European Dis/Union: The Creative Europe Programme and the Europeanization of Culture

With the start of 2014 the new Creative Europe Programme (CEP) has come into effect and it has already had a deep impact on cultural production across the EU and well beyond its borders. Attention to the program calls upon both social scientists and humanists to develop new paradigms of understanding European culture.

The CEP devotes half of its significant resources to the audiovisual sector. This paper will thus discuss 1) how the Creative Europe program explicitly understands the transnational union of the audio-visual sector, divided still by national markets and socio-linguistic distinctions, as vitally significant for European economic growth. 2) Considering especially audiovisual production at the European and national levels will allow this paper to extend critically Benedict Anderson’s paradigm: this Europeanization of cultural policy undermines the ground of the nationally imagined community, fostering a proliferation of imaginative communities. The CEP poses a challenge to this mechanism of national hegemony, because historically of course national cultural policies have been the primary means for states to reconcile “contending cultural identities” (Miller and Yudice 2002, 8) 3) finally the paper will explore how the CEP participates in a conflictual dynamic of dis/union in the EU and how this dynamic of dis/union affects the traditional terms of cultural political analysis such as legitimacy. For instance we can consider that as the CEP seeks to harmonize and synergize the cultural and creative sectors across Europe, EU member states can no longer claim to protect a national culture that transcends particular interests.