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In 1903; the British Governor of Malta appointed a committee with the purpose of establishing a National Museum in the capital. The first National Museum; called the Valletta Museum; was inaugurated on the 24th of May 1905. Malta gained independence from the British in 1964 and became a Republic in 1974. The urge to display the island's history; identity and its wealth of material cultural heritage was strongly felt and from the 1970s onwards several other Museums opened their doors to the public. This paper goes through the history of National Museums in Malta; from the earliest known collections open to the public in the seventeenth century; up until today. Various personalities over the years contributed to the setting up of National Museums and these will be highlighted later on in this paper. Their enlightened curatorship contributed significantly towards the island's search for its identity. Different landmarks in Malta's historical timeline; especially the turbulent and confrontational political history that has marked Malta's colonial experience; have also been highlighted. The suppression of all forms of civil government after 1811 had led to a gradual growth of two opposing political factions; involving a Nationalist and an Imperialist party. In the absence of a formal constitution; the political battle between the two factions was necessarily engaged on a largely cultural basis. The Maltese language; its religion; literature and its history were all hotly disputed in a partisan attempt to define the Islands culture according to a pro- Italian or to a pro-British political creed. Archaeology was no exception; finding itself caught up in the frustratingly irrelevant arguments that raged between Imperialists and Nationalists as to the real identity of the 'Maltese race'. (Cutajar; 1995: 70-71) National Museums in Malta are a reflection of the island's long history; politics; culture; values and identity. For centuries Malta depended on the sea and trade and it has had many influences arriving from the surrounding continents; as one can see at Malta's Maritime Museum in Birgu. The National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta displays a wealth of artefacts originally located in the prehistoric temple sites of Malta that range from up to 7000 years ago. The successive epoch; being Malta's Medieval period; when Byzantine; Arab and Norman communities occupied the islands; however; is barely represented. The few artefacts on display from that period do not give a clear narrative and educational representation; reflecting the fact that the Catholic faith was and still is highly dominant in the lives of many Maltese. It can be argued that the most represented artefacts on display in Malta's National Museums date to the Baroque period; when Malta was under the Catholic Order of the Knights of St. John; from the sixteenth till the eighteenth centuries. Catholicism; as it is still visible on the streets and in every village and cultural calendar of the Maltese islands; is still highly valued. The history of national museums in Malta goes on up to today; and so do the attempts at improving the current displays and narratives. The need for the setting up of new national museums; showing off the more recent and contemporary identity of the islands; is also strongly felt; especially the setting up of a National Modern and Contemporary Art Museum. The capital city of Malta; Valletta; – a UNESCO World Heritage Site – will be the European Capital of Culture in 2018. Today; three of Malta's national museums are located within the city of Valletta. These are the National Museum of Fine Arts; the National Museum of Archaeology and the National War Museum. The Palace Armoury; housing the National Collections of Arms; is located in the Grand Masters Palace; also in Valletta. The other national museums that will also be briefly discussed are the National Museum of Natural History; located in Mdina; and Malta's Maritime Museum in Birgu. It is hoped that; by 2018; further improvements will be done; reflecting a more contemporary approach in displaying Malta's unique identity. ; peer-reviewed

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw much of the nation-making and museum creation discussed in this paper, Austria underwent a whole spectrum of constitutions: monarchy, republic, autocracy and part of a totalitarian state and then again, since the ten years spanning 1945-1955, a republic. This dramatic history is also reflected in the changing borders of Austria – from a geographically extensive mosaic of the Habsburg Monarchy (as a Vielvölkerstaat; a multinational realm) to today's Austria that is made up by nine federal states with approximately 8,4 million inhabitants in total. Thus, an important question concerns what the term 'national' may refer to in the specific case of Austria. Turning to developments in the museum sphere, the period of the Austrian Empire (1804- 1867) and the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867-1918) – especially in the Vormärz - was marked by royal initiatives regarding existing collections. A process of centralizing and ordering collections, that hitherto had been dispersed, began and thus it was only now that these began to be regarded as entities. In the imperial city of Vienna, splendid buildings were constructed to host these collections during the second half of the century, e.g. the "twin museums" Kunsthistorisches Museum (KM, Museum of Art History) and Naturhistorisches Museum (NM, Museum of Natural History), emerging from the imperial collections. However, the two museums were never described as 'national', since the Vielvölkerstaat had to represent all peoples. The same can be said about the Austrian Museum für Volkskunde (The Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Art), inaugurated in 1894. Outside Vienna, a number of regional/provincial museums were founded; the Joanneum in Graz/Styria (1811) being perhaps the most prominent example. The Joanneum serves as a case study, highlighting topics such as the development of a national and regional identity and private initiatives in the museum sphere. The question of the relation between region and nation, what is centre and what is periphery is important in this context. According to Raffler, these museums were Janus-faced, being both cosmopolitan and regional as the museums presented both history of humanity and nationally specific knowledge (Raffler 2007: 344f). With the disintegration of the