There is something increasingly paradoxical about the place of culture in European political discourse. Rarely has its importance been articulated with such consistency, and rarely has the distance between that recognition and the structures governing cultural life appeared so difficult to reconcile. Culture is described as indispensable to democracy, social cohesion, economic development, European identity and international cooperation. It has become part of the vocabulary through which the European Union explains not only what it values, but also what it wishes to become. Yet the institutional recognition of culture seems to coexist quite comfortably with its continued dependence on unstable funding arrangements, fragmented governance structures and policy priorities established largely outside the cultural field. This contradiction raises a question that goes beyond the familiar demand for greater public investment. If European institutions have already acknowledged the importance of culture, what exactly has that acknowledgement changed? More importantly, what would have to change for recognition to become something other than a political statement?
The European Commission's Culture Compass, introduced in 2025, represents an attempt to establish a more coherent strategic framework for European cultural policy. Its ambitions must be understood within a broader transformation of the European political agenda, increasingly organised around competitiveness, strategic autonomy, technological sovereignty, security and democratic resilience. Culture is expected to contribute to these objectives, and there are legitimate reasons why it should. Artistic and cultural practices shape collective memory, facilitate public debate, generate knowledge and sustain forms of social interaction that cannot be reduced to commercial exchange. Cultural and creative industries also constitute an important part of European economic activity. The problem does not lie in acknowledging these relationships, but in the direction of the argument through which cultural value is established. When culture is defended primarily because it strengthens democracy, stimulates innovation, supports tourism or contributes to competitiveness, its political legitimacy becomes conditional upon the usefulness attributed to it by other policy areas. The question is no longer what cultural activity makes possible on its own terms, but how successfully it can demonstrate its contribution to objectives whose definition remains external to it.
This distinction is fundamental because public policy never merely distributes resources among activities whose value has already been established. It also participates in defining what counts as valuable. Funding criteria, evaluation frameworks, strategic priorities and administrative classifications influence the practices that institutions can sustain, the forms of knowledge that receive recognition and the professional behaviours that become necessary for survival. A cultural organisation repeatedly required to demonstrate innovation may gradually orient its work towards activities that can be presented as innovative, regardless of whether novelty constitutes its most meaningful contribution. An artistic institution evaluated primarily through audience growth may find it increasingly difficult to justify work that requires prolonged experimentation or addresses smaller communities. A research project whose relevance must be explained through competitiveness may learn to describe its intellectual contribution in terms borrowed from industrial policy. None of these adaptations necessarily involves explicit political interference. They emerge through the ordinary functioning of institutional systems, which is precisely why their consequences deserve examination. Cultural policy does not need to prohibit an activity in order to influence its possibilities; it can do so by determining the conditions under which that activity becomes institutionally intelligible.
The negotiations surrounding the European Union's next Multiannual Financial Framework offer a particularly revealing illustration of this problem. The Commission's proposal for AgoraEU, the programme intended to bring together support for culture, media and democracy during 2028–2034, envisaged approximately €8.6 billion. The Irish Presidency's negotiating box of October 2026 proposed reducing that amount to €6 billion, a decrease of roughly 30%, while the European Parliament advocated a substantially higher allocation. These figures represent negotiating positions rather than a definitive budgetary outcome, but the controversy surrounding them is significant. Culture Action Europe and its partners have argued that the proposed reduction is disproportionate and inconsistent with the political commitments made to culture, independent media and civil society. The argument has considerable force, particularly when the potential savings are considered alongside the responsibilities attributed to these sectors. Nevertheless, the contradiction cannot be resolved simply by identifying a discrepancy between political declarations and budgetary figures. Public budgets necessarily reflect competing priorities, and cultural expenditure cannot be exempted from scrutiny merely because its objectives are socially desirable. The deeper question concerns the standards through which priorities are compared. If cultural programmes are evaluated predominantly as discretionary expenditure while industrial and technological programmes are understood as strategic investment, the resulting distribution of resources reflects not only financial constraints but also a hierarchy of political assumptions.
