Introduction

From the 1970s onwards, the different institutions of the European Communities have striven for attention to culture as an equal feature of European integration, alongside the traditional economic and political characteristics. Since then, through various means such as the establishment of cultural programmes, European conventions and charters, Europe-wide research networks and other funding mechanisms, the groundwork has been laid for a European infrastructure of cultural production. Several initiatives have been launched by policymakers, organizations and intellectuals to promote a shared European cultural space in order to ‘thicken’ EU citizens’ rather weak European identity. Despite the insistence on subsidiarity, these initiatives increasingly reveal that by means of its supervisory role, the European Commission ‘governs at a distance’. Through adherence to funding criteria, insisting on the principle of shared management, and the obligation of transnational partnerships, the Commission directly and indirectly determines the form and content of the initiatives that are developed. This chapter exposes the ‘instances of friction’ that have emerged due to this governmentalization of culture and discusses the repercussions of that friction in terms of affiliation to the European cultural space. If the Commission directly and indirectly imposes approaches to culture in- and outside its political confines and considers these as more suitable than other approaches, how does this impact on the ways in which different countries relate to the European cultural space? To what extent does this display a continuing Eurocentrism in which the Commission operates in rather hegemonic ways and increasingly starts to marginalize other approaches to culture?