Transforming cultural policy in Eastern Europe: the endless frontier

The title of this special issue borrows from Vannevar Bush’s book Science: The Endless Frontier (1945), an influential treatise on the role of science in national welfare that paved the way for both the military-industrial complex and the large-scale, state-sponsored education and research programmes in science and technology in the postwar United States. Positing that modern states derive their power from science, technology and innovation, Bush outlined a social and political vision of the future as continuous change and competition in making these resources – hence ‘the endless frontier’. This frontier of the future, argued Bush, could not be left to chance: it had to be shaped through continuous policy intervention and institution-building. Bush’s arguments led to the establishment of the National Science Foundation and inspired the remaking of the institutional landscape of fundamental science research and development worldwide. These ideas were also contemporaneous with a vigorous cultural policy debate: like science and technology, culture was deemed an important social and political resource and its development was not to be left to chance. In the wake of World War II, the national and international frameworks for state cultural policy, rooted in long-standing developments of private sponsorship, were born (Paquette and Beauregard 2017; Upchurch 2016; O’Brien 2014; Belfiore and Bennett 2008; Dubois 1999).

There have been many attempts at the definition of cultural policy since then (Mangset 2020; Khan 2019; Durrer, Miller, and O’Brien 2017; Rindzevičiūtė 2012; Bennett 1998; Zimmer and Toepler 1996). Depending on the larger theoretical framework that they are embedded in, these definitions can emphasise different aspects of the cultural policy process, such as the politics of administration, but also of knowledge production, language and identity. These definitions of cultural policy are also located on the continuum of meaning that encompasses the wide definition of culture as values and way of life and its narrow definition as arts and creative industries, where policy processes can be expressed as both promotion and contestation of these values and practices.¹ To this I would like to add an important qualification, namely that cultural policy is an assemblage of formal and informal means that local, national and international authorities, collective and individual actors deploy to promote or contest values, behaviours and cultural and artistic activities. The informal side of the cultural policy process, as this special issue demonstrates, has been centrally important in East European contexts. The emphasis on cultural policy’s formal and informal character complements, but does not entirely overlap with, Jeremy Ahearne’s (2009) influential idea of explicit and implicit cultural policies, where the former is expressed in policy programmes and budgets and the latter can be seen in practices and unstated priorities. This special issue, inspired by the ICCPR 2018 conference in Tallinn, Estonia, seeks to analyse some of the most recent developments in East European cultural policies as they take place in what is a shift into a digital and globalised political economy and culture. In this essay, I use the term Eastern Europe, although this concept is politically charged and should not be approached as a neutral geographical designation (see Wolf 1994; Franzinetti 2008). The purpose of this collection is to go beyond the ‘orientalisation’ (Said 2003 [1978]) of the social and governmental systems of those countries that have not always belonged to the exclusive club of Western liberal democracies. The conceptual departure point is that a) the development of cultural policies in Eastern Europe can be characterised by modernisation, which was not disrupted, but, in contrast, intensively pursued by authoritarian state socialist regimes in the second half of the twentieth century, b) the ways in which cultural policies operate institutionally, politically and socially in illiberal regimes cannot be fully accommodated in the model of the engineer state (Hillman-Chartrand and McCaughey 1989). In this introductory essay I elaborate on these points in greater detail, finishing my discussion with a presentation of key insights derived from the contributions to this issue.

