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30 September 2026
Europe has been diagnosed with an imagination gap. The recently published European Sentiment Compass 2026, a joint project by the European Council on Foreign Relations and the European Cultural Foundation, finds that most Europeans want Europe to become a better place but struggle to picture what that ‘better place’ might actually look like. This year’s edition carries a telling title, Future Nostalgia: Europe’s unfinished song. Its argument is that while nostalgic politics are gaining ground, the answer is not to aspire to how things used to be, but to restore something societies used to possess: a sense that a better future was possible.
The ‘imagination issue’ did not escape this year’s State of the Union address by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. After an attempt at a candid diagnosis — the state of the Union proclaimed as the ‘strongest’ ever while simultaneously acknowledged as feeling ‘precarious’ — and an exercise in renewed confidence about Europe’s independence, the roughly 75-minute speech concluded with the recognition that something may be missing in how Europe speaks to future generations. The ‘capacity to think Europe’, von der Leyen argued, needs to be rediscovered. Europe must ‘reclaim its imagination’. To do so, she announced a Congress of Europe for 2027, marking the 70th anniversary of the Treaties of Rome, where ‘brightest minds’ would gather to develop a vision for Europe and a story of their own for the next generation.
There is something ironic and maybe symptomatic about reaching back to the Congress of Europe of 1948, explicitly invoked in the speech, as the format through which European imagination is to be reclaimed. But the more important question is why ‘European imagination’ needs reclaiming, and what might actually restore it (surely not the Congress alone).
Whenever a vision of the future is recognised to be missing, the diagnosis is often followed by a prescription: we need a stronger, more positive, emotionally compelling narrative of the future. The cultural sector tends to respond similarly. Whenever politics is said to lack imagination, we point, myself included, towards artists. Who, if not artists, are skilled at inventing other worlds, unsettling what seems inevitable and making alternative futures emotionally tangible?
Interestingly, in this case it is not even clear whether artists will be invited to the Congress. They appeared explicitly in the version of von der Leyen’s speech published online on 16 September (still available here) as potential participants: ‘thinkers and writers, artists and scientists, citizens and civil society’ (translation from French). Yet von der Leyen did not actually say this in her speech, and the line was subsequently removed from the final official version.
Whether artists are invited or not is a crucial question, but let’s allow ourselves to take a step back and reflect on even deeper matters. What actually happens to artistic imagination in today’s world as it stands?
If culture is indeed a space for imagination, and if we live amid an unprecedented abundance of cultural production, why are we being told that societies suffer from an imagination gap? Why are there more cultural events than ever before, with digital platforms flooded with cultural content, and yet we still need to convene a Congress of Europe to fix our imagination? Why do artists’ stories, images and experiments not more visibly become collective visions of the future? Why do artistic utopias so rarely grow into political ones?
What is the actual problem with imagining the future?
The European Sentiment Compass 2026 does not suggest that what Europe lacks is simply a new strong, unifying story. Bold promises about tomorrow will not, by themselves, restore confidence in the future. Nor will small improvements, experienced mainly as another round of crisis management. What is needed, the authors suggest, lies somewhere between ‘dreaming big’ and remaining crisis-defensive. The present needs to be governed in ways that make a better future credible. Delivery matters because people need tangible reasons to believe that tomorrow can actually be different.
Jens Beckert, from the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, pushes the diagnosis further. He describes a widespread decline in future-oriented thinking, particularly in countries of the Global North: what is sometimes called a ‘loss of the future’ — uncertainty and pessimism increasingly shape how people understand what lies ahead.
Crucially, Beckert does not argue that societies have simply run out of narratives. The problem is that people are losing the capacity to relate to the future as a collective project. Contemporary conditions have weakened the social and institutional mechanisms through which particular images of the future can become credible, shared and durable, rather than fading away shortly after they emerge.
Precarity is part of the explanation. Economic insecurity shortens the imaginative horizon. When people cannot reliably plan their lives months ahead, projecting themselves into a radically different social future becomes more difficult. Insecurity also pushes people towards spheres of individual control: the future becomes something one manages privately rather than constructs collectively. As life trajectories become framed through personal responsibility, self-realisation, entrepreneurship and consumption, collective aspirations become ‘privatised’.