The debate becomes even more complex when culture is expected to find its place within programmes whose primary objectives lie elsewhere. The campaign #NamePlaceFund, supported by European organisations representing culture, higher arts education and artistic research, has sought explicit recognition, identifiable programme structures and dedicated financial resources within Horizon Europe and the European Competitiveness Fund. Its demands reveal a distinction frequently obscured by the language of interdisciplinarity. The inclusion of culture within a broad research or innovation framework does not necessarily guarantee that cultural research can compete under appropriate conditions. A discipline may be formally eligible for funding while remaining marginal to the programme's priorities, unfamiliar to its evaluators or insufficiently represented in its assessment procedures. Artistic research provides a particularly instructive example because its methodological development has not always been accompanied by equivalent institutional recognition. Its contribution to knowledge may emerge through artistic practice, experimentation, performance or critical reflection, and its value cannot invariably be translated into the categories through which technological innovation is assessed. The question is not whether artistic research should be exempt from rigorous evaluation. It is whether European research policy possesses the conceptual and institutional capacity to evaluate it rigorously without requiring it to become something else.
These difficulties are partly connected to the limited and uneven competences of the European Union in cultural affairs. Under the treaties, the Union supports, coordinates and supplements the cultural policies of Member States rather than replacing them with a harmonised European system. This distribution of responsibility is not simply an administrative inconvenience. It reflects the historical, linguistic and institutional diversity of European cultural life, as well as legitimate concerns about concentrating authority over cultural expression. Greater European coordination does not automatically constitute better cultural governance, particularly where it risks weakening the plurality of institutions and traditions through which cultural life develops. At the same time, the division of competences can produce a persistent ambiguity concerning responsibility. European institutions articulate common ambitions, national governments retain substantial control over cultural policy and funding, and cultural organisations are expected to operate across overlapping frameworks whose objectives do not always coincide. When these arrangements fail to provide adequate professional conditions or sustainable institutional support, responsibility can become difficult to identify. Everyone recognises the importance of culture, but the obligations arising from that recognition remain dispersed.
It is within this context that the second edition of Culture Action Europe's State of Culture, published in October 2026, introduces the concept of agency. The report asks what culture is actually allowed to do now that its value has become so widely acknowledged. Its underlying argument is that the cultural sector should not merely respond to policies formulated elsewhere, but participate in shaping the structures and directions of European development. This is an important conceptual shift, although the notion of agency also requires critical examination. Who possesses the authority to speak for the cultural sector, and through which mechanisms is that authority established? European networks provide indispensable spaces for coordination, advocacy and the exchange of knowledge, but the cultural field is neither socially homogeneous nor institutionally unified. It encompasses independent artists, public institutions, private enterprises, educational organisations, grassroots initiatives and professional associations whose interests may differ substantially. Their capacity to participate in European policymaking is also unequal. Organisations with permanent staff, international connections and administrative resources can contribute to consultations and working groups more readily than individuals whose professional lives are characterised by intermittent employment and financial insecurity. A demand for greater sectoral agency must therefore be accompanied by an examination of representation within the sector itself. Otherwise, the pursuit of influence may reinforce the visibility of those already equipped to exercise it.
The problem of representation leads to a more uncomfortable question concerning professional responsibility. Cultural organisations frequently defend their social importance while operating through practices that deserve scrutiny: inadequate remuneration, dependence on unpaid work, opaque decision-making, weak financial planning or governance structures insufficiently equipped to manage public responsibilities. These practices are not universal, nor can they be explained independently of chronic underfunding. Nevertheless, economic pressure does not eliminate institutional responsibility, just as the existence of public support does not guarantee professional integrity. A sector seeking a more influential role in European policymaking must be capable of examining the contradictions within its own structures. Professionalisation should not be understood as the replacement of artistic judgement with managerial efficiency, nor as the uncritical adoption of corporate methods. It should involve the development of institutions capable of protecting artistic objectives through responsible administration, transparent governance, appropriate expertise and fair professional relationships. The credibility of cultural advocacy depends partly on whether the principles defended at European level are reflected in the everyday conduct of cultural organisations.
