Cultural policy and democracy: an introduction

Abstract

Departing from reflections on the terrorist attack in Oslo 22 July 2011 as an attack on democracy as a political system, the author discusses the premise for the special issue on ‘Cultural Policy and Democracy' of the International Journal of Cultural Policy. Then follows a short presentation of the transition from autocracy to liberal democracy and different models of cultural policy within the frames of liberal democracies. Four principal democratic dimensions of cultural policy are defined and discussed, and the article ends with a short editorial comment to all other articles published in this issue.

Keywords:

• cultural policy
• liberal democracy
• dimensions of cultural policy

Notes

1. http://eacea.ec.europa.eu./culture/programme/about_culture_en.hp (accessed 12 October 2011).

2. Hillman-Chartrand and McCaughey also have a fourth model, the engineer, but since that model is attached to non-democratic political systems like the fascist states of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, and even Soviet and Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, I shall not deal with that here. The transitional period for Eastern Europe, and the Baltic states in particular, has, among others, been described and analysed by Rindzeviciute (2009), see References.

3. These dimensions are based on Vestheim (this issue) Kulturpolitikk og demokrati i Sverige, book manuscript, in progress.

4. See Gray’s (this issue) article on different forms of democracy and different forms of cultural policy in this issue.

5. Tuuli Lähdesmäki (2012), pp. 59–75. See also Miikka Pyykkönen’s article about UNESCO in this volume of the International Journal of Cultural Policy on ‘Cultural Policy and Democracy’.

6. See my article in this issue.

7. Thomas Forser (1999). My translation from Swedish: ‘som väljer aristokratiska hållningar, skyr delaktighet, argumenterar för ojämlikhet och sätter frågetecken efter demokrati. (…) Konsten är ingen allmänning utan en plats för det partikulära, det egensinniga och det personliga’.

8. http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/culture/introduction (accessed 18 May 2012).

9. Looseley (this issue) ‘Democratising the popular: the case of pop music in France and Britain’.