Cultural policy, cultural heritage, and regional development (European Union)

Along with globalization has come an unprecedented assertion of individual identity. Yet, an emerging viewpoint emphasizes that economics and culture are the most powerful forces shaping human behavior and intrinsic dimensions of successful development strategies.; This dissertation examines the European Union (E.U.) cultural policy, which has become an official field of E.U. action since the Treaty on European Union entered into force in November 1993. This research places the E.U. cultural policy model in perspective vis-à-vis U.S. cultural policy and focuses on E.U. cultural policy from a E.U. regional policy viewpoint through a comparative analysis of two series of pilot projects launched by the European Commission in the field of cultural heritage. The first project started in September 1995 under the supervision of Directorate-General XVI for Regional Policy and Cohesion (DG XVI); the other one was launched in March 1996 under the supervision of Directorate-General X for Information, Communication, Culture, Audiovisual Media (DG X).; The analysis shows how E.U. institutions, through the promotion of a common European cultural heritage, have increasingly used culture as a way of creating a common European identity and history that should promote the European Union as a supranational level of government to E.U. citizens. However, the comparative analysis of the two case studies reveal that ambivalent ideas about the concepts of culture and cultural heritage produce some outcomes that contradict the stated objectives of respecting regional diversity and strongly favor regions that have traditionally been centers of established power and high culture. E.U. institutions could learn from the history of U.S. cultural policy at the federal level, which reveals that far from being inherently positive and harmless, cultural policy can lead to major crises such as the “Culture wars” of the early 1990s. In the European geopolitical context, the emergence of such conflicts would be frightening.