European funding of culture: Promoting common culture or regional growth?

Abstract

Since the late 1970s, European funding of the arts has been a feature of the mixed‐funding regime and support of a range of community arts, training, heritage and regeneration programmes in Member States. In the late 1980s, following widened membership and more direct policy engagement by the European Commission, regional development began to support increasing levels of investment in culture, notably heritage, cultural tourism and city regeneration through arts venues. Meanwhile the Commission's own culture programmes have focused on Cities of Culture, language and heritage projects. However, the funding of culture through the various Structural Funds (although not categorised as such at either European, national and regional levels) has dwarfed that of the Culture Unit. No cultural policy or plan for this significant amount of investment in cultural facilities has been evident, and such programmes have largely bypassed national arts policy, being directed through regional and local authority economic development, tourism and regeneration departments. Promotion of European ‘Common Culture’ was expounded in the Maastricht Treaty and, it is argued, these objectives have driven increased city‐regional autonomy. Notwithstanding difficulties in categorising grant data in cultural terms, this chapter measures the impact and distribution of such regional funding across beneficiary countries and within the eligible regions. A UK survey provides a regional breakdown of projects receiving support in the 1990s and European funding used as part of partnership funding (lottery, regeneration programmes). The chapter concludes that, while the funding of these cultural projects has been under‐estimated and ‘hidden’, its concentration in city arts and heritage venues raises questions for both European and national cultural policy: whether cultural investment has been of the right type, in the right place; or whether European common culture aspirations have ignored local and more culturally diverse opportunities. In short, whether form has followed funding.