The issue extends beyond individualism. The social infrastructures through which imaginaries historically acquired collective force have themselves weakened. Political parties, trade unions, religious communities, civic organisations and other forms of associative life once provided durable environments in which abstract visions could be debated, repeated, institutionalised and transformed into shared projects. Their decline leaves imaginaries easily fragmented into temporary mobilisations and isolated communities.
The material foundations of collective futures have weakened as well. Underinvestment in housing, education, healthcare, transport and other public infrastructures does more than weaken services. It removes some of the visible proof that societies are actually capable of constructing a shared future together.
At the same time, as Beckert argues, technocratic and managerial politics narrow the space in which alternative futures can even be contested. When political choices are presented primarily as questions of expertise, optimisation and necessity, politics becomes less about collective will-formation and more about managing constraints. Jonathan White, in In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea, similarly observes that the future increasingly appears not as something politically imagined but as something to be calculated, anticipated and managed.
Finally, as Beckert notes, collective imaginaries require shared communicative spaces: places in which different images of the future can encounter one another, be contested and gradually acquire social meaning. Those spaces, too, have fragmented, as traditional media have lost much of their former dominance. The internet allows multiple bubbles to emerge and an unprecedented number of ideas to circulate at great speed, but too often those ideas remain confined within the bubbles in which they originated.
It may be that the ‘imagination gap’ is not about the scarcity of imagined futures. The gap is created by the reality in which these ideas circulate in segmented environments, mobilising particular groups without necessarily becoming shared reference points for collective action.
Culture: a place of imagining futures?
At the 1948 Congress of Europe in The Hague, culture was at the heart of political reconstruction. Alongside the Political Committee and the Economic and Social Committee, the Congress had a dedicated Cultural Committee, chaired by the Spanish writer and diplomat Salvador de Madariaga, with Denis de Rougemont, Swiss writer, as its rapporteur. Around one hundred delegates took part in its work. The Committee was tasked to draft the Congress’s preamble — ‘to define the spirit that would inform all the work carried out at the Congress’, and debated the cultural foundations of European unity. De Rougemont also helped draft the Message to Europeans through which the Congress articulated its vision of European unity.
Historically, art has repeatedly helped make different futures socially imaginable: the Bauhaus linked aesthetic experimentation to new forms of living; Afrofuturism envisaged alternative futures beyond dominant frames, centring Black identity, agency and freedom; and figures such as Václav Havel, the playwright, dissident and later president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, carried artistic imagination and courage into political life. Italian Futurism offers the darker example: the Futurist Manifesto was created by an artist and later embraced by fascists, a proof that artistic visions of the future can mobilise collective imagination in destructive directions too.
So, what about today? Whether contemporary culture is genuinely imaginative has itself become a subject of debate. Kyle Chayka has described the flattening effects of platform culture and algorithmic recommendation. Jason Farago has asked whether our apparent obsession with innovation has shifted the focus: renewal in the arts increasingly expressed through new topics rather than through fundamentally new artistic languages.
W. David Marx begins Blank Space from a related puzzle: why does cultural invention appear to have decelerated during a historical period of almost limitless cultural production? Writing primarily about American popular culture, Marx identifies several overlapping developments: commercial success displacing other systems of cultural value; risk pushed away by insecurity; platforms turning culture into an intensified competition for attention; and the weakening of subcultural ecosystems through which new styles once developed.
Whether contemporary culture is in fact stagnating is a contested question, provoking debate among cultural critics and scholars. An important implication of Marx’s argument, however, is not that ‘cultural invention’ itself has disappeared. Artists continue to be inventive, but the problem lies in what happens to those inventions afterwards. For novelty to acquire power and enter the public imagination — for an idea to become a discourse — it needs scenes, intermediaries, institutions, critics, audiences and communities through which unfamiliar, even disruptive (and what else can help us picture a different horizon to aspire to?) imaginaries can be recognised, embraced, repeated, contested and eventually become culturally and politically meaningful for many.