East European modernisation and cultural policy

The story of East European modernisation is not what it used to be. Recent research into the transnational history of the Cold War world has disturbed the clear-cut lines and models that were used to describe and conceptualise liberal democratic and authoritarian societies by showing that these strict divisions were part of the Cold War mindset themselves (Bocharnikova and Kurg 2019; Mazierska 2016; Rindzevičiūtė 2016; Crowley and Pavitt 2008). It is therefore important to recognise that both liberal democratic and authoritarian state socialist countries developed what could be called a modern cultural policy: a systematic course of action that states adopt to regulate and support art and cultural activities, an action that is implemented by specially-established institutions and experts in a dialogue with society. In both blocs, cultural policies were mobilised to support both high culture and amateur culture in the competition for global cultural leadership (Barnhisel 2015; Koivunen 2014; Garcia 2012; Caute 2003). Both blocs saw vigorous institutionalisation of cultural policy, as it tapped into the political efforts to boost social cohesion and the welfare of populations that were seen as transitioning to a post-industrial society driven by knowledge and information, the one anticipated by Vannevar Bush, J.D. Bernal and Daniel Bell, but also East European visionaries of the Scientific-Technical Revolution, such as the Czechoslovak thinker Radovan Richta and the many Soviet philosophers inspired by what they saw as the cybernetic revolution and the coming of the communist informational society (Prudenko 2018; Vlassis 2017; Sommer 2016; Peters 2016; Rindzevičiūtė 2008; Engerman et al. 2003). Indeed, cybernetics, the new approach to information, control and self-organisation, was positioned high up the Cold War agenda, influencing art, design and architecture as well as social sciences and policy thinking in both East and West (Kurkovsky West 2019; Rindzevičiūtė 2016; Crowley 2013). Starting in the 1960s, cybernetics enabled the intellectual rapprochement between science and technology and humanities; this rapprochement was embraced with hope for emancipation from ideological control by artists and intellectuals in state socialist societies. However, the reach of cybernetics as a cultural project was limited to the political and cultural avant-guarde. Much wider social basis was claimed by the human rights movements which began to evolve as organised dissent to state socialist regimes in the 1960s. Although the communist authorities clamped down on dissidents, their legacy for the understanding of the public value of culture in the region should not be underestimated. While in the West the issues of freedom of speech and human rights became a centre of the struggle for a more democratic, bottom-up, local and transnational cultural policy (Belfiore 2020; Gray 2012), in the state socialist East these concerns were not completely absent: indeed, they informed avant-garde art movements as well as counter-cultures, leading to incremental cultural change that was boosted by the collapse of the communist regimes in 1989–1991 (Helme 2009).

On the state governmental level, the internationalisation and globalisation of cultural policy were equally important in East and West, as these processes were part of Cold War competition. For instance, an important form of competition was public presentations of what were considered the supreme signs of progress: reports containing statistical data on economic growth and social development. The cultural aspects of development, such as literacy, education and participation in cultural activities were included in social development indicators and used to showcase the presumed superiority of capitalist and communist regimes. A high percentage of cultural participation was correlated with high social development, considered a symbol of progress and, particularly in the communist context, presented as evidence of greater social equality. The production of cultural statistics required establishment of organisational infrastructures, both national and international, such as Unesco (Alasuutari & Kangas 2020; Vlassis 2017). This vigorous national and international development of knowledge and cultural infrastructure spanned East and West and, increasingly, North and South, as the colonial world order was falling apart (Stanek 2020; Mark, Kalinovsky, and Marung 2020; Preda 2017; Barnhisel 2015; Iber 2015). As emerging research has demonstrated, this Cold War cultural infrastructure was tightly linked with multiple colonial legacies and was also equally challenging in East and West, although the character of the problems and forms of their expression could differ significantly. For instance, in the former Western concessions and colonies such as Shanghai and Hong Kong, the lack of cultural infrastructure was considered ‘the remnant of the colonial past’ (Karvelytė 2017, 251). In contrast, Soviet administration left behind a vast cultural infrastructure, most notably the houses of culture, built by local authorities, trade unions and enterprises (Kurennoy, this volume; Grama 2019; Rindzevičiūtė 2012; White 1990). These venues were crumbling down unused because of the lack of demand, depopulation of the countryside and the shift of cultural practices elsewhere.

The development of modern cultural policy, in this way, was not only a response to changing societal values and artistic expression, but also part of geopolitics and the institutional transformation of political regimes in the late twentieth century. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, state cultural policy in Eastern Europe became part of the great transformation that was framed at that time as ‘a return to Europe’ and restoration of democracy. Three decades later, as Martin Müller (2019) put it, ‘socialism is no longer the prime reference point for people in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, but rather one among many, including neoliberalism, nationalism, consumption, Europeanisation and globalisation.’

And indeed, at this very moment, East European cultural policies remain at the frontier of development, facing an uncertain future. These developments are geopolitical, such as the shift of economic power from the West to China, as well as structural, such as reorientation to the digital economy, rendering many existing jobs obsolete. Global political and climate crises impact migration patterns and the changing ethnic and religious composition of populations is reflected in voter behaviour, the rise of populism and racism (Lewis and Cantor 2017). The problem of securing the institutions and practices for liberal democracy remains at the centre of contestation and key for cultural policy. As Geir Vestheim suggested in his introduction to a special issue of Cultural Policy and Democracy, ‘neither cultures nor cultural policies are by themselves democratic by definition. Whether they serve democratic purposes is strongly conditioned by social, economic and political circumstances such as available economic resources, social structures, political systems, ideologies, market forces and material and technical infrastructures’ (Vestheim 2012, 495).

