The Cosmopolitan Museum

Between 2014 and 2018, funded by the European Union’s ‘Creative European Programme’, leaders of ten European ethnographic museums met to discuss a new kind of Museum of Other People, one that would come to terms with the legacy of colonialism and take account of large-scale migration to Europe from Africa and the Middle East. Pioneered in Sweden, the Netherlands, Austria and Germany, this came to be known as the World Culture Museum. It is not a Museum of Other People, because it includes Europe on equal terms, at least in principle, although in practice Europe is present, if at all, only in the form of folk traditions. So what makes a World Culture Museum different from a Museum of Other People?