https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2658-7597
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ABSTRACT
Since 1992, culture has been an official competence of the European Union. De facto, the EU has the legitimacy and means to intervene and change collective representations and social dynamics, including in border regions, in order to bring people together and build a Europe ‘united in diversity’. The purpose of the paper is to investigate the cross-border dynamics in cultural matters, and to examine the realization of cultural projects as a driving force in the process of cross-border integration. The approach is based on a spatial analysis of the cultural projects co-financed by Interreg over the 2000–2020 period, enabling to provide an overview of the cross-border cultural initiatives undertaken. The results reveal first that strong spatial disparities exist between programming spaces in terms of cultural investment. Second, that cross-border cultural cooperation mainly involves municipalities, and not primarily cultural actors. Third, although a diverse range of cultural projects have been developed over the last twenty years, the emphasis has been more on tourism projects. These achievements bring into question the role of Interreg programming in cultural matters in the dynamics of cross-border integration, since it fosters an economic approach to culture at the expense of social and identity issues.
Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to the anonymous reviewers and editors for their insights and very useful comments, which greatly improved the manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
4 European Economic Community Treaty (EEC Treaty), also known as the Treaty of Rome.
5 With a budget of €1.46 billion for the period 2014–2020, the Europe Creative programme devotes 31 per cent of this to fund cultural and creative professionals, compared with 56 per cent for the audiovisual sector (https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/creative-europe/about_en).
6 Interreg programming is made up of three different strands: strand A for cross-border cooperation, strand B for transnational cooperation and strand C for interregional cooperation. In this paper, the analysis is focused on projects related to the cross-border scale; that is, strand A.
7 The representativeness of projects in the keep.eu database is not exhaustive, and differences exist between the programming areas and the periods taken into account in the analysis: the rate is excellent for the IVA period (93.1 per cent), slightly lower for the VA period (86.7 per cent) and average for the oldest Interreg IIIA reference period (67.5 per cent). Nevertheless, the representativeness is relatively good over the whole period under review (above 80 per cent).
8 Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics.
9 For instance, the Greater Region comprised several programming areas during the 2000–2006 period, before becoming a single entity for the next two periods. The Denmark-Germany dyad is composed of a number of programming areas (Sønderjylland-Schleswig, Storstrøm-Ostholstein-Lübeck and Syddanmark-Schleswig-K.E.R.N.), and the Botnia-Atlantica and Central Baltic programming areas also required regrouping.
10 Note: Even if this is not always the case, it can be observed that overall there is a strong correlation between the number of projects and the budgets allocated over the periods 2000–2006 and 2014–2020 (the correlation coefficient is respectively 0.8 and 0.9). This is less the case for the period 2007–2013 (where the coefficient is equal to 0.5). Some exceptions exist: there are many projects along the Netherlands-Germany and Sweden-Norway borders, but the proportion of funding is relatively small (respectively, 146 and 125 projects, and €62 and €65 million). Conversely, for the Poland-Slovakia dyad, the number of projects is limited, but the amounts spent are significant (€103 million).
11 675 of the 1,023 cultural projects categorized as ‘other’ are only qualified by the theme ‘cultural heritage and arts’. The lack of precise information concerning this category limits the interpretation and categorization of these cultural projects, thus explaining why it was not taken into account in the analysis.
12 The alterity (or otherness) is the characteristic of what is other, of what is external to a ‘self’, to a reality of reference: individual, and by extension group. It is imposed from experience and it is the condition of the other with regard to the self (Lévy and Lussault Citation2003).