Europe's cultural sector is in open revolt over how little the next EU budget proposes to spend on it. In an open letter to the Commission, the Parliament and the Council, more than 70 organisations, networks and institutions have warned that the planned successor to Creative Europe would leave culture with a vanishingly small share of the Union's money.
The arithmetic is the argument. Creative Europe is the EU's only funding instrument dedicated solely to culture. Under the Commission's proposal for 2028 to 2034, its work would be folded into a new programme called AgoraEU, whose culture strand would receive €1.8 billion, around €260 million a year. That, the signatories point out, amounts to roughly nine cents for every hundred euros the EU spends over the period, or about the annual budget of France's national library, stretched across an entire continent.
The coalition, which includes the European Association of Conservatoires and the Network of European Museum Organisations, is not simply asking for more. It wants structural protection. The letter calls for at least 25% of the AgoraEU programme to go to its cultural component, taking the European Parliament's proposed €10.72 billion for AgoraEU as a baseline rather than a ceiling.
Crucially, it demands an autonomous and visible culture strand with its own budget line, so that money earmarked for culture cannot quietly be redirected to other priorities once the programme is running. The signatories also want simpler application procedures and stronger guarantees on fair pay and social security for artists and cultural workers.
The row is one front in the much larger battle over the EU's next multiannual budget, the seven-year financial framework now being negotiated. More than 2,000 cultural professionals have already pressed for a well-resourced programme, and the sector's argument is as much about symbolism as euros: the size of the culture line, it says, is a statement about how much the Union values the thing that arguably binds it together.
Creative Europe's defenders can point to what the money does. Its Culture Moves Europe scheme alone backed 2,542 artists and cultural professionals in its latest round, three-quarters of them applying for EU funding for the first time. Shrink the envelope, the sector warns, and that pipeline narrows.
Culture is an easy line to trim because its constituency is diffuse and its returns are hard to measure against defence or industrial policy. That is precisely why the sector is fighting now, before the numbers harden. The €1.8bn figure is a proposal, not a verdict, and the Parliament, which has floated a far larger envelope, will have a say. But the deeper point the letter makes is about visibility: without a ring-fenced, named budget line, culture risks becoming the reserve that gets raided whenever a bigger priority comes calling.
