The EU “Creative Europe” program: what’s next?

Creative Europe is a programme that is to run from 2014 to 2020. It’s a brand. And it brings together the feel of European cultural and media policy. And it’s about how the European Union intervenes in culture. And the two strands are the audiovisual policy strand, which deals with film and television. That’s known as the media programme– or used to be. And then there’s the culture programme, which is much wider. It consists of questions around cultural diversity, intercultural dialogue, the mobility of artists, circulation of works, performances, visual arts, literature, heritage. Now, increasingly, the cultural programme has been seen as contributing to the European economy.

And probably one of the best known examples of the culture programme is the setting up of the European cities of culture designation, which is doing the rounds of different European capitals and secondary cities as well. If I now turn to the media programme, this is long established, and it really has its origins right at the beginning of the European project in beliefs in the cultural impact of television. And this is really training professionals, developing production projects, distributing films and audiovisual programmes, and supporting film festivals. And the thing that really has provoked that is competition with mainly US films, which have dominated in the European box office.

And it really began to establish itself in the 1980s when television was privatised and very large imports of US TV programmes were being undertaken by European states. And this began to cause a certain amount of cultural alarm.

I think something like the creative Europe programme will continue. It may not be called creative Europe. And I think it will continue to have a media dimension, and it will also continue to have a wide range of cultural practises on the lines that it has had already. The big challenge, though, to the future of the creative Europe project is the commission’s decision to pursue setting up a digital single market– that is, a market in which the territorial dimension effectively becomes superseded by the possibilities of transmitting across the whole of the European space and consuming across the whole of the European space, which is going to have very major implications for the regimes of intellectual property rights, and I think certainly the circulation of films and television programmes.

So yes, we will have something like creative Europe in new conditions. But in the media field, the digital single market means that there is going to be an increased problem of the regulation of non-linear television as internet-based provision becomes more and more the norm. There’s also going to be an increasing problem of the discoverability of content as more and more large players enter and market power influences greatly what it is that’s made available to the consumer and what it is that’s made available in the most compelling form.

And I think also the big change that’s likely to happen in the next five to 10 years is a gradual crowding out of public service broadcasters in European states by mega corporations that are effectively using the internet as a mode of distribution. So as far as the culture programme goes, doubtless there will continue to be well-meaning exchanges, but I think it’s interesting to reflect right now in our rising atmosphere of suspicion and xenophobia precisely how these cultural exchanges are going to play out.