Post-Soviet Transformation of Lithuanian State Cultural Policy: The Meanings of Democratisation

Democracies have long treated culture as the means to civilise society. In the second half of the twentieth century, this governmental role of culture formed part of neoliberal reforms pursued by conservative and so-called Third Way governments.1Re-conceptualised to fit the emerging discourse of the knowledge (or creative) economy, the civilising role of culture was operationalised in the language of ‘human’ and ‘social’ capital. As a new form of capital, culture was constructed as an area to be acted upon by economic policies. In the UK and Sweden, for example, redistribution of cultural capital was seen as an important means to achieve equal opportunities for all citizens in the new economy of knowledge (Andersson 2010). This policy development has been widely addressed in cultural policy scholarship. Where some criticised it as the ‘instrumentalisation of culture’ (Vestheim 1994, Bennett 1997, Gray 2008), others turned to Michel Foucault to inquire into the historical constitution of the governmental role of culture (Bennett 1999)