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

there were very high expectations from the candidate countries regarding possible financialbenefits of participation in Community programmes. At first, the biggest obstacle to obtainingfunds was a lack of knowledge and experience about application procedures. Eventually,cultural operators began competing equally with others from all member states and the mostrecent reports – from the European Forum for the Arts and Heritage (EFAH) or the BudapestObservatory, for example – have not revealed significant gaps.All Compendium country reports, analyzed for this study have referred to the EU fundingprogrammes. Some authors of those reports claimed, and this has been confirmed in variousstudies, that cooperation within the EU, including new members and candidate countries, wasincreasing. However, it is important to mention that there have also been reports about a lackof resources or interest for neighbouring countries to the east, which are outside the new EUborders. The consequences of developments such as this have been widely debated by policymakersand cultural operators.With limited budgets and a focus on multilateral cooperation, the goals of the Communityfunding programmes have been quite different from those of the individual EU member states.The programmes were meant to complement rather than to replace funding provided by nationalgovernments. They could be seen as exemplifying the EU principles of complementarity andsubsidiarity, as these are translated into concrete policy actions.The evidence from the programmes has also drawn attention to the fact that cultural policy of theEuropean Union has consisted of two inseparable parts. Nation states have more or less clearstrategies for culture, enabling their financing to follow fairly clear guidelines. At EU level, however,the lack of an elaborated cultural policy has certainly impaired the effectiveness of monitoringthe results of Community programmes in that sphere. As one authoritative report on culturalcooperation argues, EU Programmes should aim to support projects with a clearly elaboratedEuropean dimension and added value, even though it is not really clear what that would mean.87When looked at in the context of the EU enlargement, it is possible to claim that theseprogrammes did not seem to deal with any specific challenges facing cultural policy prioritiesof the future member states. In fact, the assumptions behind the programmes’ design was thatthe new member states would comply with existing priorities. This had a positive side-effect ascultural operators in new member states had to adopt their ways of working in order to be eligiblefor the money. At that time, at least for the cultural sector, there was no other support for themajor structural reforms that the sector was undergoing as a consequence of the transition fromsocialism. The exception was the audio-visual sector: the Programme MEDIA did make resourcesavailable for some structural changes as well as for education of creators and producers in orderto prepare them for the participation in the single audio-visual market.The questionnaire did not ask specific questions about intellectual property rights (IPR). Soonafter the beginning of the transition, post-socialist countries started bringing their copyright andOther issues59