Habsburgian monarchy, museums became state-owned. Often characterized as a time of crisis, a new self-image and identity had to be invented. The term 'Austria' was however, regarded with scepticism since it hitherto primarily had been associated with the dynasty of the Habsburgs. Rituals and festivities rooted in the empire had to be replaced and attempts were made to promote music as the factor that made the geographically highlyshrunken Austria into a world nation (Mattl 1995). The period also included art restoration claims, posed by former members of the multinational realm. During NS-rule, megalomaniac projects included new museums, here exemplified with plans for (but never completed) Fuehrer-museums in Linz and Vienna. Austria's role during this period of fascism has been much disputed, affecting later plans and discussions for museum projects dealing with this period: Austria as a victim vs. Austria as willing partner? Further post-war discussions on identity include the status assigned with the signing of the state treaty in 1955 that has been endlessly celebrated; and the constructing of a tale of new beginnings forming a unifying national symbol and stepping stone for new national myths. In this paper, the question of the existence of an Austrian national museum, focusing on twentieth century history, is addressed by highlighting recent discussions surrounding the plans for a Haus der Geschichte (House of History). Until today, it is – interestingly enough – the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum (The Museum of Military History) that presents the most complete history of Austria, although ending with the end of WWII. Since the late 1990s, various proposals for a new museum have been made and the project has been intensely debated among politicians and historians. Still today, no consensus exists regarding exactly what to exhibit and why; neither is the question of where (in Vienna) such a museum should be located settled. The debates are interesting since they reveal the still-existing tensions regarding how to tackle and present central topics such as the Ständestaat (authoritarian rule 1934-38), the Austrian civil war, the Anschluß and Austria's role during the NS-reign. Many historians fear a political instrumentalization and a toosmooth version of the violent past that constitutes one aspect of Austrian twentieth century history. Finally, Marlies Raffler has put forward an interesting thought: could it be that an Austrian national museum is equal to the sum of existing Landesmuseen (i.e. museums located in the federal states of Austria), together making up a kind of 'disloziertes Nationalmuseum' (dislocated Nationalmuseum) today? ; Eunamus

Inside the National Museum, Riyadh, you can find a captivating display of Saudi Arabia's culture in past and present forms

From 1760-2010, Germany has been marked by several levels of nation-building as well as many different ideological and territorial projects. This inquiry has focused on processes of long continuity, spanning unification in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, adding the most important ruptures and institutional inventions to get a firm-enough basis for conclusions on the institutional role of museums vis-a-vis the state-making process. The most significant periods for the interaction between museums and nation-building can be labelled The struggle, leading to Germany's unification in 1871, where several regions made their bids through museums. Imperial unity on display from 1871-1914. National museums were stabilizing and universalizing the German Empire in the world. Nazi cultural policy, 1933-1945: Comprehensive museum plans for the Third Reich. GDR (German Democratic Republic) national museums between 1949-1990 were dominated by the ideology of socialist culture. The Federal republic, before and after 1990: inscribing Nazi and GDR as pasts contained within brackets. Germany's history is marked by the processes of unification meeting dissociative forces resulting in dramatic political shifts and the persistence of a complex federal structure. Museums reflect various strategies both within this history and through contributions to stabilizing, reinforcing and materializing ideas of continuity. Balancing the unifying message of the heritage of a Roman – German legacy and later federal structures resulted in a distribution of national museums in Berlin, Munich, Nuremberg and Bonn. A long-standing cooperation and tension between local, regional and national identities with a clear utopian and activist element marks initiatives taken for establishing national museums. What later became national museums often started as private individual or collective elite initiatives aimed at putting certain projects on the political agenda. The enlightenment ambitions went beyond national borders with the establishment of Humboldt University in Berlin in 1810 and several of the institutions at the Museumsinselas "Universalmuseen". The scientific and technical scope of Deutsches Museum in Munich captured the rational dimension in German identity politics into the next century. These rational and scientific ambitions coincided in time and helped to legitimize both military national unification and imperial undertakings. Implicit and explicit historical narratives representing the existence of German culture dominated national museums with a plastic delimitation between a European (Roman), Germanspeaking and German state as the space of representation. Art and cultural history was more expandable, while political history followed the honours and sorrows of political community. National museums have, overall, survived with an astonishing continuity when successively changing the goal of state-making from creating the state, an empire, a Nazi state to overcoming that past and creating democratic visions in both liberal and communist versions to, again, healing that division and constructing it as a parenthesis in history. A re-nationalisation process post-1990 again activated investments in museums and reveals again a standing ambiguity in dealing with national sentiments. This is most clearly visible in museum discussions and projects dealing with the NS-legacy versus demands for "Normalisierung". As opposed to many European countries from France to Greece that have a high level of centralization within the field of culture, both culture and cultural politics is, in Germany, mainly dealt with on a regional level within each Bundesland. This can partly be explained by the terrifying