Bridging the Competing Views of European Cultural Integration: The Transformative View of Culture As a Means to Promote Growth and Employment

The problematic nature of a European cultural identity became more salient after the enlargement of 2004 with ten new countries becoming part of the EU, seven of which being part of the former Eastern bloc. With the enlargement towards the East, the EU, as Delanty points out, is “at the decisive point of moving beyond postnationality to an encounter with multiple civilizational forms,” (2003, 10), multiple histories and competing visions of European integration, turning the “unity-in-diversity” paradigm into a huge challenge. European cultural identity has become increasingly controversial, culture remaining an ambiguous term in most debates on European identity as well as and in European institutions. This paper focuses on the idea that culture in Europe is acquiring a new status with potentially transformative powers, and that addressed conveniently by the European institutions it may become a means of bridging competing views of cultural integration.  Addressing the “2014-2020 Creative Europe” programme, the paper discusses the transformative potentialities of its goals: the promote of “smart, sustainable and inclusive growth”, and the contribution to “high employment, high productivity, and high social cohesion.”