THE ARTS / European culture - What is it? Arts events are fun while they last, but the EU will not develop a shared culture until it has its own TV station, writes Enda O'Doherty.
The cultural programme of Ireland's EU presidency, now just beyond its halfway point, has two aims: first, the promotion of Irish arts and artists abroad; second, the creation of links between artists and audiences in Ireland and those in the 10 states which join the EU on May 1st.
It is impossible to be against such a programme. Everyone likes a trip, and certainly the trips here of Hungarian folk musicians, Polish street performers, Lithuanian chamber artists and Czech dancers will add to our gaiety during these six months. But what then? Does an exchange programme of this kind leave any lasting impression? And will our enthusiastic "showcasing" of native artists and musicians, or the organisation of ambitious public events and celebrations, lead to any more elevated conclusion than the observation of some foreign journalist (yet again) that "the Irish certainly know how to throw a party"?
Certainly things could have been worse. The cultural face we have chosen to show to Europe on this occasion is on the whole a fresh and imaginative one, with little sign of the traditional staples of bawneen, booze and ballads or - God between us and all harm - craic. The visits of artists from central Europe and elsewhere have also given us a glimpse of cultures of which we have been almost wholly ignorant.
But from the point of view of the Irish presidency the question is: how many building blocks for the future will have emerged at the end of our period minding the house? If, as I suspect, the answer is precious few, the fault does not necessarily lie with the Minister for Arts, John O'Donoghue, or his department, but with the fact that the idea of a European cultural policy within the framework of the EU and its institutions is a relatively new and somewhat problematic one.
The EU has had a competency in cultural matters only since 1992. The relevant text in Community law, Article 151, states that "the Community shall contribute to the flowering of the cultures of the member-states, while respecting their national and regional diversity and at the same time bringing the common cultural heritage to the fore".
The article also pledges the Community (now Union) to encourage co-operation between member-states and, "if necessary", to support and supplement their action in some areas, including "improvement of the knowledge and dissemination of the culture and history of the European peoples".
It is not difficult to see that there is a slight tension here between two ideas of culture, the first of which sees it as operating predominantly within a national (or even regional) context while the second emphasises a putative common European culture. There is a further genuflection to the idea of culture as an essentially national affair in the suggestion that the Community should act alongside individual governments only "if necessary". The stated commitment to "supplement" national efforts to promote knowledge of "the culture and history of the European peoples" presupposes the existence of such efforts in the first place.
In practice, the EU has tended to avoid philosophical questions and concentrate on what it is good at and has experience of: assessing projects and awarding grants.
The Culture 2000 programme, for example, has been spending €167 million in the promotion of cultural diversity, creativity and exchanges between those active in the cultural sector throughout the EU. Other major cultural programmes operate in education and vocational training, the audio-visual sector, technological research and social and human development.
What is not much in evidence is a real commitment to the notion of common cultural heritage. Indeed, there often emerges in the well-intentioned official pronouncements of senior European statesmen or earnest Eurocrats a certain floundering before the whole notion of culture, raising the suspicion that while they know it is a good thing, they are not quite sure what it is for. So there is a weary sense that they are going through the motions, as shown, for example, by repeated references to the most obvious of cultural icons, such as Goethe, Shakespeare and Beethoven.
In an article last year in the Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, Carl Henrik Fredriksson bemoaned what he saw as the lack of a common European intellectual and cultural space, in spite of growing integration at economic, social and political levels.
"Swedish thinkers write for Swedish readers. French intellectuals write for the French and Hungarian ones for the Hungarians. And worse, they write almost exclusively on Swedish, French or Hungarian subjects respectively," wrote Fredriksson.
This situation, he argued, was unsustainable and, in the long term, destructive of the advances made on other European levels. He quoted the Spanish sociologist, Manuel Castells: "The technology is new, the economy is global, the state is a European network which is in relation with other international actors - while the identity of the people is national, or, in certain cases, local or regional. In a democratic society, such a structural and cognitive dissonance could prove untenable. Even were it possible to integrate Europe without a common European identity, every great crisis, in Europe or in one of its member-states, could provoke an implosion, with unforeseeable consequences."
Fredriksson did not just call for a common cultural space but engaged in an effort to create one through his editorship of Eurozine (www.eurozine.com), an Internet magazine which draws its contributions from a Europe-wide network of some 50 reviews and periodicals (none of them Irish) and endeavours to publish each item in at least two languages. It must be said, however, that Eurozine operates on a relatively high, and sometimes rarefied, plane.
Fredriksson is aware of this problem and has called on Europe's leading national newspapers to complement his efforts by providing, at a more accessible intellectual level, "a European public space which, through translations, both of language and context, would be capable of installing 'foreign' thinkers and ways of thinking in a space where Swedish, French or Hungarian readers would feel at ease".
Fredriksson's ideas are both admirable and feasible, but arguably newspapers are not the most appropriate medium through which to tackle the problem of "dissonance" between Europe's leading political and bureaucratic actors and its people.
Politicians and higher civil servants move comfortably (none more so than our own) in the European network that is now our reality; but at the same time they seem to be leaving the citizens behind, uncomprehending, emotionally uninvolved and increasingly prone to episodes of sour rejection of what they see as the latest airy project of "Europeanist" utopianism.
Pro-Europe campaigner Adrian Langan and others have argued that public apathy or hostility to Europe is largely due to failures of communication, in particular to the Eurocrats' failure to communicate what they are doing and what they wish to achieve in sufficiently simple language. But there is another failure of communication: the failure in each state to convey any sense of the realities of other Europeans, to show the human faces of the EU's 450 million citizens, or to engage a national audience with the rich and complex texture of European life, past and present.
It is strange that the ever-expanding "choice" that commercial interests in the television sector feel we require (a choice, in fact, between multiple identical goods) does not yet allow the possibility of watching a pan-European channel of culture, documentary, cinema, drama and current affairs. Former French prime minister Lionel Jospin called for such a channel last year. It already exists in embryo form: in terms of subject matter in the Franco-German station Arte, and in terms of the necessary imagination and flair in BBCFour.
Such a project would obviously require European funding and would have a traditional public service remit. Intellectually, it should probably be pitched principally at the audience the British dub "upper middlebrow". Such a channel might begin to fulfil some of the Article 151 functions that the EU's current piecemeal cultural policy fails to meet. At the very least it would provide greater popular access to the variety and richness of European experience and an alternative to the ghastly simulacrum of reality constructed by Anglo-American TV entertainment.
With the advent of a community of 25 states and 450 million citizens and the corresponding political imperative that we must get to know one another better if we are to cohere and progress, it is surely high time for the EU to cast aside its inhibitions in the sphere of cultural policy.