The condition of cultural institutions matters enormously in these processes. Across Europe, cultural organisations are operating under overlapping political, economic and social pressures. Scarce resources, social polarisation, and political uncertainty can encourage risk-aversion. Tested formats, established names and demonstrable audiences become easier to defend than expressions and ideas whose value is not yet legible. As Fatoş Üstek observes in The Art Institution of Tomorrow: Reinventing the Model: ‘The consequence of institution’s constraining finances, underpaid and overworked staff, authoritarian demeanour, archaic operational frameworks, and financial dependencies all play a crucial role. I believe the majority of art institutions are at the moment standing still in the fear of any movement that might precipitate their demise’.
Even where artists themselves remain visionary, speculative, and future-oriented, cultural institutions may therefore struggle to perform the function of hosting collective imagination: to take up new imaginaries of the future, let them develop, build artistic movements and communities around them, expose them to disagreement and give them enough duration to become something larger than an individual artwork.
There is another structural obstacle here: time. Bojana Kunst has described how contemporary artistic labour has become organised through what she calls projective temporality. In Artist at Work and in Making Temporal Kinships: Beyond the Project, Kunst argues that the project is more than an administrative or funding format, but it is also a way of organising time.
What is a project? It is the present acquiring value through what it promises to produce later. Cultural workers move from project to project, often several simultaneously, while already preparing the applications, partnerships and promises on which the next one depends. This produces a paradox for a sector supposedly concerned with imagining futures: cultural work is intensely future-oriented while increasingly lacking time to establish a meaningful relationship with the future, and to allow it to be open, to begin with.
Kunst contrasts this temporal logic with artistic practices whose value lies in continuity, maintenance, relationships and forms of being together that do not necessarily become more valuable because they produce an identifiable future output. Project logic can marginalise those relational and reproductive dimensions (the ‘art biosphere’) on which artistic ecosystems depend.
Seen through the lens of imagination, projectivisation therefore can prevent imaginaries from acquiring duration and becoming something powerful and collective. The relationships around it may never have enough time to consolidate into a movement, a discourse, a vocabulary, a community. The social infrastructure capable of carrying the ideas forward can remain at the fringe of support if the focus remains largely on short-term trajectories aimed at a final output.
At the same time, the spaces through which culture reaches people have themselves transformed and largely emerged in the virtual world. The internet once promised unprecedented opportunities for collective action, mobilisation around ideas and the collaborative production of knowledge and imagination. Instead, digital cultural environments have become deeply segmented, increasingly organised by algorithmic systems whose mechanisms remain largely invisible to their users. People inhabit isolated cultural and informational worlds. Artistic expressions that are not guaranteed to speak to many, difficult to classify, package or predict may find it especially difficult to travel beyond their initial audiences.
Citing Nina George, the proverbial thing that ‘everyone discusses on Monday morning’ has become harder to imagine. Has one more social infrastructure through which a notion of the future as a shared, collective project weakened?
Cultural policy and the future that is already decided
Cultural policy itself has, over the past few decades, steadily embraced the vocabulary of projects, deliverables and measurable effects. At the same time, the concept of future has entered European cultural-policy discourse increasingly through the language of uncertainty. Ole Marius Hylland, writing about Nordic cultural policy, points to the rising presence of the buzzword ‘preparedness’, and the future appearing in cultural policy discourse increasingly as something unpredictable and uncertain.
The Culture Compass, the EU’s new cultural strategy, is centred on addressing the many crises unfolding simultaneously, and resilience is referenced 17 times across 20 pages, detailing at least seven different types of resilience — territorial, mental, physical, emotional, communal, social, and economic. This marks a contrast with previous European cultural strategies: neither the 2018 New European Agenda for Culture nor the European Agenda for Culture in a Globalising World of 2007 mentioned ‘resilience’ even once.
AgoraEU, the proposed programme for the next EU budgetary cycle 2028—2034, similarly places substantial emphasis on protecting values and democracy. Protecting democratic institutions and European values matters enormously. But the dominant relationship with the future is nevertheless revealing: it is one of safeguarding, protecting, defending, strengthening what we have while preparing for what is to come.
Cultural policy is preoccupied with the future while leaving so little of it genuinely open. Resilience discourse is in many ways future-oriented, but the future arrives primarily as disruption, threat or uncertainty for which one must be ready. What is less visible is an invitation for artists to enter the unknown: to create ideas whose value cannot yet be measured, to support institutions whose role is to host disagreement, or to allow propositions to develop without already knowing what they are meant to achieve.