In this context, it is clear that ‘catching up with the West’ even for those eleven states that joined the EU the process was not ended by completing European integration in 2004, 2007 and 2013: it was just the beginning of a long transformation. Recent events are a good proof of that: attempts to democratise the hybrid authoritarian regimes in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia resulted in Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2015, ongoing protests in Belarus in response to rigged presidential elections in 2020 and ongoing political violence. For the EU members, membership itself is clearly not a guarantee against the backlash of conservative and radical ethnic nationalisms. These reactionary developments are fuelled by the sense of political inferiority among East European governments, fear of the Other, exacerbated by the refugee crisis in 2015–2016, and the increasingly volatile relations between the EU countries and Russia. Recent years saw what appears as a decisive turn of Hungarian and Polish politics toward illiberal values, a turn that, according to Zielonka and Rupnik (2020), was provoked by both the migration crisis and the financial crisis of 2008 (although Poland was the only EU state that did not suffer from a decline in GDP). The financial crisis had particularly deep adverse impacts on cultural organisations and public funding of culture in all European countries, but artists and cultural workers in Eastern Europe suffered most as the available resources were already comparatively scarce (Čopič et al. 2013) because governmental spending on culture was generally quite low in all eleven new EU member states (Rius-Ulldemolins et al. 2019). On the other hand, this disparity motivated policy actors to secure their institutional anchoring in the West, bolstered by the flow of investment in infrastructure from EU programmes, which stimulated the growth of new entrepreneurs in local creative industries (Vos 2017; Rindzevičiūtė, Tomson, and Svensson 2016). In turn, some countries like, for instance, the Baltic states, responded to the political unrest at the Eastern EU borders by significantly reducing their economic dependency and media contacts with Russia, thus becoming even more West-oriented (Bergmane 2020).

In this context of political and economic instability, as this special issue shows, cultural policymaking in East European countries is shaped simultaneously by many different rationales, social, economic and political forces. Although post-state-socialist transformation and ethnic nationalist state-building perspectives remain relevant, they cannot exhaust the understanding of these processes. There is still a lack of cultural sociology exploring the relations between social and cultural capital and different forms of cultural participation in the traditional ethno-national, high and popular cultures (although see the illuminating study by Šebová and Révészová 2020). It is also necessary to move beyond the simplistic understanding of the (communist) authoritarian and (recent) populist regimes, which tend to view the relations between incumbents, state cultural administrations, the cultural sector and society in a mechanistic way (as in Bonet and Zamorano 2020).

The forking paths of institutional change

This special issue seeks to offer a critical lens to map and examine some of the key transformations in state cultural policy landscapes in Eastern Europe over the last two decades through selected case studies. The cases presented involve Russia, Poland, Lithuania and Hungary, as well as a comparative modelling analysis of Central European cultural policies. While the selected cases present a generous slice of central to North-Eastern Europe, both inside and outside the EU, it was impossible to assemble a fully comparative analysis of all East European countries. Fortunately, there is a good theoretical reason not to attempt the illusion of a comprehensive review of the region. First, researchers have noted the great heterogeneity of policy and political frameworks in what might appear as a monolithic region, ‘Eastern Europe’, and forewarned against regional generalisations (Autio-Sarasmo and Miklossy 2011). Second, the term Eastern Europe is a geopolitical concept, whose meaning is constantly negotiated in national and international diplomatic forums (Kuus 2007). For instance, the United Nations has classified the Baltic states as Northern Europe since 2017, although the notion of Nordic countries remains reserved for Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Norway and Finland and does not include the Baltic states (Bjorkman et al 2011). Third, the economies of the former state socialist countries evolved along different paths: for instance, there is a heated debate among economists how to classify the very different market economy systems in Eastern Europe, with some being more distinctly liberal while others are coordinated by the state to a greater degree (Rapacki 2020).

These heterogeneous developments in the area put the established conceptual models of cultural policy to the test. On the one hand, the traditional focus of East European cultural policies on the arts and professional culture remains highly salient. Domestic debates on cultural policy continue to focus on whether the state’s support for creative professionals is adequate. In this respect, the logic of the classificatory categories of patron, facilitator, engineer or architect states, proposed by Hillman-Chartrand and McCaughey (1989), appear to be relevant at a macro level of analysis. This said, it is increasingly difficult to reduce the highly diverse, formal and informal, as well as networked modalities of cultural policy to these models. Furthermore, these models did not anticipate the wide-ranging privatisation of the public sector in the old and new liberal democracies in the 1990s. What is more important, they did not consider organisational practices bridging policy rationales and institutional design and agency, resulting in a mechanistic system linking policy programmes and implementation.² In other words, these models omit process.

