Abstract
This chapter examines the EU Cultural Diplomacy in the wake of the 2016 Joint Communication and the 2017 adoption of a strategy for international cultural relations. It identifies opportunities, but more pertinently the constraints on the development of a European strategy for international cultural relations and cultural diplomacy. In doing so, it specifically looks into the institutional design that underpins the current attempts to develop a strategy for intercultural relations. The chapter identifies three types of constraints: structural (politico-economic context), ideational (defining the appropriate normative agenda for ICR-CD), and agential (the role of people and institutional agents). These big picture constraints cast an immediate policy shadow that houses three practical problems: How does the EU: (i) overcome the competence problem in the policy-making relationship between the member states and Brussels; (ii) how does it resolve the perennial coordination problem; (iii) how does it address the funding problem? In what is a more an applied exercise in public policy than an academic/scholarly paper, it attempts to provide insight into the resolution of these problems.
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Notes
- 1.
A disclaimer: I know that some colleagues in the cultural relations stakeholder community with whom I engage see my views as negative. This is to misunderstand my views. I want nothing more than for the strategy to succeed. I am sympathetic to the EU policy of enhancing external cultural engagement . As an old liberal internationalist (a cosmopolitan in the pejorative language of the current populist era), anything that enhances global cooperation and dialogue is something to which I am instinctively drawn. My concern is that a failure to acknowledge the contextual constraints on policy minimises the prospects of making a success of the strategy.
- 2.
‘Cultural domain’ is used inclusively here to comprise a broad spectrum of activity and effects from the arts (film, theatre, music), heritage (artefacts and icons) through to language, ideas, beliefs and the support of cross national teaching, research and higher education in the arts, humanities, social sciences and science.
- 3.
For recent methodologies and studies in the application of soft power see Mclory, n.d. The monthly periodical Monocle provides a glossy global briefing covering the soft power influences of international affairs, business, culture and design. See https://monocle.com/.
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Higgott, R. (2020). EU Cultural Diplomacy: A Contextual Analysis of Constraints and Opportunities. In: Carta, C., Higgott, R. (eds) Cultural Diplomacy in Europe. The European Union in International Affairs. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21544-6_2
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