The Cultural Politics of Europe

European Capitals of Culture and European Union since the 1980s

Kiran Klaus Patel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415521499
• eBook ISBN: 9781136171536
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Culture is one of the most complex and contested fields of European integration. This book analyzes EU cultural politics since their emergence in the 1980s with a particular focus on the European Capital of Culture program, the flagship of EU cultural policy. It discusses both the central as well as local levels and contextualizes EU policies with programmes of other European organisations, such as the Council of Europe.

By asking what "Europe" actually means for European cultural policy, the book goes beyond the confines of official organizations and the political sphere, to discuss the contribution, impact and appropriation among a more diverse group of actors and participants, such as transnational experts, local bureaucrats, cultural managers, urban dwellers and the visitors. Its principal aim is to debunk the myth of Brussels as the centre of cultural Europeanization. Instead, it argues that European cultural policy has to be seen as a relational, multi-directional movement, involving a wide variety of stakeholders and leading to conflicts and collaborations at various levels. This book combines the perspectives of political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and historians, at the intersection between EU, urban, and cultural studies, and changes our understanding of 'Europeanization' by opening up new empirical and conceptual avenues.

Challenging the dominant interpretation of European cultural policies, The Cultural Politics of Europe will be of interest to students and scholars of European studies, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, historians and cultural studies.

Part I

The trajectory of EU cultural policy

1 The European Capitals of Culture in context

Cultural policy and the European integration process

Uta Staiger

The European Cities or Capitals of Culture (ECOC) programme is today one of the most successful European cultural initiatives. Launched among the first schemes in the area of culture at Community level in 1985, it has since maintained and even increased its appeal for a range of political and cultural actors. Over the quarter century of its existence, however, it has also undergone both conceptual and institutional changes. Although these changes emerged partly in response to the programme’s increasing popularity and thus requirements, they were also intimately related to the development of cultural policies at European level as such, and the role the latter played within the wider European integration process.

The aim of this chapter is to assess the ECOCs in the historical and political context of these developments. With regard to their place in European integration, cultural policies have often been considered of marginal interest to policy makers and scholars alike. Without formal Community competence until 1992, comparatively insignificant budget provisions and little weight in the key political or economic decisions of the day, culture has seemingly not played a major role in European integration – nor vice versa. However, from both a policy and a normative point of view, it can in fact be an important explanatory factor in analyses of European integration. Normatively, it brings into focus some of the key concerns regarding the nature, underlying values and democratic legitimacy of this polity sui generis. Precisely because of this sensitivity, the political choices that led to the gradual ‘communitarisation’¹ of cultural policy provide a lens through which to understand the evolution of decision-making processes, policy objectives and governance structures in the European Communities and the European Union (EU). A core element of cultural action at Community level, the ECOC programme is not only an important part of this discussion; it can hardly be fully grasped without it.

The chapter will begin by briefly discussing why a European cultural policy might be of such sensitive nature and how it is informed by both divergent definitions of ‘culture’ and different policy traditions. It will then proceed to analyse what it argues are the three main phases of cultural policy development at Community level, which are broadly in line with the legal–institutional and conceptual changes the ECOC programme underwent. These lead from an early phase, characterised by a dualism between Community extension of market liberalisation to the cultural sector and first intergovernmental support for symbolic actions, in particular the ECOCs, to limited Community competences in the area of culture, checked however by continued member state control and the increasing involvement of other institutions and actors. Increasing communitarisation of culture, including finally the ECOC programme, and a more extensive policy remit mark the third and ongoing stage.

An analysis of these stages allows us to shed some light on the institutional actors involved in shaping cultural action in general and the ECOC programme in particular, including the European Parliament (EP), the European Commission, the member states and, increasingly, civil society organisations, as they are competing to introduce their preferences for more or less involvement of Community institutions in cultural affairs. However, by so doing, the chapter also aims to show how these institutional developments are accompanied by a rhetorical shift in Community policy discourse, which is mirrored by the evolving programme’s emphasis on individual European Cities of Culture over the years. This shift gives evidence to changing motivations for promoting cultural policy at Community level. These range from an initial focus on culture’s assumed significance in enhancing a sense of identity and belonging among European citizens over a particular interest in its contribution to regional development, economic growth and cohesion to a renewed, if still tentative, emphasis on a European dimension and, in particular, an active participation of citizens, via regional and transregional projects, in the integration process.

Despite these two shifts, the chapter will not read cultural policy development in the European Communities and later the EU as teleological. Rather, it will portray this process as a history of struggles over the definition of the Community’s remit, competences and long-term goals, as well as over the understanding of culture and its relation to polity building. Marking the very beginning of activity in the area of culture at the European level and transformed as Community cultural action takes hold over progressive phases of integration, the European Cities/Capital of Culture programme is best understood as a history of competing interests and investments.

Culture, cultural policy and the Community

The complexity of linking culture with policy at Community level has its roots in three different but analytically related conflicts. It lies, first, in the polysemy and contested nature of ‘culture’, in particular as it relates to the genesis of political communities. This, second, informs the range of cultural policy traditions upheld by member states, as they seek to maintain, mostly exclusively, authority in this field. They thus, third, raise concerns as to the legitimacy and form of Community intervention in culture to further integration among them. If the historical development of the last category is to be treated in more detail in the rest of this chapter, it is worth first revisiting – briefly – its relation to the first two.

