ABSTRACT
Two news items from the summer of 2013 provide us with an entry point for our discussion of cultural policy and the nation. The first concerns an idea floated by the French president, Francois Hollande, to apply a tax to smartphones, tablets and laptops. The revenue thus collected would be used to support French cultural production – music, art and film (Willsher 2013). After nine months of deliberation, a ‘special culture committee’ made this proposal, along with 75 others, in a move to protect France’s ‘cultural exception’ (see Chapter 6). The second story, appearing on a British national newspaper’s blog, focusses on the UK’s culture minister, Maria Miller. It reports doubts about her capability in the role, wondering whether she might be the last UK minister for culture – might even preside over the disbanding of the Department for Media, Culture and Sport (DCMS), a ministry established (or at least rebranded) by the incoming Labour government in 1997. Doubts about Miller and about the DCMS are cast in the shadow of austerity and cuts in government funding – and the arts are often a soft target for such cuts (Higgins 2013). So, on the one hand we have a story about protection and
exception, on the other about the vulnerability of state support
for culture and doubts over the very purpose of a government department for culture. Stories like this repeat through the history of national cultural policy: what is the right role for the state in matters of art and culture? How should the state intervene? And is the infrastructure of the state an appropriate mechanism for ‘managing’ culture, by either protection or promotion? In this chapter we trace the playing out of such questions through a focus on the scale of the nation. The nation might seem like the ‘natural home’ for cultural policy and its analysis, but as we shall see, there is considerable contest over the national state’s role in culture, and even more variation in how that role plays out. Our discussion also considers ways of studying national cultural policy, examining single-nation ‘case studies’ as well as comparative research. We begin with one of the best known, but also most controversial, aspects of national cultural policy: uses of culture in the service of celebrating the nation.