experience of a centralized rule and the misuse of art and culture for political ends made during the NS-regime (Klein 2003):71). After the war, one sought to prevent this through legislation by reducing state influence within the cultural policy sphere through the foundational law (GG article 5(3) and 30). A federal - and thus fragmented - Germany was also something desired by the Allies. However, a decentralized Germany was nothing entirely new. An on-going interplay between regional and central forces in representing the state was one of the long-term phenomena, although driven by various logics: In the mid-19th century, the relative strength and actual outcome of the unification process was naturally open-ended which allowed for several strong suggestions, while mid-20thcentury dynamics was determined by the urge not to repeat the mishaps of a strong national ideology. The current trend seems to lend itself to stronger nationalizing forces in the field of memory politics. The overarching argument of the role played by national museums in the making of the German state and nation is that it has provided a platform for a cultural constitution only slowly negotiating changing ideas of what it means to be German and how to relate to local, regional and transnational communities. Hence, the main impact of the museums is to secure ideas of continuity in the midst of dramatic political change. ; EuNaMus

From 1760-2010, Germany has been marked by several levels of nation-building as well as many different ideological and territorial projects. This inquiry has focused on processes of long continuity, spanning unification in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, adding the most important ruptures and institutional inventions to get a firm-enough basis for conclusions on the institutional role of museums vis-a-vis the state-making process. The most significant periods for the interaction between museums and nation-building can be labelled The struggle, leading to Germany's unification in 1871, where several regions made their bids through museums. Imperial unity on display from 1871-1914. National museums were stabilizing and universalizing the German Empire in the world. Nazi cultural policy, 1933-1945: Comprehensive museum plans for the Third Reich. GDR (German Democratic Republic) national museums between 1949-1990 were dominated by the ideology of socialist culture. The Federal republic, before and after 1990: inscribing Nazi and GDR as pasts contained within brackets. Germany's history is marked by the processes of unification meeting dissociative forces resulting in dramatic political shifts and the persistence of a complex federal structure. Museums reflect various strategies both within this history and through contributions to stabilizing, reinforcing and materializing ideas of continuity. Balancing the unifying message of the heritage of a Roman – German legacy and later federal structures resulted in a distribution of national museums in Berlin, Munich, Nuremberg and Bonn. A long-standing cooperation and tension between local, regional and national identities with a clear utopian and activist element marks initiatives taken for establishing national museums. What later became national museums often started as private individual or collective elite initiatives aimed at putting certain projects on the political agenda. The enlightenment ambitions went beyond national borders with the establishment of Humboldt University in Berlin in 1810 and several of the institutions at the Museumsinselas "Universalmuseen". The scientific and technical scope of Deutsches Museum in Munich captured the rational dimension in German identity politics into the next century. These rational and scientific ambitions coincided in time and helped to legitimize both military national unification and imperial undertakings. Implicit and explicit historical narratives representing the existence of German culture dominated national museums with a plastic delimitation between a European (Roman), Germanspeaking and German state as the space of representation. Art and cultural history was more expandable, while political history followed the honours and sorrows of political community. National museums have, overall, survived with an astonishing continuity when successively changing the goal of state-making from creating the state, an empire, a Nazi state to overcoming that past and creating democratic visions in both liberal and communist versions to, again, healing that division and constructing it as a parenthesis in history. A re-nationalisation process post-1990 again activated investments in museums and reveals again a standing ambiguity in dealing with national sentiments. This is most clearly visible in museum discussions and projects dealing with the NS-legacy versus demands for "Normalisierung". As opposed to many European countries from France to Greece that have a high level of centralization within the field of culture, both culture and cultural politics is, in Germany, mainly dealt with on a regional level within each Bundesland. This can partly be explained by the terrifying experience of a centralized rule and the misuse of art and culture for political ends made during the NS-regime (Klein 2003):71). After the war, one sought to prevent this through legislation by reducing state influence within the cultural policy sphere through the foundational law (GG article 5(3) and 30). A federal - and thus fragmented - Germany was also something desired by the Allies. However, a decentralized Germany was nothing entirely new. An on-going interplay between regional and central forces in representing the state was one of the long-term phenomena, although driven by various logics: In the mid-19th century, the relative strength and actual outcome of the unification process was naturally open-ended which allowed for several strong suggestions, while mid-20thcentury dynamics was determined by the urge not to repeat the mishaps of a strong national ideology. The current trend seems to lend itself to stronger nationalizing forces in the field of memory politics. The overarching argument of the role played by national museums in the making of the German state and nation is that it has provided a platform for a cultural constitution only slowly negotiating changing ideas of what it means to be German and how to relate to local, regional and transnational communities. Hence, the main impact of the museums is to secure ideas of continuity in the midst of dramatic political change. ; EuNaMus