The essays that form this special issue address this gap by specifically focusing on processes, analysing the cases of organisational agency in state cultural policy. In doing so, the authors draw their inspiration from neo-institutional theory (Meyer and Rowan 1977; Powell and DiMaggio 1991), which has become influential in cultural policy scholarship studying policy processes (O’Brien 2014; McGuigan 2004; Gray 2000; Paquette and Beauregard 2017), policy transfer (Rindzevičiūtė, Tomson, and Svensson 2016; Prince 2015; O’Connor 2004) and policy and cultural work (Khan 2019; Comunian and Conor 2017; Banks 2017). Although the uses of neo-institutional theory in organisation and management studies has been criticised for being vague (Alvesson and Spicer 2019), its usefulness for cultural policy research has not been exhausted yet: the institutional approach enables us to bridge the long-standing binaries of ideology and practice, individual creativity and bureaucracy and, which is particularly important in an East European context, governmental control and freedom. Furthermore, much of the scholarship on post-state socialist change was strongly influenced by the institutionalist approach and developmentalist thinking (North 1992), while neo-institutional theory informed studies of European integration, international policy transfer and learning (Mangset 2020; Alvesson and Spicer 2019; Vos 2017; Tjarve 2013; Rindzevičiūtė 2012; Jacobsson 2006). The essays that compose this special issue augment this body of research with important empirical materials, evidencing the ways in which history shapes the types of policy actors and modes of actions, as well as describing the organisational mechanisms of change. As I show in the following and final section, a struggle for legitimacy characterises different cultural policy interventions, but this legitimacy refers to the broader mandate of cultural institutions and is not reducible to ethnic politics.³

Ambivalent legacies

The two articles that focus on Russian cultural policy make a strong case for the ambivalent legacy of state socialist policy. As Vitaly Kurennoy demonstrates, Russian cultural organisations have acquired a considerable degree of organisational power that enables them to secure their economic status as well as to assert and protect their autonomy from the political ideologies espoused by the Russian government leadership. A strong administrative apparatus for culture was developed during the Soviet period, when the government designed and implemented a vast infrastructure to provide cultural services, a process that began in the 1950s under Stalin (Kurennoy, this volume) and which accelerated in line with Khrushchev’s orientation away from militarised industrial mobilisation toward satisfying the Soviet citizen’s needs. The Soviet cultural administration evolved not only to ideologically control cultural operators, but also to protect cultural organisations from the Communist Party ‘campaign’ mode of governance. This administrative resistance to political pressure was considered a late Soviet phenomenon that contributed to stagnation. Kurennoy argues that this ecosystem of Soviet cultural administration left a significant legacy, enshrined in legislation in the 1990s, whereby ‘cultural infrastructure was considered valuable and was politically important’ in its own right (Kurennoy, this volume). This created preconditions for the decoupling of cultural administration from partisan politics, a logic which was deployed to cope with new types of political problems; these strategies of self-preservation in a volatile political context proved to be increasingly expedient during Vladimir Putin’s rule (1999-present). This continued decoupling of the functioning of cultural administration from the externally set political goals, as Kurennoy shows, afforded the cultural policy sector some limited self-governance, some room for manoeuvre and autonomy, not unlike the elite scientific research institutions under the Soviet regime (Sarasmo and Miklossy 2010).

The deepening political rift between the EU and Russia, termed a ‘new Cold War’ by Edward Lucas (2008), reinforced the need for cultural organisations to continue insulating themselves from high politics in order to secure viable conditions for everyday work. The question is what is being lost in the process, when the efforts of cultural organisations are concentrated on preserving their autonomy from the state. As Roger Blomgren (2012) convincingly argues, although the value of autonomy dominates in modern cultural institutions, it should be accompanied with a striving for democracy, expressed in the emphasis on participation and contribution to the creation of public good.

While this continuity of Soviet cultural organisational strategies to establish and keep their autonomy is vital for organisational survival (although it is insufficient for the flourishing of public culture), the continuation of ideological censorship and politically-motivated control of cultural production is undoubtedly detrimental for public culture. In Russia the novel, emergent forms of popular culture constitute a moving target for political censorship, as Ilya Kukulin’s analysis reveals. In the last decade Putin’s regime concentrated on controlling new cultural practices, like blogging, as well as pop culture, particularly the music that is distributed through social media and can be presented at mass gatherings, like music festivals. Clamping down on the forms of music with emotionally disturbing content, like rap or industrial pop music, was particularly prioritised. In this respect, Kukulin argues, Russian cultural politics is undergoing demodernisation: the authorities appear to have learned the lesson of the 1980s, when ‘rock revolutions’ shook Eastern Europe, paving paths for new forms of social mobilisation that brought down the Berlin wall (Mazierska 2016; Ramet 1994). While the apparatus of high culture, described by Kurennoy, can continue enjoying a substantial autonomy, its reach in terms of audiences is much more limited than that of pop music. Russian pop music is controlled through securitisation followed with explicit censorship and indirect blocking of performances (implicit cultural policy). These interventions are questioned by young audiences, but they find themselves at the centre of this securitising governmentality. To legitimise the control of cultural content, Russian authorities frame the young people as victims of Western propaganda and endangered by what they present as corrupt values such as pro-LGBTQ+. It is important that, as Kukulin shows, the agents of securitisation involve both grassroot vigilantes and state institutions, co-creating a sense of moral panic (Cohen 1972) about youth cultures.

