Transcultural Europe: An introduction to cultural policy in a changing Europe

Abstract

The debate concerning European cultural policy - or what we prefer to call cultural policy in a changing Europe - came very much on to the agenda in the 1990s, in the context of what we may regard as a significant cultural turn in EU discourses. There was the sense at that time that the project of European unification could only move forward on the basis of a new kind of European cultural imagination. There were two directions in which the debate was to move. The first was in terms of the construction of a pan-European cultural space, and the possibility of creating a common European culture and identity. This integrationist agenda was associated with the enlargement of European cultural markets and spaces, as, for example, in the media policy for ‘television without frontiers’. The other direction in which thinking moved was towards a new regionalist agenda, with the slogan of a ‘Europe of the regions’, with the emphasis being put on the idea of Europe as a rich cultural mosaic, and on the idea of ‘unity in diversity’. At the heart of the unfolding debates, along both of these lines of thinking, was the issue of national cultures, which have, of course, been the primary frame of reference in which cultural policy agendas have been elaborated in modern Europe. How, it was being asked, might cultural policy now be re-framed in a context in which national objectives were no longer self-evidently the ʼnatural’ priority?