented Europe and its others  above all, its own wartime past, but also the Communist East and the colonies that countries like Belgium, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Italy held on to all over the globe. This paper will zoom in on these boundaries, and the ways in which they structured the branding and building of Europe in the post-war years. Based on extensive archival research and both textual and visual sources (propaganda films, photos, political symbols), it seeks to explore and discuss the following questions: What role did boundaries play in the promotion of European unity? How did the cultural and political demarcation of Europe take visual shape in the images projected by organisations like the Council of Europe and the European Coal and Steel Community? What do these images tell us about the different, sometimes competing visions of Europe feeding into the institutional infrastructure in the 1950s? And how do these mental maps correlate with the geopolitical borders of (Western) Europe at the time?