Although state socialist dictatorships have long been identified with excessively rigid governance through heavily politicised bureaucracies, recent research has recognised the role of informality in authoritarian regimes (Rindzevičiūtė 2011; Ledeneva 2006). Kukulin’s analysis demonstrates that Putin’s government uses informal, indirect ways of control, seeking to preserve their face, because naked censorship is not considered legitimate. A combination of formal and informal means is also embraced by the president of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, who seeks to foster conservative ethnic nationalist values in Hungarian society. As Orbán’s attempts to make cultural policy more authoritarian are constrained by the law as well as public consensus that freedom of speech is a bedrock of liberal democratic governance, he resorts to a mixture of formal and informal means to strengthen centralist control. However, this is not a straightforward process: as Luca Kristóf shows in her insightful analysis of Orbán’s reform, top-down regulation does not always work in the pluralist and globalised world of cultural organisation. Instead, Orbán’s authoritarian policy transformed the cultural landscape not so much by censorship and clamping down on cultural activities (although there were cases when cultural projects perceived to be pro-LGBTQ+ were attacked through the media), but by establishing competing institutions, withdrawing state funding from established cultural organisations and seeking to reduce the number of professional cultural experts on decision boards. More direct measures were applied in the field of higher education: Orbán’s government forced the move of the Central European University, established by the US philanthropist George Soros in Budapest in 1991, to Vienna, Austria in 2018 and banned gender studies programmes. Although EU membership remains an important external constraint that moderates Orbán’s decisions in the cultural field, Kristóf suggests that democratic cultural policy is particularly vulnerable in Hungary, as new institutional actors tasked to develop ethnic nationalist agendas are created and given resources. That said, Orbán’s authoritarian cultural policy appears to remain responsive to public opinion, both domestic and international, as there is evidence that Orbán backs down on some initiatives. Hence civil society’s engagement becomes central for the maintenance of liberal democracy.

Opening the black box of the numbers and process

Since Vannevar Bush wrote his influential statement, the governance of science and technology has evolved to become a highly extensive and sophisticated machine of accounting and performance measurement. The origins of this new governmentality are complex, rooted in the tradition of imperial government-at-a-distance, military planning and the postwar welfare state, as well as the professionalisation of management and administration and the rise of accompanying sciences like accounting (Mennicken and Espeland 2019; Boltanski and Chiapello 1999; Dean 1999). The modern European cultural sphere evolved through self-distancing from the economy, commercial values and the managerial criterion of efficiency. This conceptual and social legacy, however, did not make the cultural sector immune to the audit society (Power 1997); culture was, however, absorbed into government by numbers at a rather slower rate than other sectors. The sea-change was brought about with the rise of creative industries as a field of technological innovation and, eventually, as a policy idea in the late 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s. The policy frameworks for science, technology and culture began to converge. As Kamila Lewandowska and Emanuel Kulczycki show, science policy became a form of implicit cultural policy in Poland, where art creators are increasingly searching for employment security in academic institutions. This convergence between institutional fields was partially motivated by pragmatism: art and cultural work can be notoriously underpaid and precarious (Banks 2017), whereas academia can offer a more stable form of employment and career progression. However, this move into the more stable institutional landscape of academia has exposed artistic work to a form of governmentality infused by the values of the New Public Management (NPM). NPM is criticised widely in studies of organisation and management as well as in cultural policy studies for its excessive bureaucracy and reliance on quantitative measurement of targets, resulting in a reductionist approach to core activities, such as the production of new knowledge and art (Valentine 2017). The NPM is often labelled as neoliberal authoritarianism. Could this mean that the Polish cultural sector transitioned from communist political censorship to neoliberal slavery to numbers? The situation is rather complex: in Eastern Europe, according to Lewandowska and Kulczycki, governance by numbers was expected to have a democratic effect, to provide an antidote to political bias and the clientelism that prevailed under state socialism. However, as their study shows, this new process of bureaucratic and quantitative evaluation led to a deeper and unexpected cultural change, where creators began to adjust their work structurally to the criteria of evaluation. The Polish academic system of evaluation is based on a set of fairly formal values, which give high ratings to large-scale and international research. Accordingly, the system would prioritise and reward those forms of artwork which are produced on a large scale, both in terms of the time involved and materials used, and which are internationally oriented. This new politics of value capitalised not on the content, but on the scale, particularly the international outlook and the extent of professional recognition. A very interesting finding is that although this evaluation system was formal and not content oriented, its effect was conservative: it rewarded those creators who had received recognition in the past, therefore reproducing established value structures and hierarchies. This system of gate-keeping was bound to disregard innovation by mistaking expert and public recognition for quality and novelty. In this way, the convergence of research and cultural policies – done in Vannevar Bush’s spirit – resulted in a deeply conservative framework which began to systematically penalise small-scale, emergent, locally and nationally oriented and not-yet-recognised forms of art. Lewandowska and Kulczycki’s argument provokes questions about the structural differences between the institutional fields of art and science and technology. Although the transfer of ideas and methods between these fields has been a source of rich innovation, the policy transfer appears to have ambivalent effects.

