Culture of the market versus culture market

"Creative Europe ": it is the name of the new EU Culture program to be implemented between 2014 and 2020. The budget allocation represents 1,8 billion Euros. In the last months, the Commission has published several proposals in order to plan the future of EU policies after 2013. The plan is to develop a creative Europe but the UE will also have to be competitive according to the program.
 
THE ECONOMIC ANGLE

Cultural activities play their part in the European economy, that should not be denied: as the European Commission claims, cultural activities represent about 4,5% of the EU GDP and 3,8% of the jobs in the EU. The sector benefited from an average growth of 3,5% between 2000 and 2007 whereas the global European economy increase was only of 1%. The European cultural policies have to take into account this economic aspect: how to adapt to the technological changes and to the digital revolution, which considerably changes the way the society works, how to find a way to meet a new audience, how to export the European culture across the world? In other words, how to lay the foundations for a sustainable economic model for culture, a sector which has to deal with severe cuts in public funds in the context of the current economic crisis?
The Commission found a way to answer the question by reversing it: the point is not to find out what the economy can do for Culture anymore but what Culture can do for the economy. Make Culture a vehicle for growth and wealth by achieving the objectives set in the EU 2020 strategy. The strategy, adopted at the beginning of 2010, is supposed to frame the EU strategy for the next 10 years, with one motto: develop a smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. What a plan!
 
FORGOTTEN VALUES

In its « Creative Europe » program, which deals with culture in general but also the audiovisual sector, the European Commission aims at answering two main objectives: protect and value cultural diversity as well as enhance competitiveness of cultural and creative activities?
In reality, the Commission does not innovate much on content and financing tools but it redirects its action towards a certain type of actors: the creative and cultural industries, which are more likely to participate in increasing economic growth than the public or semipublic cultural actors, widely subsidized.
To go even further in this logic, the Commission suggests the implementation of a “financial facility” to guarantee the loans made to the cultural actors. In fact, one can hardly imagine that the public actors, barely financially viable, are the ones targeted by that policy. Here again, it has more to do with helping the private sector. There is nothing wrong with that, except that the first objective which was at the core of the implementation of European cultural policies, namely the aim to develop a European citizenship, has been forgotten…
 
How to support the creation of a common cultural space through the cultural dialogue, the spread of pieces across Europe, the artists’ mobility…? In such a way that it could finally contributes to reinforce the sense of belonging to a common project, the development of common values, and thus manage to get the European peoples closer. That was the governing principle until now, and it seems that we have lost it…
 
EUROPE 2020: THE MOTHER OF ALL POLICIES

The reason behind the redirection of cultural policy has to be found in the progressive and general drying out of funding for not very profitable sectors having a weak impact on economic growth, but it can also be found in a more mundane fight. The one which opposes a General Directorate of the European Commission dealing with culture (DG EAC ), often marginalized, to the more powerful ones like Competition, Budget or Internal Market DGs or even the general secretariat of the Commission.
 
How to value the relevance of a cultural program in this uneven balance of power when the very existence of the program is under threat? The reply is simple, and has to do with a Faustian compromise: deciding that culture has to serve the economy and thus satisfying the most powerful ones, by establishing Europe 2020 and its ambitions of growth at the level of a unique political thought.
 
Hélène Ahrweiler, putting herself in Jean Monnet’s shoes, said, 25 years ago, “if it was to be done again, I would start by culture”. This false quote, which nonetheless has been widely used and commented, shows a kind of nostalgia of the European integration which, instead of having been built through the economy, could have started by culture. Obviously, one identity cannot be created through a market, one needs content. Culture is surely a piece of it.