Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Differing diversitiesaffairs. As Delors noted in his first speech as Commission President to theEuropean Parliament in 1985:“The culture industry will tomorrow be one of the biggest industries, a creatorof wealth and jobs. Under the terms of the Treaty we do not have the resourceto implement a cultural policy; but we are going to try to tackle it along economiclines. (…) We have to build a powerful European culture industry thatwill enable us to be in control of both the medium and its content, maintainingour standards of civilisation, and encouraging the creative people amongst us.”(Delors, cited in Collins, 1993: 90)The European Union was effectively operating a de facto cultural policy longbefore Maastricht gave it the legal right to do so. Like Delors, many EuropeanUnion supporters have long harboured a deeper vision of European integration asa historical project that can perhaps be characterised as one of social engineering;a process similar to that of nation-building, but with the more ambitious goal ofcreating a new political order based on pan-national cohesion and supranationalinstitutions. The “European idea”, as it is called, epitomises the ideological underpinningsof this vision of a more integrated federal Europe.To justify expansion of the European Union beyond its original remit, particularuse has been made of the general prefatory remarks contained in the Treaty preambles,notably their flowery statements about forging “ever-closer union among thepeoples of Europe” and laying “the foundations for a destiny henceforth shared”. 1Within this logic, the idea of promoting or defending “core values” and “the commonEuropean heritage” became a major plank in the strategy for advancing theEuropean Union project. European Union cultural initiatives were guided by thebelief that culture could be mobilised to galvanise people towards a new conceptionof themselves as “Europeans” rather than exclusive nationals – in a mannerreminiscent of the model of nation-state formation. 2 As the European Commissiondeclares (1988: 3), “the European Union which is being constructed cannot haveeconomic and social objectives as its only aim. It also involves new kinds of solidaritybased on belonging to European culture.” The European Union’s morerecent “Culture 2000” programme was similarly justified by arguments calling forthe creation of a “cultural area common to the European people” (EuropeanParliament, 2000: 2). In their policy statements and declarations, European Unionstrategists thus echo the argument made long ago by Ernest Gellner (1983: 36) that“modern man is not loyal to a monarch or a land or a faith, whatever he may say,but to a culture. And he is, generally speaking, gelded.” The difficulty with this,however, is that there is little consensus over what “European culture” consists of,or which peoples are to be included or excluded within its definition, although theanswer becomes clearer when we look more closely at European Union culturalaction, and “gelding strategies”, in practice.__________1. For an interesting legal perspective on this see Howe, 1992.2. On the creation of national cultures see especially Anderson, 1983; Foster, 1991; Gellner, 1983;Hobsbawm, 1990.110