European inventory of
societal values of culture

Lijster, Otte & Gielen - Towards a Cultural Policy of Trust

Lijster, T., Otte, H., & Gielen, P. (2018) Towards a Cultural Policy of Trust: The Dutch Approach from the Perspective of a Transnational Civil Domain. In Q. Van den Hoogen & E. Van Meerkerk (Eds.), Cultural Policy in the Polder: 25 Years Dutch Cultural Policy Act (pp. 133-150). Amsterdam University Press. ISBN 9789048537471

Throughout modernity, institutions and cultural organisations such as museums, theatres, opera houses, theatre companies, orchestras and so on have played a crucial role in the constitutive process of civil society and of a democratic public sphere. The conceptual framing of this civil domain, from Hegel up until Habermas (1989), has focussed mainly on the national level: the ‘civil’ as the middle ground between the private individual and the political body of the nation-state. Dutch cultural policy also focuses on this level, supporting a so-called national Basic Infrastructure that provides high-quality offerings of culture, to be displayed on podia that are mainly locally supported but do comply to this national standard. The same applies to subsidised organisations and cultural projects allocated by the six national cultural funds established and supported by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

This framing is up for discussion, for several reasons. On the one hand, the social, political and cultural issues facing civil society today go increasingly beyond the scope of the nation-state (Walzer 1995, Koopmans & Statham 2010, Fraser 2014). Globalisation forces us to re-evaluate the notion of civil society, as well as civic values and virtues, and raises questions about the possibility of a transnational public sphere, which would be crucial for democratic deliberation. On the other hand, all over the globe we witness the emergence of grassroots cultural and civil organisations that do not f it the traditional prof ile of national institutions. These organisations lack the hierarchical order and rigid organisational structure of traditional institutions, and no longer or not primarily refer to the (national) artistic canon (Castells 2015)