Institutionalization through Europeanization: the Danish film policy reforms of the 1980s and 1990s

Abstract

This article analyses the impact of the emergence of a cultural orientation within the EU on Danish film policies during the late 1980s and the 1990s. The methodology consists of document analysis of correspondences between domestic and EU authorities based on an institution-analytical approach to the question of Europeanization. The main argument is that the European Commission’s ongoing push for the Pan-European idea has contributed to a process of institutionalization through pressures and enabling structures, with renationalization and affirmation of national film-cultural diversity as its main outcome.

Keywords:

• film policies
• Europeanization
• re-nationalization
• institutionalization

Notes

1. The Programme was also emblematic of an increased commercial orientation and the economic instrumentalization and marketization of policy-making across Europe (Hesmondhalgh 2007, Duelund et al. 2012).

2. Moreover, there was a strong resistance to denationalization in Denmark when the Commission in 1985 issued a first attempt to create a co-production programme aimed at increasing the number of mass-audience cinemas on European level (Herold 2010, p. 49).

3. Paradoxically, the response stressed that the programme did not contain ‘restrictions or discriminatory precautions towards foreign film producers who apply for funding through the programme. It is open to all European film producers (European Commission 1997). With legal basis in Chapter 4, Section 14(4) of the Film Act on the lapse of requirements regarding citizenship, non-national applicants may in principle not be excluded.

4. As an example of recent trends, The British Film Institute’s 2012–2017 plan Film Forever: Supporting UK Film, sets up a fund for attracting inward investment.

5. Former head of the DFI board Ib Bondebjerg explains that the approach to culture around 1997, when the DFI underwent profound organizational reforms, was characterized by social-liberal attitudes, embracing artistic, popular, industrial rationales all together (Givskov 2011, p. 164). Accordingly, on the organizational level, the 1997 restructuring of the DFI and repositioning of the organization and subsidy programmes reflected both industrial professionalization inspired by organizational structures of vertical integration and reforms in line with the principles of New Public Management.