Cultural policy : issues and interrogations in an international perspective

This essay was supposed to be a review of long-term trends in ‘international cultural policy’. Although it has turned out to be something else, it is still worth pausing to inquire what that original brief might mean. ‘International cultural policy’ could denote two different things: first, the evolution of norms and frameworks articulated by international organizations and/or considered to be good practice internationally; second, the emergence of different ‘cultural policy’ stances and measures in different countries and regions (this second reading could of course subsume the first). Interested principally in the second reading, I am in fact beginning to envisage a book-length cross-cultural survey of the topic. This project is still only half-formed, however. What is more, neither my decades of direct experience in the policy-making arena, particularly at UNESCO, nor my current co-editorship of The Cultures and Globalization Series of publications, have (yet) afforded me scope for first-hand research. So rather than generalize in ways that could only be impressionistic, I have chosen to discuss not the ‘long term trends’, but rather some necessary preliminaries to a systematic inquiry into ‘cultural policy’ worldwide, in the hope that my reflections may provide some useful elements of ‘global’ context for the Swedish national ‘cultural policy’ exercise now under way