Why we need European cultural policies: the impact of EU ...

a broader understanding of culture, in the sense intended by the European Cultural Convention.They also believed that some positive effects of the programme included awareness-raising andbringing a measure of order to the `organized chaos’ in the cultural sector.Most recent comparative studies of European cultural policy use the Council of Europe data.The range of obstacles and limitations encountered in its reviews – the definition of culture,defining the scope and goals of state intervention in the cultural field, the term `national culturalpolicy’, and the lack of reliable indicators – all support the argument that a shared cultural policyat EU level is an impossible vision and that policies about culture have to remain with individualEU member states.The role of the Council of Europe was recognized explicitly in Article 128 of the MaastrichtTreaty.16 The European Union opted, however, for a rather conservative approach and ignoredone of the most valuable outcomes of the Council of Europe’s programme – that is, a broadunderstanding of cultural policy as a field, which consists of all measures having a direct orindirect impact on culture. In fact, a common, narrow, interpretation of the principle of subsidiarity,has resulted in a situation in which policies and actions concerning culture remain restricted toso-called `harmless areas’, such as cooperation and exchange (Kaufman and Raunig, 2002).In the following chapters, we will look more closely at how culture is defined and understoodwithin the EU, including whether it is possible to justify the EU’s recent separation – in 2004 – ofculture and audio-visual sectors between two directorates of the European Commission; culturenow comes under Education and Culture and media comes under the Information Society andMedia. (How the Commission is going to deal with the digitalization of heritage remains to bedecided.) This contrasts with the methodology scope of cultural policy in the Council of Europe’sprogrammes, which has meant that, in that forum, these same European states have taken a muchmore inclusive view of cultural policy, encompassing audio-visual policy.This choice of scope, used for the purpose of this study, is therefore closer to the definition ofcultural policy used in the Council of Europe reports, rather than the restrictive definition of theEuropean Union’s competence in the field of culture.The work of the Council of Europe is especially important for researching the possible impactof the EU enlargement on cultural policies, because the Council of Europe was in some ways adriving force for involving researchers in broader European debates, long before their countriesbecame candidates or member states of the European Union. As culture has for many yearsbeen among the priorities of the Council of Europe, this has spawned close cooperation andmany collaborative research projects. At the same time, the fact that culture has not yet figuredprominently on the EU agenda has had the consequence of rather modest interest in research,other than in those areas directly covered by the acquis communautaire.24Part 1 The conceptual frame of the study