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

Alongside this, Community funding programmes, such as Culture 2000 and its successors, willremain the most visible structures for shared cultural effort in the Union. There will be even morepressure to increase EU funding for culture. Given the growing costs of EU administration, theneed to find money for those areas which are firmly the current business of the EU, as well ascalls from member states to reduce spending, it is not realistic to expect significant increases inEU budgets for culture. We all know that when budgets are tight or declining, spending on cultureis the first to be reduced, because the arts are seen as a frill and not central to the economy.Cultural policy will more often appear on the agenda only indirectly, either when there isresistance to regulations that might have a negative impact on this field such as happened withthe so-called Bolkenstein Directive on services,97 or when there is a legal dispute.One of the main characteristics of cultural goods and services is their dual nature – cultural andeconomic. If culture remains outside the EU agenda, a rift will deepen, and cultural matters willbe dealt with at a national level, while economic matters will be dictated more and more by rulesadopted at EU level.98 However, a proper development of culture can be ensured only if bothelements are treated as equally important; this view was put forward strongly by EU memberstates and the European Commission during negotiations in 2005 in UNESCO about theConvention on the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions.99The recent division of the responsibilities of the European Commission, in which audio-visualmatters were transferred to the Directorate for Information Society and Media, is another exampledirectly linked with the debate about the impact of convergence on culture.100 According tothis logic behind that transfer, the cultural field has been divided between those elements whichwill be largely digital, and those which will remain produced in traditional media and distributed ina more traditional way.From a cultural point of view this distinction is highly problematic; the main concern of culturalpolicy is to support artistic creation as well as participation, cultural consumption, and providinga choice of cultural events and products, regardless of the technology or media used in theirproduction. Yet now we have the definition and boundaries of cultural policies being changed asconsequence of the fact that some cultural contents are becoming largely digital. A significantpercentage of creators and their works primarily those creating in new media, remain outside ofthe reach of national cultural policies simply because it is impossible to confine them to nationalborders. The area where the overlap between cultural and audio-visual policies is obvious is thefield of artistic expressions, which is why there is a constant need for link-up and fine tuning ofcultural and media/audio-visual policies both at national level and at EU level.The second scenario replaced `l`exception culturelle’, which has always been just a politicalconcept anyway, by a strategy of cultural diversity. The protection and promotion of culturaldiversity requires adoption of specific policies on different levels, both nationally and internationally– an approach followed with the elaboration of the UNESCO Convention. Although the conceptCultural diversity: the way forward?71