European Citizens: Empowering European Civil Society Through Culture?

With regard to the rich cultural diversity within the EU, the concept of transculturality – which is about “creating value across borders” – will be of crucial importance for the future of societal transactions and relations in an increasingly globalized world, as well as an EU increasingly marked by populist movements and diverging national interests.

Whether top-down initiatives by the EU can be a way of addressing such changing dynamics through empowering its civil society was the starting point of this research. (...) This chapter will add a valuable perspective at the European institutional level and the EU’s efforts to engage with European civil society in very diverse contexts so as to better understand the connection between the European ‘state’ and its citizens. With culture being an empowering tool enabling dialogue and social cohesion, we believe that it can play a crucial role for CSOs. Using the case of a large-scale Social Community Theatre (SCT) project under the Creative Europe programme 2014-2020 through the lens of conceptual theories on transculturality, we ask the following questions:
- Is a transcultural understanding and approach to top-down management adopted by the Commission and, accordingly, are transcultural processes at the level of civil society actively encouraged by the EU through the means of funding cultural projects?
- (How) Do such programmes enhance the creation of relations between citizens, CSOs and the European institutions, and of shared values and a sense of belonging among European citizens?
- Can the observed relations be defined as transcultural?
- What is the role of CSOs in these processes?

Finally, we discuss how a deeper adoption of the transcultural approach in a sense of transcultural management, both by the EU institutions and beneficiary projects, could enhance EU projects with CSOs, and if EU-funded culture projects engaging CSOs could help to create and strengthen transcultural relations across Europe in a more decentralized and bottom-up manner.