Transnational Cultural Policy: The Creative Europe Programme and the Europeanization of Culture

In the 1970s and early 80s, during the transition from the European Economic Community to the European Union, advocates of greater integration confronted the “Eurosclerosis,” which had set in. To overcome the stagnation Jacques Delors revived the European project through the questions of cultural union. With the Single European Act, it was thought that fostering the cultural aspect of European union would actually reinvigorate the stalled agendas in the political and economic arenas. The legacy of this initiative is found in the new Creative Europe Programme (CEP) which has come into effect in 2014 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 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 explore how the Europeanization of cultural policy undermines the ground of the nationally imagined community, fostering a proliferation of imaginative communities. 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 social and political scientific terms of European Union.