European Cultural Policy: A French Creation?

Scholars are increasingly concerned with the phenomenon by which successive policy areas become ‘Europeanized’ — by which we mean European policies are developed and the sector's governance takes place at the supranational level. In the cultural sector, the French government is assumed to have initiated the creation of a new policy space at the European level. However, a closer scrutiny at the policy-making process in the book and audiovisual sectors shows that most French initiatives were taken as a response against European institutions' attempts to use the ‘liberal’ policy image to extend their remit to policy areas not mentioned in the Treaty. This paper examines how the framing of policy issues has been used as a weapon in the conflict between the national and the European levels of governance. If the French government can undoubtedly be characterized as a policy entrepreneur in the cultural sector, this paper challenges the view that it was eventually successful in securing the policy outcomes it wanted at the European level. Insofar as European institutions had successfully shifted the locus of decision-making to the European level, the diversity of actors' interests and institutional constraints made it difficult for the tenants of ‘dirigiste’ policies to influence policy outcomes.