BRIDGING THE COMPETING VIEWS OF EUROPEAN CULTURAL INTEGRATION: THE TRANSFORMATIVE VIEW OF CULTURE AS A MEANS TO PROMOTE GROWTH, EMPLOYMENT AND SOCIAL COHESION

• Main Author: María Luz SUÁREZ CASTIÑEIRA
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Nicolae Titulescu University Publishing House 2018-05-01
• Series: Challenges of the Knowledge Society
• Subjects: Employment; European Culture; European identity; European integration; Unity-in-diversity paradigm
• Online Access: http://cks.univnt.ro/uploads/cks_2018_articles/index.php?dir=6_administrative_and_political_sciences%2F&download=CKS_2018_administrative_and_political_sciences_021.pdf
• ISSN: 2068-7796; 2068-7796

The concept of a European culture became very complex with the enlargement of 2004 towards the East, when the EU, as Delanty pointed out, moved “beyond postnationality to an encounter with multiple civilizational forms,” multiple histories and competing visions of European integration. The “unity-in-diversity” paradigm turned into a huge challenge for the European institutions. On the one hand, achieving a European image of cultural unity without excluding all the local, regional and national cultures is a very complex, if not impossible, task. On the othe hand, culture remains an ambiguous term in European institutions due to the lack of a full-fledged European cultural policy. This paper focuses first on how in the early 1970s the EC/EU started to be concerned with defining the role of culture, and second on how since the year 2000 culture has progressively acquired a new status with potentially transformative powers to bridge the competing views of cultural integration. Programmes, such as the “2014-2020 Creative Europe” programme, focus on culture as a creative accelerator and promotor of different forms of cultural participation and production. Culture generates “smart, sustainable and inclusive growth”, and contributes to “high employment, high productivity, and high social cohesion.”