"Europe is not possible without a cultural policy"

• We reactivate Europe. The challenge of health

"If we want citizens to feel a stronger adherence to the European Union, even more emotional , we have to be aware that this is not built in a window where financial aid is processed. The affection for the common project depends on the culture and education that the citizens receive ».

Domènec Ruiz Devesa, MEP of the Socialist Group and member of the Committee on Culture and Education of the European Parliament, summarizes the interest of the cultural industries within the European project. "Europe is not possible if it renounces a common cultural policy," adds his popular colleague Beatriz Benjumea. "If we want to relaunch the European project after the blows it has received in recent years, we need a much more powerful cultural policy."

The bad news is that the pandemic and the economic slowdown it has forced have left the sector in a particularly fragile situation . The European Union lacks specific powers, but it tries to reduce waters in this landscape. «I would not speak of reconstruction, because what there was is not destroyed. But it is a very difficult reactivation », adds Ruiz Devesa.

There is no need to dwell too much on the weaknesses of the cultural industries in Europe: the business fabric is highly fragmented. Companies are SMEs and many of the professionals act as self-employed and discontinuous workers who often do not even have access to unemployment benefits. Expenditure on culture is seen by consumers as superfluous, so they do without it in case of crisis. The technological leap has called into question many mediation jobs. The new sanitary safety standards for de-escalation include capacity cuts that make the profitability of theaters, concert halls and museums impossible ...

"They are not in an easier position than the automobile industry, which is talked about a lot, and with good reason," says MEP Ruiz Devesa. “Many of the cultural companies will take longer to restart their activity than those of any other sector. We must give them maximum support, among other things, because culture was one of the first sectors that was European , one of the first that acted naturally on an international scale ”.

The issue of public administration support for the cultural industry is somewhat similar to that of vegetables in children's diets. All parents explain to their children that vegetables are important, but children prefer hamburgers. Could it be that the vegetables are not very good?

Before the pandemic, the European Parliament's Committee on Culture was fighting to occupy a more central place for culture on the agenda of the European Union. Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, did not include culture among the six priority lines of her team or among the names of any of her portfolios (in the end, the position of the Bulgarian Commissioner Mariya Gabriel was renamed and became in "Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth").

On what does it depend that cultural policy has a more central place on the European agenda? "That the politicians who are in the area generate projects that offer something truly relevant to the EU project", explains MEP Benjumea. "In Parliament's Committee on Culture there is a certain feeling of being on the periphery of the Union. And, since we are on the periphery, there is a point of resignation, of conformity. We do little things ... The European dance festival that can be sponsored in Hungary is very good but we need something more. We need to have a more powerful impact to attract the attention of the European Commission. "

An example: the Erasmus program, which is on the border between culture and education, is a success story, a way of building Europe from the outside of the political agenda. How to replicate such an impact? «There are deficiencies, subjects for which there has never been a real interest. We are lacking a joint initiative for the conservation of the historical-artistic heritage, for example, "explains Benjumea, who acknowledges that, while this great shock is coming, the struggle of the Culture Commission will continue to be" a battle for survival ", within the community budgets.

"A great deal of progress could also be made in teaching History with a European approach, emphasizing the way in which the peoples of the continent have been interacting over the millennia, how they have shared the space naturally," adds Ruiz Devesa. "Furthermore, the digital adjustment of the economy is one of the Commission's priorities and the cultural industry can be very relevant there"

"The reality," continues the Socialist MEP, "is that in the multi-annual financial framework presented by President von der Leyen, investments for culture and citizenship were reduced by between 7 and 20% and that attention had to be drawn to that I forget in your debate. That framework was not approved due to the pandemic and the Next Generation European Union arrived », the emergency budget for the reconstruction of European culture.

Own fee

The European new deal foresees a community investment of 500,000 million euros, which, in part, will go to the European cultural industries. How much? Not known.

Aid applications from culture will have to compete with those of the rest of the productive sectors. The fight of the Parliament's Committee on Culture during these months has consisted of fighting for a percentage of that investment to be exclusive to the cultural industry, but they have met the usual barrier: the competences in culture belong to the States and they are them those who must create specific games. Germany, Italy and France were the first countries to implement aid as early as March. In Spain, that step only came in early May.

Meanwhile, European action on culture continues to work, granite by granite. There are programs with tradition, such as Europa Cinemas, a network of movie theaters that, in exchange for committing themselves to screen European cinema in the established percentages, receive community aid to improve their infrastructures and access channels of consulting and debate.

"After the pandemic, we are already working with a five million euro game that will be available in January 2021 so that the rooms can get ahead," explains Ainhoa ​​González, head of the Creative Europe Office Euskadi, the body that manages these grants to the cinemas next to those of the Basque Government . Its action reaches 14 theaters in the Basque Country and a "mini-network of rooms in towns and small cities that we have joined so that they can enter Europa Cinema".

Another example of community action is in the aid for the translation of European literature for publishers such as Sixth Floor. Santiago Tobón, the publisher of the label, explains that the EU call “requires a complex and ongoing project. In our case, we wanted to work on books that addressed the self in EU languages ​​that are not the ones that are translated most often and within three years. EU money covers translation, production and promotion costs but cannot be used to pay copyright. It is enough to take risks.

Tobón is moderately optimistic about the future of his sector. "I was expecting a worse scenario when the closure was decreed." What if you had to say what you expect from public administrations, including the European Union, in the future? What would you ask for? “I would like the aid available to me to be aimed at feeding the entire ecosystem of the cultural industry. For example: if States buy books for their libraries, they do so through bookstores . "

In accordance with the criteria of The Trust Project

• culture
• Coronavirus
• European Union
• European Parliament
• movie theater
• literature

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