6 - The horizons of European culture

Summary

Cultural union, along with economic and political union, is one of the aspirations of the EU. From the first gatherings in Switzerland to the Cultural Resolution, with which the 1948 Congress of Europe in The Hague ended, discussions of cultural unity and cultural renewal dominated the postwar European project. In these considerations, the “founding fathers” of the EU were anything but the small-step bureaucrats they are often painted to be. In 1958, looking back on his first year as the first president of the Commission of the EEC, Walter Hallstein set forward his vision for the EC. In “The Unity of European Culture and the Policy of Uniting Europe”, he presented a clear statement on the role of culture in the European project, placing a commonality of culture as the foundation for political and economic aspirations.

In fact, Hallstein suggested that the question of culture is more important than the aspirations of the ECSC or Euratom, which had no possibility of inspiring the populace to commit to the common European project. He echoed in this speech ideas expressed similarly by Robert Schuman, Paul-Henri Spaak, Alcide de Gasperi, Altiero Spinelli, and Winston Churchill. Jacques Delors in 1985, following in Hallstein's footsteps, set forward a cultural policy agenda during his first speech as the head of the European Commission:

The culture industry will tomorrow be one of the biggest industries, a creator of wealth and jobs. Under the terms of the Treaty we do not have the resource to implement a cultural policy; but we are going to try to tackle it along economic lines … We have to build a powerful European culture industry that will enable us to be in control of both the medium and its content, maintaining our standards of civilization and encouraging the creative people amongst us. (Shore 2000: 46)

Yet culture, European culture, and the processes of European cultural unionization have received relatively little attention. The focus on European politics and economics has overshadowed research on European culture.

The importance of culture

A focus on culture is important at this moment during which the European project is fractured: the UK is heading out into the Atlantic, Turkey is aimed eastward, a Eurasian geopolitical trench opens up from the Baltics to the Bosporus, and an EU border regime turns the Mediterranean into a mass grave.