The Realities of the Economic Crisis in the EU – What are the Impacts for the Cultural Sector?

The words “aus­ter­ity pro­gram” have become the most repeated col­lo­ca­tion across all of Europe. Major cuts to cul­ture are a real­ity in many Euro­pean gov­ern­ments and relaxed Euro­peans are being forced to adopt this new word “aus­ter­ity”. What are the actual impacts?

France and Germany

France and Ger­many are the only two coun­tries that do not plan on cut­ting cul­tural fund­ing. Sur­pris­ingly the bud­get for the Min­istry in France has increased by 0.9% com­pared to 2011, for a total increase of €7.4 mil­lion. An exam­ple of their spend­ing is the open­ing of the Palais de Tokyo that just took place on April 20^th in Paris, and the for­mer 1937 World Expo Pavil­lion was recon­structed to become the biggest arts cen­tre in Europe (it’s big­ger than 3 soc­cer fields!) France is very for­tu­nate when we com­pare their bud­get to the ones in the UK, where the arts coun­cil was cut nearly 30%, or the Nether­lands where the cul­tural bud­get was cut by 25%. Ger­many increased their national cul­tural bud­get by 5.1% for 2012.

Nether­lands

The centre-right coali­tion plans to cut the cul­tural bud­get by 25% (€200 mil­lion) by Jan­u­ary 2013. Taxes on tick­ets for cul­tural events will rise from 6 to 19%, although sport­ing events, zoo and cir­cuses are being exempted.

Den­mark

Den­mark is see­ing their cul­tural bud­get cut by 5% this year.

Britain

The Depart­ment of Cul­ture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has seen their bud­get slashed by 24%, going from  £1.9 mil­lion to £1.1 mil­lion in 2014–15 as part of the wide-scale gov­ern­ment cuts. Approx­i­mately 41% of the sav­ings will be made in the department’s admin­is­tra­tion costs, includ­ing the abo­li­tion or sub­stan­tial reform of a total of 19 of DCMS’s 55 exist­ing quasi non-governmental orga­ni­za­tions), includ­ing the UK Film Coun­cil and the The­atres Trust (which ill con­tinue as an inde­pen­dent charity).

The end result to “front line” arts orga­ni­za­tions will be lim­ited to 15% cuts over the next four years. The biggest dam­age has been done to the Arts Coun­cil Eng­land, which was down­sized by nearly 30% last year. Such a reduc­tion in arts fund­ing will force 1 in every 10 cul­tural orga­ni­za­tions to close.

A pos­i­tive step from the gov­ern­ment has been a boost to the cre­ative indus­tries sec­tor. By April 2013, tax breaks for TV and ani­ma­tion aim to reverse a trend of UK pro­duc­tions being made over­seas and attract for­eign com­pa­nies to make their pro­grams in the UK. Tax relief for video games could help increase the sector’s con­tri­bu­tion to the UK econ­omy by £280 mil­lion over the next five years.

 Greece

The bur­glar­ies in the national and munic­i­pal gal­leries in Feb­ru­ary, as well as the armed rob­bery at the museum Olympia on March 5^th, have exposed weak­nesses in the pro­tec­tion of cul­tural her­itage sites across the coun­try. These weak­nesses have been made worse by the so-called aus­ter­ity pro­gram that is slash­ing all national pub­lic ser­vice budgets.

The Greek min­is­ter of cul­ture has decided to cut fund­ing for museum secu­rity by 20%. Accord­ing to a new law, the Greek gov­ern­ment is also plan­ning per­son­nel cuts of 30–50% at the Min­istry of Culture.

Italy

A total bud­get of  €1.8 mil­lion for cul­ture is not enough to pre­serve erod­ing his­tor­i­cal sites like the Col­i­seum or the col­laps­ing arche­o­log­i­cal sites in Pom­peii (both of which are on the UNESCO world her­itage sites list). The Col­i­seum seeks its sal­va­tion at the hands of shoe mag­nate Della Valle, who own Tod’s shoe brand, and promised to invest €25 mil­lion into its revi­tal­iza­tion. The bud­gets of La Scala and the famous Pic­colo Teatro have been cut €17 mil­lion. Although Ital­ians claim the half of the world’s her­itage can be found on the Apen­nine penin­sula, the gov­ern­ment ear­marked only 0.21% of the national bud­get for cul­ture, while an aver­age of 1% is com­mon for most the EU countries.

Spain

Spain is cur­rently fac­ing an unem­ploy­ment rate of 23% (the high­est in the EU) and is tak­ing all mea­sures along with its Por­tuguese neigh­bours to stay in the Euro­zone. The cul­tural sec­tor in Spain con­tributes nearly 4% of the GDP and employs 2.8$ of Span­ish workers.

The Film Insti­tute, which is respon­si­ble for aid to Span­ish cin­ema, will have its bud­get reduced 35% from €106 mil­lion to €69 mil­lion accord­ing the new 2012 bud­get.  The sec­ond high­est cut, which is by 17%, will be to the Per­form­ing Arts and Music and the National Library will suf­fer a 14% decrease. The over­all cuts to the cul­tural bud­get add up to 15%.

Czech Repub­lic

The right-wing coali­tion gov­ern­ment is con­sid­er­ing abol­ish­ing three depart­ments – the Min­istry of Cul­ture not with­stand­ing. The Czech Repub­lic invests only around a mere 0.6% to cul­ture. The gov­ern­ment relies on EU pro­grams that pre­dom­i­nantly help the per­form­ing arts to sur­vive. The coun­try would be on the list of EU coun­tries the have no min­istry of cul­ture along with Hun­gary, Aus­tria, Fin­land, and recently Por­tu­gal. The Czech Repub­lic com­petes with its East­ern Euro­pean coun­ter­parts at attract­ing film crews from the West. The film indus­try incen­tives account for 800 mil­lion Crowns (€32.3 million).

Barbora Pola­chova  is a stu­dent in the Czech Repub­lic who worked for the CCA in the con­text of an intern­ship project with the Euro­pean Union.

Sources