Towards the Empowerment of Culture: The EU’s Response to Recent Crises Through Its Cultural Policy and Beyond

Abstract

Given that culture through cultural policies at all levels of governance has the potential to mitigate crises, the main aim of this paper is to indicate that the EU, through its recent actions (i.e. initiatives, measures, and projects) – and within the limits of its competences – is steadily moving in a direction to utilise the potential of culture in this regard mostly through its evolving cultural policy. This aim is achieved by applying qualitative methodology (i.e. a content analysis of relevant primary and secondary sources) in the following ways – firstly, the basic definitions of culture, cultural policies, and crisis are provided in order to eventually emphasise the growing recognition of the importance of culture in confronting crises according to recently published UNESCO and Council of Europe documents. Subsequently, after indicating the current course of the EU’s cultural policy and its accentuated cross-sectoral dimension, what follows is a review and analysis of the relevant actions taken within the framework of the EU’s cultural policy that are related to recent crises (i.e. the migrant crisis, the Coronavirus crisis, and the Ukraine crisis). In view of that, the results of this inquiry indicate that through its recent cultural actions – channelled mostly through its cultural policy – the EU is increasingly approaching culture as a valuable resource which has the potential to enhance resilience and recovery from crises in an EU context and beyond.