ABSTRACT
Governments long have intervened in culture, creating collections and libraries, commissioning artworks and monuments, building cultural venues, preserving heritage sites, developing and exporting distinctive cultural products, supporting or enforcing censorship and language regulations. The whole series of cultural actions governments around the world had embarked on over the postwar period required an organizing and comparative framework. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was established in coordination with the founding of the United Nation itself and was ratified by twenty signatories one year later, in November 1946. The cultural policy concept was formalized at UNESCO beginning in 1966 with preparations for the 1967 Roundtable of Monaco. Much of the contemporary work of continuing to develop and disseminate cultural policy norms is undertaken by the transnational organization the Council of Europe. The UNESCO Monaco Roundtable materials identify motivating challenges that compelled the development of this new policy arena—cultural policy.
