This edited collection brings together distinguished scholars across a range of academic disciplines to explore how the European Union engages with culture. The book examines the ways in which cultural issues have been framed at the EU level and the policies and instruments to which they have given vent.

This edited collection brings together distinguished scholars across a range of academic disciplines to explore how the European Union engages with culture. The book examines the ways in which cultural issues have been framed at the EU level and the policies and instruments to which they have given vent.

Cultural governance is currently regarded as a transversal element of public policy in Europe. This book brings together academics and policy practitioners to provide new insights into the field, exploring its contemporary dynamics, dilemmas and challenges. In light of the Cyprus Presidency in 2026, the authors reflect on the breadth and boundaries of cultural governance in a European perspective, the role of international institutions, such as UNESCO and the EU, and the frameworks and dilemmas of cultural governance as a dedicated practice. Particular attention is given to the relationship between culture and human creativity, to cultural rights and to climate breakdown, placing cultural governance at the heart of integrated public policy. As a key contribution that enriches the field of cultural policy, this book is essential reading for academics and offers guidance for concerted action for policymakers and legislators.

Creating and Governing Cultural Heritage in the European Union: The European Heritage Label provides an interdisciplinary examination of the ways in which European cultural heritage is created, communicated, and governed via the new European Heritage Label scheme. Drawing on ethnographic field research conducted across ten countries at sites that have been awarded with the European Heritage Label, the authors of the book approach heritage as an entangled social, spatial, temporal, discursive, narrative, performative, and embodied process. Recognising that heritage is inherently political and used by diverse actors as a tool for re-imagining communities, identities, and borders, and for generating notions of inclusion and exclusion in Europe, the book also considers the idea of Europe itself as a narrative. Chapters tackle issues such as multilevel governance of heritage; geopolitics of border-crossings and border-making; participation and non-participation; and embodiment and affective experience of heritage. Creating and Governing Cultural Heritage in the European Union advances heritage studies with an interdisciplinary approach that utilises and combines theories and conceptualizations from critical geopolitics, political studies, EU and European studies, cultural policy research, and cultural studies. As such, the volume will be of interest to scholars and students engaged in the study of heritage, politics, belonging, the EU, ideas, and narratives of Europe.

This volume offers a critical inquiry into the ever-evolving notion of cultural heritage and the way it has been made accessible, governed, and protected by the institutional, operational, and legal structures of the European Union.

The European Union and culture explains why and how the European Union has started to intervene in the cultural policy sector - understood here as the public policies aimed at supporting and regulating the arts and cultural industries. It is the first comprehensive and theoretically informed account of the Communitarisation process of the cultural policy sector. Before 1992, no legal basis for EU intervention in the field of culture appeared in the Treaties. Member states were, in any case, reluctant to share their competences in a policy sector considered to be an area of national sovereignty. In such circumstances, how was the Communitarisation of the policy sector ever possible? Who were the policy actors that played a role in this process? What were their motives? And why were certain actors more influential than others? This book will be of great use to all researchers and students of European integration and European public policy.

A fresh alternative to traditional state-centred analyses of the process of European integration is presented in this book. World-renowned scholars analyze the state in terms of its component parts and clearly show the interaction of subnational, national and supranational actors in the emerging European polity. This `multi-level politics′ approach offers a powerful lens through which to view the future course of European integration. The contributors′ empirical exploration of areas such as regional governance, social policy and social movements underpins their broad conceptual and theoretical framework providing significant new insight into European politics.