While the drive to quantify the cultural sector was widely criticised as an extension of neoliberal governance, statistics create an impression of visibility, comparability and transparency: the values that came to characterise normative notions of good governance in the late twentieth century (Mennicken and Espeland 2019; Geroulanos 2017). Statistical surveys of cultural production and consumption emerged as part of the welfare state (Jakobsson et al 2018). They feed into social indicator systems, which are deployed to measure and project growth and plan investments and social policies, but they are also part of cultural politics themselves, used to communicate organisational achievements internationally and across institutional sectors (MacDowall et al 2015). The first series of Unesco reports on world cultural policies represented a patchwork and uneven attempt at such a comparison (Vestheim 2019; Rindzevičiūtė 2008). Since then, area scholars have been interested in mapping the big picture, often charted through quantitative data and made in the spirit of Cold War research that sought to ‘know their enemy’ (Engerman 2009) as well as to maintain power relations in a decolonising world (Slobodian 2018; Schmelzer 2016). European integration created a great need for more cultural statistics; however, comparative statistics databases continue to be marred by methodological and conceptual issues (O’Hagan 2016).

Continuing this line of inquiry, Andrej Srakar and Marilena Vecco tested the hypothesis that a comparison of macro indicators of social development could be linked with the priorities and historical trajectories of state cultural policy systems in a selection of Central European countries (Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia and Slovenia). Differences between these countries were expected because they developed significantly different governmental approaches before, during and after the state socialist regimes. Moreover, these four countries are characterised by a continued divergence: since joining the EU, they developed different governmental systems and committed different levels of public funds to support culture. However, Srakar and Vecco’s modelling analysis revealed that these Central European countries cluster together by showing a significantly weaker performance in social and cultural development than West European countries, which, in turn, clustered together as well regardless of their models of state cultural policy. The Mediterranean countries (Greece, Spain, Italy, Cyprus and Portugal) appear to form a cluster in regard to their social and cultural development and are situated in between West and East Central European countries. The authors suggested the hypothesis that the organisational mode of state cultural policy apparatus appears to have little impact on social and cultural development. The scale of economic support appears to have a more significant effect on the cultural sector and society than the mode of public intervention. For instance, regardless if a society is committed to the welfare state model (Nordic cultural policy model) or the neoliberal market economy (UK), they displayed similar outcomes in terms of social and cultural development. While this is an interesting finding, the question remains whether the term ‘neoliberal market economy’ is a good descriptor of otherwise different social and economic systems, as well as whether the deeper social and political transformative effects of policy processes can possibly be captured by statistical indicators.

