New European agenda for culture

The Committee on Culture and Education adopted the own-initiative report by Giorgos GRAMMATIKAKIS (S&D, EL) on the new European agenda for culture.

General aspects: Europe is emerging from a severe financial crisis, during which national and regional budgets for culture have, unfortunately, often been among the first to suffer cuts. Faced with growing social inequalities and youth unemployment, rising populism and radicalisation, culture is more important than ever in achieving social cohesion and intercultural dialogue and in guaranteeing citizens’ freedom and diversity of expression, communication, and creation, and in building bridges among individuals.

Europe’s creative and cultural sectors are the EU’s strongest assets representing 4.2 % of the EU’s GDP, create 8.4 million jobs, equal to 3.7 % of total employment in the EU, and are economically resilient, even in times of crisis.

Members welcomed the new agenda for culture and stressed that it represents a huge opportunity to adopt a comprehensive and coherent policy for culture at European level recognised by European citizens and outside the EU.

Members called on the Commission to:

• set up a single EU portal dedicated to cultural heritage, bringing together information from all the EU programmes funding cultural heritage;
• develop new approaches to systematic data collection for all cultural and creative sectors and to ensure that effective statistical codes and more qualitative indicators are used;
• introduce EU scoreboards to measure cultural and media pluralism, to develop indicators and to monitor freedom of artistic expression at European level;
• reinforce the visibility of European cinema in Europe and on a global scale, through promoting the development of European platforms providing access to licensed EU films.

Concerning the priorities of the new agenda, Members welcomed the choice to structure them around three dimensions: social, economic and external, as well as the inclusion of a sector specific approach.

Social aspects: Members welcomed the Commission’s intention to introduce a dedicated action on mobility within Creative Europe, but underlined that this requires an appropriate budget and simplified administrative procedures in order to avoid obstacles, such as those linked to visas, in particular those from third countries. They also called on the Commission to put in place a single portal containing information on all available residency programmes and mobility opportunities. The report called for a guarantee of the right of creative and artistic workers to fair remuneration, contractual agreements and working conditions. In this regard, Member States are called on to adopt comprehensive measures in order to reduce the grey area through harmonisation and improve the contractual conditions of artists and creators across the EU and on a European scale, with respect to collective representation, social security and direct and indirect taxation.

The Commission and the Member States are called on to strengthen the links between culture, art, creation, education, innovation, and artistic research.

Economic aspects: Members stressed that this agenda can only be successful if supported by a significant budgetary increase for Creative Europe and by the development of synergies and interactions with other EU-funded programmes in order to create a holistic, cross-cutting approach to culture. While welcoming the Commission’s intention to present an action plan for cultural heritage, Members recalled that new initiatives should be financed by a new budget from new sources and not via a reallocation of existing funds.

The Commission and the Member States should contribute to the development of cultural organisations by providing stable, reliable and sustained financial support. They regretted that, despite the EU added value of cultural investment, Creative Europe merely represents 0.15 % of the overall EU budget, of which only 31 % is earmarked for culture.

The report called for the budget to be doubled for the new Creative Europe programme and for it to be made more accessible for smaller organisations. It called on the Commission and the Member States to report on how much funding is allocated to culture across all funding programmes and ensure that it amounts to at least 1 % of the next MFF.

It also underlined the importance of facilitating and streamlining access to Creative Europe for small cultural operators and SMEs. They stressed the need to introduce a dedicated strand reserved for these operators and businesses, in particular those from areas affected by natural disasters.

The Commission is called on to:

• develop a ‘one-stop shop’ portal listing all existing EU funding instruments in a user-friendly, comprehensive, innovative and efficient manner, with clear application guidelines and assistance;
• give particular attention to cultural areas that are endangered because of lack of funding or attention, one such area is poetry.

External aspects: Members called on the Commission to report regularly to Parliament on the implementation of the strategy for international cultural relations and to increase resources for EU delegations for cultural promotion initiatives and projects, also in collaboration with the European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC).

They also supported the Council initiative to draw up a comprehensive approach to international cultural relations and called for the creation of cultural focal points in all EU delegations, the appropriate training of officials and the involvement of local and grassroots actors, civil society and international cultural networks, including in the preparatory action on European Houses for culture.

Members reiterated its request for the Commission and the European External Action Service to report on the state of implementation of international cultural relations every two years.