The KEA Blog

Observations following the Hungarian EU Presidency Conference on Culture and EU 2020 (Budapest, 1st March 2011)

The pace and discussion at the conference did not reflect that it is now the 11^th hour: the EU budget to carry out culture policy will be decided in the coming weeks.  It will settle the fate of EU culture programmes (including the MEDIA programme) until 2020.

Unfortunately the captive and resilient audience composed mainly of national representatives from EU Member‘s ministries of culture was told by a high level EC official that stakeholders still had to develop the narratives to justify investment in culture.

Well I told myself that (angrily I must admit):

-          It took only 6 months for the EC’s DG Enterprise to develop a narrative to set up the European Creative Industry Alliance and finance pilot actions with Euro 8 million funding.  It’s now been 4 years since the cultural agenda was adopted - arguing that the sector should still be looking for a narrative is just not possible.

-          Regions and cities as well as some States (such as Estonia and Finland which made the case brilliantly in Budapest) have developed wonderful narratives on the impact of culture investment.

-          We are still addressing culture policy as if Google, Apple, Amazon or Spotify did not exist.

The new ‘Marco Polo adventure’

In October 2010, at the European Union (EU)/China High Level Cultural Forum, the Chinese and European authorities engaged to launch a new ‘Marco Polo adventure’ under the auspices of the Year of the EU-China Intercultural Dialogue in 2012. Back in the XIII century, Marco Polo embarked in a business voyage which ended up in a revelatory meeting between two continents, cultures, languages and traditions. It was the start of a new era of economic and cultural exchanges between Europe and China.   

China and the EU are key commercial partners. In 2009, bilateral trade reached € 296 billion from € 4 billion in 1978[1]. However, cultural exchange is still underdeveloped. In 2004, China represented only 2.9% of the EU 27’s cultural trade abroad and only 5.1% in 2007[2].

Commissioned by MOFCOM (the Chinese Ministry of Trade) and the European Commission (EC) as part of the ‘EU-China Project on the Protection of Intellectual Property Rights’ (IPR2), KEA’s Working Paper “Mapping the Cultural and Creative Sectors in the EU and China”[3] is the first step in a process aimed at developing business and trade exchanges between European and Chinese cultural and creative industries (CCIs).