Podcast with Rob van der Laarse on european collaboration and cultural heritage

Europe's greatest collaborative achievement , transforming a war-devastated continent into one of the world's richest regions , is now at risk because cooperation has replaced genuine collaboration. Heritage scholar Rob van der Laarse explains why shared memory, contested landscapes, and the unresolved traumas of the twentieth century hold the key to whether Europe survives the twenty-first. Subscribe for more episodes on collaboration and its relationship to conflict. Rob van der Laarse, historian and founder of the Amsterdam School for Heritage and Memory and Material Culture, brings a perspective that connects cultural memory, conflict landscapes, and European geopolitics to the question of collaboration. His career spans 20 years in history departments, pioneering work in heritage and memory studies, and advisory roles for Dutch government ministries on war heritage and digitalization. The conversation opens with van der Laarse's central distinction: Europe has a system of cooperation, not collaboration. Countries cooperate, they coordinate, negotiate, trade, but they do not collaborate in the sense of working on the same problems together, thinking collectively, and sharing expertise to address real challenges. This distinction, he argues, explains why the European project is losing momentum despite its institutional architecture. Van der Laarse traces this problem through the lens of cultural heritage and contested memory. His work on "Terrorscapes" , landscapes shaped by twentieth-century violence, from Holocaust sites to Cold War borders , reveals how unresolved historical trauma continues to fracture European collaboration. When Romanian politicians sit in the European Parliament's social democratic faction but come from a completely different historical and political context, and when they speak different languages and carry different memories, the result is what he calls "fictive cooperation" , the appearance of collaboration without its substance. The discussion addresses the practical mechanics of genuine collaboration through van der Laarse's fieldwork experience. Projects like IC_ACCESS and ARISE brought together universities and heritage sites across Europe to work on shared problems , visualization technology, digital preservation, the interpretation of conflict landscapes. What made these projects collaborative rather than merely cooperative was physical co-presence: working on the same site, thinking about the same problems, discussing constantly. On the relationship between heritage and contemporary politics, van der Laarse is direct. Europe's failure to discuss resource competition, trade systems, and geopolitical positioning , while China buys the harbor of Athens and Silk Road dynamics reshape global power , represents a catastrophic failure of collaborative intelligence. Academics, he argues, should be on advisory boards discussing long-term developments, not just competing for research funding. His proposed change is both simple and radical: reinvent collaboration at every European level, starting with schools. Not fictive exchanges between twin towns, but genuine shared work on real problems , environmental sustainability, building conservation, forestry management , where expertise is shared across borders to produce tangible results. The European research project offers a glimpse of what this could look like, but even scientists struggle to explain to colleagues in their own university what they are actually doing. Part of the Ernst Strüngmann Forum series on Collaboration, produced with the Convergent Science Network.