Dragan Kla Ice u Enlargement 2004

7/28/2019 Dragan Kla Ice u Enlargement 2004

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This article has been published in June 2004 in the SICA magazine in Amsterdam, in

Dutch and English

EU Enlargement

NOT JUST AN EXPANDED MARKET FOR CULTURE

By Dragan Klaic

On countless feasts EU enlargement generated much of celebratory fog. After this fog is

dispelled, it becomes possible to explore the cultural perspectives of this new phase ofEuropean integration. The EU market, thus also the cultural market offers 450

consumers. But what do new member states bring in as their specific cultural

constellation?

A tremendous avalanche of political phrases and truisms, uttered by the politicians andthe media about the Enlargement, had little impact on the vast majority of the old and

new EU citizens who remained in the best case indifferent, badly informed and quite

ignorant about their fellow Europeans. In the last 2-3 years of legislative and politicalpreparations of the Enlargement, culture has been mentioned rarely. The EU Treaty

precludes any form of harmonization of the national cultural policies and obliges the

member states only to open their territory to foreign commercial television, something

they have done already years ago. The non-commercial cultural operators already hadaccess to the Culture 2000 subsidies of the European Commission, in collaboration with

their foreign peers. The other cultural matters remain firmly a national business, not anEU business.

Steady clients, demoralized and impoverished

In most acceding countries the national cultural systems have not been altered

significantly since the ushering of the multiparty democracy and market economy.

Cultural expenditure takes various percentages of the state budget but says little about

priorities. Even per capita spending in culture (between eur 10 and 90 p/y) does notindicate the quality and efficiency of cultural subsidies and often hides major investment

in representative objects (a museum, a national library, an opera house renovation) rather

than expenditure in regular cultural output. Over the years, subsides were reduced acrossthe board and lost ground to the inflation while the method of their distribution remained

by and large unchanged. Old steady institutional clients are eternal clients, it seems. They

receive the subsidy chiefly because they exist and because they used to receive it in thepast and because cultural policy gets regularly confused with the social policy that

strives to keep people on jobs even if they get paid less and less.

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In several countries, national government pushed the financing of culture on the lower

levels of the government, without securing additional means, while in some other

countries the ministry takes responsibility for almost all of the existing culture, fearingthat local and regional authorities, if left alone, wouldnt do anything to sustain it. Some

forms of project financing have been introduced and in few countries (Hungary, Estonia,

Latvia) special funds have been created to distribute incidental subsidies but they remaina breadcrumb of what goes automatically to the established institutions.

Many established institutions lost a sense of purpose and direction, feel demoralized,abandoned by their most creative staff members while the most incompetent ones keep

hanging on. Commercialization is the consequence, visible in the light entertaining

repertory of the subsidized companies that seek to regain at the box office what they

dont any receive longer from the Ministry. Or the disco club operating in the cellar of amuseum, because extra space is suddenly a precious source of income. In many

impoverished cultural institutions (which now have to pay the real cost of heating and

electricity) every square meter has been sublet to some small business in order to

generate some extra income to the steady employees.

False expectations, widening gaps

Initial wild expectations from sponsorship have pilfered out even though in Central and

Eastern Europe new capitalists seek to achieve quick brand recognition, so in someinstances sponsors contributions are higher than 5-6% that is a standard in Western

Europe. Sponsorship is entangled with corruption and dubious ethic and rests on private

connections rather than any policy. Exceptionally, a recently established arts and business

council in Hungary seeks to bring the communication of those two worlds to anotherlevel of mutual understanding and transparency. Much expectation is directed at cultural

tourism but that is a long term trajectory that demands substantial investment in tourist

infrastructure, in people competences and in ruined, long neglected cultural heritageobjects - something that the structural funds of the EU could improve in due time. For

the time being, Prague, Budapest and Cracow have benefited a lot from the tourist inflow

and some Finish tourists see a musical in Tallinn between the rounds of cheap drinks thatbring them there in the first place, but rare are those who explore the splendor of

Secession architecture in Riga, follow the trace of former synagogues in Hungary, or look

at frescos and icons in Bulgarian monasteries.

The wide gap in the quality of cultural provisions between the capitals and perhaps a few

large cities on one side and the rest of the country on the other has become only wider.

