ABSTRACT
Sustainable development and culture are very well rooted in the European Union legal order. However, they are mutually exclusive since they clearly pertain to different areas of competence. Consequently, the Court of Justice and the General Court have been adopting the same approach in their case law. Scholars, in turn, have been focusing on discussing the normative implications of the principle of sustainable development in respect to environmental protection or on what can be subsumed under the vast category of ‘culture’, spanning from linguistic diversity to the preservation of traditional practices. This chapter seeks to explore the potential relations between sustainable development and culture in order to understand whether an encounter between them is desirable, first, and even feasible, second. Section 1 sketches out the normative premises of the research. Section 2 explores the components of the principle of sustainable development, and section 3 investigates how culture underpins the EU legal order. Against this backdrop, section 4 argues that sustainable development and culture are an unlikely encounter for two intertwining reasons: (1) they belong to two different areas of competences where the EU’s breadth of powers is substantially asymmetric and (2) they pursue different goals, so far having been treated in isolation from one another. This interim conclusion, however, is mitigated by section 5, where it is acknowledged that sustainable development and culture might integrate with each other when some specific economic activities, such as, but not limited to, the management of cultural heritage, are at stake. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen whether these theoretical considerations could be implemented into EU legal acts. In this respect, a potential solution could be found in emphasizing the value of a joint reading of Articles 22 and 37 of the Charter, thereby streamlining a fundamental rights-based approach.