This responsibility is reciprocal. It would be contradictory to demand greater institutional maturity from organisations while financing them through mechanisms that systematically undermine their capacity to develop it. The continued predominance of short-term project funding creates precisely this difficulty. Project grants can support experimentation, international cooperation and activities that would otherwise remain inaccessible, but they do not necessarily sustain the organisations responsible for delivering them. Administrative requirements, repeated application cycles and narrowly defined indicators can absorb resources that might otherwise support artistic development, research, professional training and institutional continuity. The emerging European discussion of private finance, philanthropy and public-private partnerships may offer additional possibilities, but financial diversification should not be confused with the transfer of public responsibility to the market. Private resources can complement public investment; they cannot be assumed to reproduce its objectives, particularly where artistic value is not readily convertible into commercial returns or institutional visibility. A sustainable cultural policy requires a more demanding understanding of investment, one capable of recognising that the infrastructure of cultural life consists not only of buildings and projects, but also of professional knowledge, organisational continuity and relationships developed over time.
The Commission's Work Programme for 2027 makes the broader political context particularly visible. Its agenda is dominated by economic competitiveness, regulatory simplification, defence, security, technological development and democratic resilience. Culture appears explicitly in connection with the opportunities and risks of artificial intelligence for the cultural and creative sectors, while AgoraEU and Horizon Europe remain among the legislative proposals identified as priorities in the accompanying annexes. This does not demonstrate that cultural policy has been abandoned, nor would it be reasonable to expect a general Commission work programme to reproduce every sectoral initiative. It does, however, illustrate the framework within which cultural interests must increasingly be articulated. The challenge for European cultural policy is not to isolate culture from the political, economic and technological transformations taking place around it. Such isolation would be neither possible nor desirable. The challenge is to prevent integration from becoming subordination: to ensure that culture participates in defining European priorities rather than being recognised principally for its capacity to serve them.
There is an important difference between asking institutions to take culture seriously and asking what taking culture seriously should entail. The first question seeks recognition; the second demands an examination of political authority, financial responsibility, professional practice and institutional design. It also requires the cultural sector to abandon the assumption that the intrinsic value of artistic activity automatically establishes the legitimacy of every organisation, funding request or policy position advanced in its name. Cultural value and institutional effectiveness are related, but they are not interchangeable. The existence of cultural rights does not eliminate the need for accountability, just as the necessity of accountability does not justify reducing artistic value to measurable outputs. A mature European cultural policy would have to sustain these distinctions rather than resolving them through convenient declarations of consensus.
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the current European debate is that culture has become increasingly visible at precisely the moment when the political conditions of that visibility are being renegotiated. The language of recognition has advanced faster than the structures through which recognition acquires practical consequences. Yet this should not lead to the conclusion that cultural policy requires only stronger declarations or larger budgets. Resources matter, profoundly, but their significance depends on the institutional purposes they serve and the relationships they establish. The future of European cultural policy will be determined not only by how much money is allocated to culture, but also by who defines its objectives, who participates in those decisions, how responsibility is distributed and what forms of cultural knowledge are considered legitimate.
Europe has recognised culture. The question now is whether that recognition will remain a means of incorporating cultural activity into an existing hierarchy of political priorities, or become an opportunity to reconsider the hierarchy itself. For the cultural sector, the corresponding challenge is equally demanding: to claim a greater role in shaping Europe's future while demonstrating the intellectual independence, institutional responsibility and capacity for self-criticism that such a role requires. Recognition may open the door to political participation. It cannot, on its own, determine what happens once the door has been opened.
Sources
European Commission (2025). A Culture Compass for Europe. COM(2025) 785 final. EUR-Lex.
European Commission (2025). Proposal for a Regulation establishing the AgoraEU programme for the period 2028–2034. COM(2025) 550 final. EUR-Lex.
Council of the European Union (2026). Draft EU Work Plan for Culture 2027–2030. Council document 15072/26. Council document.
European Commission (2026). Commission Work Programme 2027: European Union – standing up for one another. COM(2026) 710 final, including Annexes I–IV.
Polivtseva, E. (2026). State of Culture Report: Second Edition. Culture Action Europe. Culture Action Europe.
Culture Action Europe (2026). A 30% cut to AgoraEU? Dubious savings with major consequences. Culture Action Europe.
European Court of Auditors (2026). Opinion 11/2026 on the proposed AgoraEU programme. European Court of Auditors.
