ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the important connection between culture and politics through the European newspaper data. It presents two specific cases that have stood out in the research: Francoist Spain, whose later transition to democracy shaped drastically the views on how national identity is constructed, and Turkey, with its challenges on national identity derived from its process of Westernization. Before going into these cases, the chapter provides an overview of the theoretical stakes of the problematic relationship between art and politics, after which comes a section analysing the articles including the explicit political dimension in our entire newspaper data. In both cases, the newspaper cultural coverage clearly reflected the political processes of the country, showing what is considered worthy of journalistic attention and how products are properly evaluated in specific historical time points. Cultural events with identity politics, and in particular gender politics, seem to have received increasing attention in Dagens Nyheter's cultural pages.