Culture, famously called one of the most difficult concepts in the English language, can describe an integral dimension of social life that defines and sustains a community; the cultivation of values, intellectual and aesthetic development; and the production of artefacts, material and symbolic significance. If, for Kant, culture was the capacity of human beings qua rational agents to live by universal moral laws and thus ‘endowed with context-transcending validity claims’,² we draw from late eighteenth-century German idealism our understanding of the particularity of cultures in the plural.³ Coming to denote the value systems, languages, traditions, beliefs and symbols shared by distinct peoples, which were in themselves often conceived of as internally cohesive and relatively uniform, culture acquired integrative and formative attributes.⁴ Culture is understood from this perspective to articulate individual identification within and thus to generate a territorially delimited, organic political community – for Herder linked to the nation as Kulturnation. Now drawn on also for a multicultural ‘politics of difference’,⁵ this capacity of culture to harness identity and diversity within a polity, in either case often conceived of as delineable politico-cultural congruence that disallows for internal heterogeneity, makes cultural governance so inherently sensitive for political authorities. If most cultural politics today paradoxically highlight both the equality of all cultural forms and the distinctiveness of each, the implications multiply with transference to a supranational level.

Bound up with this dimension are both intellectual and artistic practices – art productions proper, as well as ‘other manifestations of human intellectual achievement’ (Oxford English Dictionary), as they generate both meaning and aesthetic products with intrinsic values. These practices may express knowledge, codify ideology, contest values or be purely self-referential. They are, however, also tied in with the non-relativistic conception of culture as an educational vehicle. Associated with institutions – museums, cinema, libraries – arts practices have historically been used to further political norms and ends, foremost among them the ‘forming of civic and civil attributes’.⁶ Culture qua artistic practice may thus be supported for its own ends or made operable in the process of managing polities. It is also, however, an increasingly significant economic and employment sector that warrants public policy intervention. In itself an inchoate field marked by polyglot ‘idioms’ that may include anything from government support for libraries to language policies, creative industry incentives or arts education programmes, cultural policy is today a complex policy field with at times conflicting goals.

If the governance of culture is thus determined by political, institutional and economic interests, different policy models have developed in EU member states to address it.⁷ At one end of the scale, some states following a liberal policy model prefer limited state intervention in the cultural field, with delegated ‘arm’s length’ arts funding systems and some reliance on free market forces; the UK and also Scandinavian countries are cases in point. Most of the post-communist countries similarly oppose strong government intervention, particularly in language and nationality questions, more so on historical grounds. On the other hand, France and the Mediterranean states are characterised by state interventionist traditions in the cultural sector, with a strong and often centralised public sector and pronounced political control over the market. In federal countries such as Germany and Belgium, in turn, cultural sovereignty remains mostly with regional and local authorities, complicating the delegation of competences to the national or supranational level. The diverging preferences and institutional constraints of these national policy models have always been in evidence in negotiations with the Community.

Cultural action in the Community is thus sensitive on both normative and policy grounds. Normatively, the linkage of cultural practices and policies with social governance and the encoding of collective identities raise concerns as to the appropriateness and nature of polity building beyond the state and the relation of the Community to its constituent elements. Even without any definition in the treaties, and a long-standing refusal on the part of the Commission to engage in ‘academic argument over the definition, purpose and substance of culture’,⁸ its growing support for cultural action has been controversial and often strongly opposed by member states reluctant to have the Community intervene in this traditionally national policy field. But also, where policy intervention was increasingly sanctioned, stark differences have remained as to its objectives, in particular regarding the opposition between economic interests via the liberalisation of goods and services and the dirigiste support of cultural action to exempt practices from the same and to support explicitly cultural ends. Both conflicts signify in themselves cultural preferences; both intimately relate to divergent goals and forms of integration, and both have marked cultural policy development in the Community from its inception.

Between economy and community: cultural action before Maastricht

As is well acknowledged, Community action in the area of culture did not have a legal basis prior to the Maastricht Treaty entering into force in 1993. As the Schuman Plan set out, and both the Paris and Rome Treaties reflected, it was the pooling of key industrial sectors and the gradual creation of a common market that were to lay the foundations for ‘an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’.⁹ Indeed, the only reference the Rome Treaties made to culture was by way of an exception: allowing the restriction of exports on grounds of the ‘protection of national treasures possessing artistic, historic or archaeological value’.¹⁰ As this exception confirmed the rule that cultural products and services were in general to be treated as any other economic sector by the Community, it also indicated that cultural policy proper continued to be the exclusive competence of national (or, where applicable, regional) authorities. The only transnational actors promoting culture in this early period were the Council of Europe, as well as the federalist movements that had first inspired it. Until the 1980s, these remained the main cultural initiators at European level.¹¹

However, cultural initiatives and policy developments did take place at Community level beginning in the early 1970s. Institutionally, it is a period characterised by an accentuated ‘dualism’ between supranational law-making, on the one hand, involving in particular the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the Commission, and intergovernmental policy making, on the other, negotiated between national ministers in the Council and the heads of state and government, which since 1974 have met in the European Council.¹² This dualism was arguably paralleled by another, which opposed the kinds of integration measures different policy actors preferred: negative integration, consisting of market-liberalising measures that aimed at the removal of trade barriers; and positive integration or common policies including market-correcting measures.¹³ As they pushed for different forms of integration, all institutional actors began to attend to culture. Their proposals, ranging from the removal of barriers to trade in cultural goods to training cul...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: The trajectory of EU cultural policy
• Part II: Creating local Europes
• Part III: European cultural policies in context
• Index