Our recommendations for the future Creative Europe programme

The European Commission has presented its proposal for the future Budget of the European Union’ (2021-2027), maintaining Creative Europe as a stand-alone funding programme, with an increased budget of € 1.8 billion.

 IETM welcomes the outline of the new Creative Europe programme, which is seemingly more oriented towards social and democratic values, empowering citizens, promoting fundamental rights and democratic participation, and “sustaining open, inclusive and creative societies”. We also appreciate the European Commission’s willingness to “support the creation and dissemination of quality and diverse European works”.

Overall, we believe that the future EU programme for culture should address the intrinsic value of culture and the arts, which are crucial for maintaining and promoting Europe’s diversity,  building a healthy democracy and ensuring a viable future of the European project. More support should be given to the arts and cultural activities fostering social empowerment, democracy and pluralism. Furthermore, support to mobility of artists and art works and workers must be a vital part of the future programme, and imbalances between the Member States need to be addressed.

Moreover, in order to attune the future Creative Europe to the vital needs and concerns of the artistic and cultural sectors, we call on the European Commission to:

1. Ensure that the Guarantee Facility is covered by the InvestEU Fund and is not financed from the Creative Europe’s budget.
2. Reinforce an inclusive, balanced and differentiated approach to Culture and MEDIA strands - with an equal division of finances; avoid bringing them under identical guiding values and application conditions and creating an unfair competition between the two.
3. Support the international collaboration in the fields of conception, artistic creation, production and exchange, valuing research, experimentation, innovation, and risk-taking in the cultural sector.
4. Guarantee that enlarging the scope of the programme and adding new priorities is accompanied by an increased budget and a possibility to focus on one or few priorities relevant to each project’s mission while not being obliged to focus on all of them.
5. Enable cultural and creative sectors to participate in other EU programmes, by advocating for a proper integration of cultural actors in other programmes and policy areas, especially cohesion, education, regional policy, research, migration, climate action, citizenship, among others.
6. Facilitate the application procedure for international cooperation between smaller organisations by establishing a two-stage application process and / or  introducing a special strand for smaller organisations.