The last two contributions to the special issue make the importance of process and context for cultural policymaking particularly evident. Although European integration was mainly driven by economic and geopolitical interests, it also included a cultural agenda for the ‘thickening’ of European identity and ‘thinning’ inward-looking, ethno-nationalist identifications (Shore 2000). This orientation towards international openness and what were presumed to be universal values found a particularly interesting expression in post-state socialist cultural diplomacy, where nation-building and projection of cosmopolitan culture could go hand in hand. In Poland, as Beata Ociepka shows in her article, the search for a new institutional form of cultural diplomacy and negotiation of its priorities reflected cultural policy discourses, which oscillated between cosmopolitan and national values, the former promoted by the liberal Civic Platform party and the latter by the Law and Order party. During the Cold War, cultural presentations of East European countries in the West combined different strategies, emphasising both modern and ethnic components of their national cultures that were showcased in international fairs, festivals and exhibitions. The ideological goal of these Cold War displays was to broadcast the power of communism to the world, but these diplomatic bridges were also important channels for cultural exchange (Koivunen 2014; Babiracki and Jersild 2014). In her study of the Polish year of culture in Russia, launched in 2013, Ociepka shows how this project was conceived to showcase what was presented as a mature, liberal Polish democracy with a strong civic sector and plurality of cultural expressions. However, the course of events demonstrated that cultural diplomacy was subordinated to foreign policy. The organisation of the Polish year in Russia was cancelled in 2014 in response to Russia’s occupation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine; although other countries, such as Austria and the UK, went ahead with similar programmes of cultural diplomacy in Russia in 2014. Given the centuries of the strained relations between Poland and Russia, it is interesting that Poland’s decision to cancel the year in Russia, as Ociepka shows, was not self-evident, but arrived at in an incremental manner. At the first stage, top-down decisions were made to depoliticise the Polish programme by removing those projects that were deemed too entertaining. Several cultural organisations withdrew from the programme and a heated public debate ensued, but the final decision not to go ahead with the project was taken by the Minister of Foreign Affairs and not by the representatives of the cultural sector. The process through which this major decision in cultural diplomacy was arrived at, was characterised by inter-institutional policy negotiation, where domestic media debates played a key role. This suggests that to understand the cultural policy process it is important to examine its ‘throughput,’ the fluid modes and ad hoc decisions made in response to a changing environment, both international and domestic, because in this process legitimacy and identity are negotiated.

The final case in the special issue makes a particularly important argument that challenges the hitherto established conceptualisation of East European cultural policies as centralist and state-driven. Skaidra Trilupaitytė’s analysis of urban cultural planning in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius demonstrates the growing significance of urban cultural policy as a site for party politics and resource distribution which intertwine with the efforts of the professional cultural community and grass root communities to shape their social identities and urban spaces. In this urban policy landscape ethnic nationalist values, a traditional component of the repertoire of East European cultural policies, face particularly strong competition from other values, such as neoliberal values of commercialism and professional expertise.⁴ As Trilupaitytė shows, the struggles over cultural interpretations of the past in urban cultural planning are less systematic and strategic than previously thought. Cultural policy actors act opportunistically and tactically; the link between their ideology and cultural projects is not always clear cut. Furthermore, the forms of authoritarian city planning are shared by state socialist regimes and neoliberal urban development: both fail to engage residents in the process of shaping key urban spaces. However, whereas the Lithuanian state socialist urban planners usually delegated the aesthetical decision to professional artist unions (Drėmaitė 2019), the neoliberal city government appears to engage with conservative right wing communities supporting their projects of de-sovietisation and aesthetic choices that are questioned and actively resisted by the professional art community.

This deserves an additional comment, anchoring this case in the growing body of research into East European urban planning as a form of coping with the legacies of the state socialist past, where ethnic, cultural and infrastructural politics intertwine (Kim and Comunian 2020; Andres and Golubchikov 2016; Boren, Grzyś, and Young 2020, 2020aa; Baldwin Hess and Tammaru 2019; Bocharnikova and Kurg 2019; Grodach and Silver 2012; White 1990). This post-communist urban cultural policy ‘ecosystem,’ to use Boren, Grzyś and Young’s (2020) term, is far from equilibrium. The key difference between the state socialist cultural policy context and post-communist liberal democracy is that in the latter the procedural aspect of policy making is strong. The public have legal means to contest urban development projects and access to national and social media, which are used to mobilise city residents and give them voice. That the planning outcomes cannot be predicted beforehand, because prolonged contestation can result in the stoppage of urban development projects altogether, testifies to the growing institutional capacity for cultural democracy (Gross and Wilson 2020). It also reveals the changing notion of cultural value among cultural professionals, who began adopting participatory methods of cultural planning to go beyond the elitist model or an architect or engineer state (Trilupaitytė, this issue). This brings me to conclude that the cases of Russia, Lithuania and Poland presented in this issue reveal the important diversity of institutional resources that are created or activated by a wide range of cultural policy actors and used to empower them when contesting – or ignoring – political initiatives.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have argued that it is important to go beyond the orientalisation of cultural policies in the former state socialist region. Scholars are only beginning to understand the complexity of the policy process in these countries; indeed, there is much to learn from area studies and cultural, social, intellectual and political historians and social scientists who have advanced significantly the understanding of state socialist politics, culture and societies in the last three decades. The articles that form this issue signal clearly what is to be gained by moving beyond the ethnic nationalist perspective, on the one hand, and beyond the liberal/authoritarian divide, on the other. The understanding of policy lifeworlds (Khan 2019) and ecosystems (Boren, Grzyś, and Young 2020), particularly in sites of transnational policy making (James and Winter 2017) as well as the many paths that are pioneered by policy entrepreneurs (Rindzevičiūtė, Tomson, and Svensson 2016) is key to unlocking the complex social and institutional logic that can perpetuate the old, state socialist ways of cultural administration as well as to generate novel modes of action. A fine-grained analysis that would combine ethnographic sensitivity to organisational realities with historical knowledge would also help build a more robust understanding, enabling us to address the increasingly urgent issues of ethno-centric nationalism and the rise of far-right politics.