Even in small countries there is less artistic mobility than in the times of socialismbecause who would pay the real cost of travel and displacement? There is a steady artistic

and intellectual brain drain from smaller places to big places and from the country to

abroad but no one has statistics how many musicians, dancers and visual artists have leftthe 8 acceding countries, plus the EU candidates Bulgaria and Romania, in the last 15

years. Rare are the enthusiasts who went the other way, like a group of artists taking over

a small railway station in Slovakia to make it into a cultural center, or Borderland

Foundation in Szejne, in the northeast Poland, engaged to revive the trans-border

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intercultural traditions on the triangle of Poland, Belorussia and Lithuania. Many

provincial theater companies keep sliding into insignificance, museums with old shabby

permanent exhibits cant attract no one, concert halls that provide few concerts and evenless heating in the winter months are signaling a protracted agony of a large part of

cultural infrastructure. But generalizations are dangerous, differences in resources and

professional level of operation are marked not only among the acceding countries butamong particular regions and cities. A visitor to the Gdansk (PL) city theater, with its

huge output, generated by the turbo director Maciej Novak and his team, or to Tartu City

Museum (EST) will be impressed by commitment, quality, and diversity of programs.And some international festivals popped up in small places that were never thought of as

a cultural bulwark: Nitra (Slovakia), Sibiu (Romania), Gyr (Hungary), Rakvere

(Estonia)

New players internationally oriented

There is fortunately a new, alternative cultural infrastructure that has emerged in the last

15 years everywhere in Central and Eastern Europe, consisting of festivals, galleries,cultural, artistic and media centers, studios, producing, programming, supporting and

developing organizations, individuals and teams with new initiatives and ambitions, ,spaces with scarce but precious facilities that regroup artists and a new, young public.

This wide net of adventurous and dynamic forces has emerged thanks to much of hardly

paid free lance work, occasional project subsides of the authorities, little bit ofsponsorship and donations of foreign cultural centers and embassies and a few widely

engaged private foundations. Among the latter, the investment of the Open Society

Instutute network of foundations, supplied by the US speculator-philanthropist billionaire

George Soros surpasses what all others could achieve.

Soros had a sense of occasion and a vision so that for many years after 1989 he kept

pumping hundreds of millions dollars of his own money each year in the region, hopingto help build civil society with its autonomous institutions, human competences, implicit

rules of behavior and standards of integrity. His investment supported the emergence of

an innovative, alternative and critical culture, enhanced mobility, provided trainings,internships, collaborative opportunities across the borders and in some countries

effectively combated the trend of cultural centralization and cultural conservativism and

nationalism. But Soros has came to a wrong conclusions that the acceding countries do

not need his input any longer. He closed his foundations no other philanthropicinitiative stood in the wings to pick up the tab and the governments wont be able to do

much compensatory funding either. Moreover, much competence, know how and

procedures of local staff, boards and advisory committees of Soros foundations has beenwasted.

The alternative cultural sector found much encouragement and support abroad, amonginternational networks and their members. While established cultural institutions found it

hard to maneuver internationally without the guiding hand of the state and felt

demoralized and pauperized, new initiatives recognized that they can ensure their own

survival through international partnerships, pooling of resources, sharing of risks, market

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an inspiration, a frame to gather artistic impulses and achieve trans-sectorial connections

that are less obvious in the well segmentarized Dutch cultural world.

Dutch EU presidency without a cultural initiative

EU did not see fit to great the joining of ten new national cultural systems with anyspecial welcome gift and even after the enlargement the cultural means of the European

Commission remain at the trifle eur 33 million per year. Even structural funds of the EU

have only one tenth to spend on every new EU citizen than what was available in theprevious enlargement rounds for each citizen of Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland.

This enlargement is to be achieved on a shoestring budget despite crying needs and gaps.

The Dutch government assumes the half-yearly EU presidency on July 1 with noparticular cultural agenda, package or initiative, directed at the institutions of the EU.

Uncertainties over the EU Constitution, growing disputes about the EU budget after 2006

and the differences in the assessment of a possible Turkish candidacy play here a curbing

role. Cabinet Balkenende 2 is in general not very EU oriented and remains obsessed, asthe recent SER critique states, with countrys net contribution to the to the EU budget.

The ministries of Culture (OCenW) and Foreign Affairs chose to initiate a culturalseason of Dutch cooperation with the acceding countries under the title Thinking

Forward. While this event series will certainly bring some new insights and might

stimulate further cultural cooperation, one would like to see a reaffirmation of the role ofthe country as cultural free haven (vrijhaven) and a place of hospitality, multilateral

encounters, dialogue and collaboration. Whatever the government invests in network

development, in trans-border mobility and protracted forms of cooperation, led by the

autonomous cultural organizations, works better than expensive and often superfluousself-representational activities, sometimes driven by the anachronistic concept such as

Holland promotion, Nederlands image forming, Put the Nederland on the map.

They belong to the old Cold War models of public diplomacy.

D. Klaic 2004

(Dr Dragan Klaic is Permanent Fellow of Felix Meritis and President of the European

Forum for the Arts and Heritage.)

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Dragan Kla Ice u Enlargement 2004