Carla Figueira

A Joint Communication to the European Parliament and the Council: towards an EU Strategy for International Cultural Relations, by the European Commission, 2016

Towards an EU Strategy for International Cultural Relations is a proposal by the European Commission and the European External Action Service. Federica Mogherini, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, issued it through a Joint Communication to the European Parliament and Council on 8 June 2016. Its aim was to put “culture at the heart of the EU international relations” (European Commission, 2016b). Although its implementation has already started, technically it only becomes a formal strategy once it has been approved by the Member States (along with the even more recent European Union (EU) Global Strategy) at the next Council meeting, in Winter 2016. This aspirational document is the fruit of over a decade of work and lobbying by EU officials, Member State representatives, and civil society activists. Their concern was to mainstream culture in EU external relations, which the Joint Communication variously refers to as “international cultural relations”, “cultural relations” and “cultural diplomacy” – none of which are defined. Culture is regarded as a competence of the Member States, implying that the EU only has a subsidiary competence in the area (as stipulated in the Lisbon Treaty, article 167). It follows that the EU’s cultural policy and practices have been characterised by fragmentation, which has hampered the efficient use of resources and the development of a visible EU strategy. (For a detailed account of the evolution of the situation see Fisher, 2007 and Isar et al., 2014.) The context within which this initiative developed includes the 2007 European Agenda for Culture, that aimed to promote culture as a vital element in the Union’s international relations; the Preparatory Action “Culture in External Relations” (Isar et al., 2014) that focused on the potential for the EU’s engagement with the rest of the world; and a range of civil society initiatives illustrated, for example, by the work of More Europe (www.moreeurope.org/). The given aim of the Joint Communication is to propose “ways to develop the EU’s international cultural relations in order to advance the Union’s objectives to promote international peace and stability, safeguard diversity and stimulate jobs and growth” – this ties in nicely with the EU Global Strategy, the proposed overall strategic framework for the

Cultural Diplomacy and the 2005 UNESCO Convention

Cultural diplomacy is not explicitly mentioned in the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. However, the Convention itself can be viewed as a classic normative instrument of multilateral cultural diplomacy harbouring, nevertheless, a potentially transformative metanarrative of accepted patterns of diplomatic relations. The Convention, dealing with the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions and emphasizing balanced partnerships between developed and developing countries, as well as making links between culture and other policy areas, challenges traditional cultural diplomacy, often associated with the uniform representation of discrete cultural nation-states and their imbalanced relations in narrowly defined areas. The Convention presents a unique opportunity to transform cultural diplomacy.

Languages at War: External Language Spread Policies in Lusophone Africa

This study explores the argument that postcolonial Africa has been the setting for competing external language spread policies (LSPs) by ex-colonial European countries at the turn of the 21st Century. It focuses on the external LSPs developed by the governments of Portugal, Brazil, United Kingdom, France and Germany towards Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau from the 1990s to the present. The study offers a perspective on the web of relationships involving European ex-colonial powers and the African postcolonial countries of Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. The author seeks to examine the development of external (European) LSPs and the construction of politico-linguistic blocs in a complex context whilst taking into account the colonial heritage and its lingering dependencies, the construction and maintenance of nationhood and the increasing globalisation of the world.