Although nationalism and conservatism remain salient in Eastern Europe, one should not continue the long-lasting tradition of treating the region as a problem ‘belt’ where the ethnic mix of populations and limited experience of liberal democracy leads to dictatorship (Arendt 2001 [1951]). The development of cultural policies in this region contains important examples of the creation of resources for liberal democracy, reconciliation and cohesion. Accordingly, the experiences of East European cultural policy can offer lessons, both negative and positive ones, which are worth considering and should not be dismissed as background noise, an imperfect transition to liberal democracy. In the contexts of the marginalisation of cultural policy by populist and conservative attacks against experts (Gross 2019) and the urgent need to decolonise West European public spaces, discourses and curricula by acknowledging the colonial past and the contribution of non-white Europeans and the global South (Gilroy 1995; Turunen 2020), there is a need for a new social contract between cultural professionals and society. The highly complex problems of the return of ethnic nationalism and the rise of the far right and populism do not separate but unite the ‘old’ and ‘new’ European democracies. Francis Fukuyama (1992) has been proven wrong and history has not ended: for as we know now, liberal democracy in the West is an endless frontier too.

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Notes on contributors

Eglė Rindzevičiūtė

Dr Eglė Rindzevičiūtė is a sociologist of governance and an Associate Professor of Criminology and Sociology at Kingston University London, the UK. She is the author of The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World (Cornell University Press, 2016). Her book in progress, with the preliminary title The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future, examines the politics and epistemology of scientific prediction in late modern society. Dr Rindzevičiūtė is the P.I. and director of the research projects “Nuclear Cultural Heritage: From Knowledge to Practice” (UK Arts & Humanities Research Council, 2018-2021) and “Nuclear Spaces: Communities, Materialities and Locations of Nuclear Cultural Heritage (NuSPACES)” (EU Joint Programming Initiative on Cultural Heritage (JPI CH), 2021-2024).

Notes

1. This definition of cultural policy has informed the rationale for The International Journal of Cultural Policy: ‘Cultural policy is understood as the promotion or disparagement of particular cultural practices and values. This conception of cultural policy encompasses a broad view of both “culture” and “policy”. On the one hand, “culture” may be taken to refer to systems or clusters of attitudes, values and behaviours, along with the symbolic practices that maintain or support them. On the other, it may refer more narrowly to products of the arts, heritage and creative and media industries. “Policy” may be considered as programmatic sets of ideas or plans of action pursued by any agency’ (IJCP n.d)

2. To put it briefly, according to Hillman-Chartrand and McCaughey (1989), there are four models describing the form of governmental engagement in the cultural sector. The facilitator state is a classical liberal, night-watch form of governance where the state puts in place tax relief for different private and corporate actors to support the forms of culture according their own preference, thus resulting in a high plurality of cultural tastes and sources of cultural funding. In contrast to this liberal form of self-organisation, the patron state actively engages in the cultural sector channelling its support to professional arts through expert bodies. The architect state constitutes a version of a welfare state where artists are recognised as providers of civil service, funded directly from the governmental budget and expected to demonstrate high social relevance of their production. Finally, Hillman-Chartrand and McCaughey suggested the model of the engineer state to describe authoritarian systems of cultural governance, where both the organisational form and contents of cultural creativity were determined by the political state bureaucracy. In this essay I suggest that while this conceptual framework can still provide useful insights in the rationales of state cultural policy, they are not sufficient. As I show here, and as the essays in this special issue demonstrate, it is vital to consider the institutional contexts to understand the trajectories of uneven transformations from authoritarian to liberal democratic or hybrid cultural policy regimes.

3. For important discussion of policy change and ethnic politics in post-socialist context see Pettai and Pettai (2015) and Feldman (2010).

4. Existing work has mainly analysed attempts to reconcile majority and minority ethnic identities in urban spaces, as well as the articulation of difficult heritage, such as the legacies of the Holocaust and communism (e.g. Apor and Iordachi 2021; Norris 2020; Grama 2019; Sindbaek Andersen and Tornquist-Plewa 2016; Rindzevičiūtė 2013; Mark 2010). In the early twenty-first century, the question of ethnic identities and their position in the national culture remains central to the cultural policy agenda.