ECCM Symposium: Productivity of Culture

Spyros Mercouris at ECCM Symposium Photo: Kostas Kartelias

A recent study commissioned by the European Commission has confirmed a point that those of us who have been involved in cultural matters have been making for a long time. This is that culture is of central and growing importance to the European economy. The study has confirmed that no fewer than 5.8 million people (more than the combined working populations of Ireland and Greece) are employed in the cultural sector, that whilst the number of jobs in the European Union declined overall in 2004 – 5, the number of those employed in the cultural sector in that year actually increased and that the cultural sector employs some of Europe’s best educated and most flexible workers. The facts speak for themselves. Whilst only a quarter of Europe’s working population has a university degree the proportion with such a degree amongst those working in culture is almost half. The cultural sector also employs twice the standard rate of self employed people.

The survey uses a broad definition of culture extending beyond the traditional areas such as cinema, music and publishing to include the written press, radio and television, and creative sectors such as fashion, interior and product design, cultural tourism, the performing and visual arts and heritage. This use of such a broad definition is to be welcomed though it does perhaps pose the question of how we define culture. In my opinion the survey is undoubtedly right. “Culture” is not a narrow form of activity in which, apart from a few full time professional ‘artists’, most of us only engage in as consumers during our spare time. Rather it is an integral part of our human identity.

The study merits an unequivocal welcome. The Commission is to be congratulated for commissioning it. It finally and conclusively nails the lie that culture is a mere appendage or accessory. In the words of Jan Figel, the European Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Multilinguilism “This study confirms the arts and culture are far from being marginal in terms of their contribution. The cultural sector is the engine of creativity and creativity is the basis for social and economic innovation.”

To those of us who are involved and concerned for the future of European culture the study also however contains within it a certain risk. This is that at a time when progress is too often defined in purely commercial, material terms, the study might reinforce a tendency to look upon cultural activity as merely another form of economic activity. This would be a mistake. In the long march of history culture has never been a mere or even primarily an economic activity. Here we must be very careful. Culture is much deeper and wider. That doesn’t mean that economy doesn’t help us to prove the productivity of culture. The point is that culture is generated by its own power creating its own momentum. This is its perennial strength. Culture has cycles of germination and renewal. It now appears that the power of culture starts to grow again.

This is not of course to say that when we think of culture in the modern world we should not think of economic factors. The point is that it is our culture that in the end defines us as Europeans and which is at the root of the social, political and economic structures and institutions that today go to make up our conception of Europe and indeed of the West. If we ignore or forget this and approach everything in purely technocratic terms of profit and loss, and given the pressures of the modern world that danger is very real, we will not only put our very identity as Europeans at risk but we will undermine those very concepts and structures that underpin our success. History shows that whenever material growth is not accompanied by a parallel development of culture the result is decline and decay leading eventually to complete breakdown and systems collapse. Some symptoms of this are already becoming visible in our society. For example, the gulf between the centers of power and the public opinion has in recent decades begun to widen dramatically. There are growing signs of a loss of social cohesion and of political apathy accompanied by growing intolerance and insecurity.

Here I would just wish to make a further point. The culture that I have spoken of as “European” is the common heritage of what we call the West. A great deal has been written and said about American exceptionalism and about the differences between the United States of America and individual European states and also Europe as a whole. In the last decades there are times when one might be forgiven for thinking that in the minds of some people ideas of democracy, of human liberty, of equality, of human rights and of fundamental freedoms, are specifically American ideas that have had to be exported to Europe and other countries, sometimes by force. This completely ignores the underlying unity of our Western civilization, which has its origins in Europe and is in the end best described as European. This is in no way to diminish the American contribution. Rather it is to put that contribution in its correct context whilst recognizing that Europe today is what is has become first and foremost because generations of Europeans have strived to make it so.

In a period of unemployment, insecurity, war and terrorism we have to prove the ‘productivity of culture’ as enabling people to resolve these and other problems peacefully and in an open spirit as demanded by any democracy not based exclusively only but still in continuity of the best Western values.

The study by the European Commission is a milestone.

As I have said already at the First International Symposium of Cultural Capitals held in Athens October 2005, “to develop we must adapt ourselves to reality. To use the means that the contemporary conditions offer to us and to function in a way that we can convince others in the importance and power of culture and for the development of societies and to make them believe that culture is not an abstract idea that occupies only the intellectuals but culture is at the center of our political, economic and social life.”

Spyros Mercouris
Honorary President of the ECCM

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ECCM Symposium: Productivity of Culture