Title: New agendas? Culture and citizenship in EU policy
Abstract: Abstract If the liberal tradition considered citizenship mostly as a legal status entailing both rights and duties, opposing views from communitarian or republican theorists privilege its substantive dimensions. Social equality is no longer configured exclusively in terms of material redistribution, they argue, but also through the recognition of cultural difference. Whether related to cultural identity or the empowerment of public agency, citizenship is increasingly couched in cultural terms. Taking recourse to political theory, this paper analyses the connections between culture and citizenship in policy documents by the European Union (EU). It identifies three 'semantic clusters', which it discusses in more detail: the ontological, the intercultural and the participatory. If the first harnesses culture to address the EU's 'legitimacy deficit' by promoting a European demos, the second shows how these are complemented with new policy concerns emerging in the context of transnational migration. The third in turn focuses on culture as a platform for citizens' agency through participation in political and deliberative processes. Keywords: citizenshipcultural policyEuropean Union Acknowledgements This paper has benefited greatly from comments and references offered by members of the European Research Group at the Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge. Thanks are also due to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Responsibility for this version rests with me. Notes 1. If the paper makes occasional reference to the 'European Community' (EC), it does so to designate the integration process prior to the establishment of the EU in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. It should be noted that it was instituted as the 'European Economic Community' by the Treaty of Rome in 1957 with the principal aim of creating a common market; it remains part of the EU under the designation 'European Community'. 2. Under the new Lisbon Treaty (2007), the unanimity principle is finally deleted from Article 151. If the Treaty comes into force in 2009 as originally expected remains, however, unclear (at least at the time of writing), given the Irish rejection of the Treaty in the referendum held on 12 June 2008. 3. This translates into an annual expense of 13 cents per European citizen, as the European Forum for Arts and Heritage (EFAH), now called CultureActionEurope, argues (see http://www.cultureactioneurope.org/; last accessed 11 January 2009). As Sandell points out, with reference to a 1993 independent report, the vast majority (83%) of funding for culture in the EU is allocated through structural funds and other non‐cultural programmes. These, however, tend to go towards joint actions, infrastructural support, or regional development support (Gordon Citation2007, footnote 1). 4. For a thoughtful and topical discussion of the effectiveness of cultural policy in fulfilling government goals given the methodological and conceptual difficulties associated with it, see Clive Gray, 'Managing Cultural Policy: Pitfalls and Prospects' (forthcoming) with Public Administration. I want to thank the author for providing me with a copy of this text in advance of publication. 5. In an extraordinarily cautious wording indicating the sensitivity of the issue, the Heads of Government pledge to facilitate the 'examination of the advisability of undertaking joint action to protect, promote and safeguard the cultural heritage' (Gray, forthcoming, 3.3.). 6. As Elspeth Guild has argued, the citizen can only access the substantial rights that have come with Union citizenship when her or she goes abroad, becoming 'migrants' in another Member State. Union rights thus 'straddle the traditional idea of the relationship of the citizen with the State … and the concept of an immigrant as a person excluded from the relationship of the State and its citizen' (Guild Citation2005, p. 103). Rights provisions have also expanded with the 1989 Charter of Social Rights and the Charter of Fundamental Human Rights (2000). 7. In this view, the Council of the European Union (the council of ministers of the member states for given legislative areas) combines legislative and government powers, while the European Commission, as a politically independent collegial institution that is not directly elected yet prepares and implements the legislative instruments adopted by the Council and the EP, lacks democratic legitimacy. 8. As the failed Draft Constitutional Treaty had it in 2003, 'Europe is a continent that has brought forth civilisation; […] its inhabitants, arriving in successive waves from earliest times, have gradually developed the values underlying humanism: equality of persons, freedom, respect for reason' (European Convention Citation2003, p. 3). While usually rather in terms of an unspecified 'cultural heritage', exceptionally even as a 'collective consciousness' (CEC Citation1987), the paradigm has established itself as the foundational 'myth‐motor' (Assmann Citation1992, Sloterdijk Citation1994, Stråth Citation2000) of most Community discourse. 9. The CoE, with currently 47 member countries, is a separate institution from the EU, although all EU member states are members. It makes recommendations, commissions research, and forms opinions that often have significance influence on EU legislation, yet it has no legislative power itself. Note that the articulation of and policy debate on 'intercultural dialogue' is another area in which the CoE has been path‐breaking. 10. It has been argued that popular rejections, such as the Danish no‐vote to the Maastricht Treaty, the Irish rejection of the Treaty of Nice (both later overturned), or the French and Dutch no‐votes to the Constitution (if offset by the approval of Spain and Luxembourg) were mainly due to domestic concerns rather than a rejection of EU integration. The increasingly pervasive debate about the EU's 'democratic' or 'legitimacy deficit' in academic, media and policy circles might be more of an indicator of the changing climate. Nonetheless, public support for EU integration can no longer be taken for granted, as the Irish rejection of the Lisbon Treaty has just demonstrated. 11. This argument, chiefly represented by Yasemin Soysal's Citation1994 study, has received substantial criticism for treating universal personhood as a form of citizenship. This elision, it has been argued, obscures the distinction between the two rights regimes and the particular importance of the latter for immigrant integration (Joppke Citation1999, cf. Shafir Citation2004). It is beyond the scope of this paper to follow this dispute in detail. 12. Since 1999, the former DG X has become the Directorate General for Education and Culture (DG EAC). Alongside Education and Culture, this DG also houses the unit 'Citizenship'. 13. As Christopher Gordon put it recently, the EU's political agendas continue to eclipse 'the sector's own essential needs' (Gordon Citation2007, 8.1.). 14. Currently funded under the Community action programme to promote bodies active at European level in the field of culture (Decision No 792/2004/EC).
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-02-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 35
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