Cultural Counterbalancing: The Contribution of Cultural Policy to EU Enlargement

This paper discusses how cultural policy is employed as a means to facilitate EU integration processes in applicant countries in Southeast Europe. While recent studies about the adaptation of legal and administrative procedures to the requirements of EU membership have expanded our understanding of European integration processes, relatively little work has been done on the role of cultural programmes in this particular field. From 2007 onwards several cultural programmes have been funded by the Instrument for Pre-Accession (IPA) of the European Commission as alternative to the more coercive strategies of the EU to stimulate European integration. This is based on the conviction that investments in the cultural sector stimulate transnational cooperation, economic growth, employment, innovation and social cohesion and potentially identification with the EU. However, while the EU aims to use these cultural programmes to facilitate European integration, it is uncertain whether these nationally and regionally based programmes will lead to such outcome. This research will provide more understanding in how the European Commission aims to use cultural policy as contribution to EU enlargement. The main questions that this paper aims to answer are: why does the European Commission invest in locally and nationally bounded cultural programmes as a means to bring about grand European integration processes such as regional development and transnational cooperation? What is the Commission’s vision on how this should work and what does that tell us about the way in which the EU aims to employ cultural policy as facilitator of EU enlargement?