There are, of course, very real reasons for this resilience lens. Europe and the wider world face profound geopolitical, economic, environmental and social uncertainty. The cultural sector faces an additional destabilising force — artificial intelligence. AI already raises serious questions about artists’ livelihoods and remuneration, while simultaneously unsettling categories central to how artistic work understands itself: authorship, originality, copyright, creativity and creative responsibility. Artists also remain economically precarious. Living from one project to another, combining several jobs and moving between periods of paid and unpaid work creates precisely the kind of insecurity that Beckert identifies as hostile to future-oriented thinking.
This helps explain the growing political interest in basic income for artists. There are good reasons for this interest. Justin O’Connor, Sam Whiting and Tully Barnett point to evidence that greater income security can reduce financial stress, allow artists to turn down unrelated work, decrease the time spent chasing grants and create more sustained time for artistic practice.
But O’Connor, Whiting, and Barnett warn against seeing basic income as the only solution for building strong cultural ecosystems. Income support for individual artists cannot substitute for soft and hard infrastructures around them: arts education, organisations, institutions, studios, equipment, venues and companies, but also mechanisms of exhibition, criticism, circulation, exchange and relationships with audiences. Even solitary artistic practice depends on an ecosystem through which work enters cultural life.
A basic income can give artists greater security and more time to imagine, but it cannot on its own create the conditions in which those imaginaries feed into collectively shared visions and aspirations. This requires a strong arts sector, with structures for professional development and representation, sustainable networks, long-term relationships, spaces for collective experimentation, and platforms of visibility open to a diversity of ideas rather than only to safe bets, as well as honest debate through which ideas can mature and develop into discourse, political imaginaries and potentially shared narratives for the future.
A strong cultural ecosystem can become one of the social infrastructures that Beckert talks about needed not only to produce new narratives (there are many of them produced in different corners of public life), but also to sustain them within society and give them collective force.
Beyond Congresses
None of the symptoms behind the ‘imagination gap’ diagnosed by the Sentiment Compass means that uncertain times cannot generate extraordinary artistic invention. New stories, styles, dystopias, utopias and radically different ways of understanding social life continue to emerge. AI itself, often understood as the biggest source of uncertainty, simultaneously pushes artistic experimentation. And whether culture appears in a State of the Union speech or artists are invited to the future Congress of Europe or not, they will continue to imagine. That is, after all, part of what artistic practice does: it enters spaces that do not yet exist and gives form to possibilities that are not yet socially or politically understandable.
But for imaginaries to be a social resource, societies need infrastructures of collectivity: institutions, networks, spaces and practices through which ideas can be encountered repeatedly, contested, refined, connected to other ideas and gradually turned into shared reference points. Culture needs the same: not only mechanisms for generating imaginaries, but conditions in which they can mature, transform and endure.
So, yes, if Europe is serious about reclaiming its imagination, artists must be in the room. But fora’s imagining Europe will achieve little if the wider conditions through which imagination becomes collective continue to erode. What needs strengthening are the social and cultural structures that allow new ideas to move beyond isolated works, projects and communities, and to become shared, democratic and powerful enough to reshape how societies understand what is possible.
*First published on Culture Policy Room, 29.09.2026. See here.
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12 February 2026
What role do artists play in defending freedom in today’s Europe - and what about their own freedom? While political institutions speak with growing urgency about reimagining the EU’s autonomy and independence in the world, the conditions that allow artists to shape this new vision are quietly eroding. So too is their capacity to exercise freedom. A European Artistic Freedom Act is urgently needed - but no law, on its own, can secure the space where freedom becomes real and for everyone. Much more must be done - by more than policy-makers alone - and time is running out.
‘Honesty about the world as it is’
‘Time is running out’. Indeed, over the last few years, we have lived in what feels like a permanent urgency. Crisis after crisis has trained us to think and to govern in the language and logic of emergency and responsiveness.
The discourse of a decisive moment, of choice, of a crossroads, has penetrated political debate at multiple levels in recent years. We are told that we must choose, now or never, as hesitation itself has become a risk. ‘The world is at a crossroads’ was one of the central messages of the United Nations’ Summit of the Future, which UN Secretary-General António Guterres described as ‘the moment for world leaders to make breakthrough choices’. The political guidelines of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen are titled Europe’s Choice, presenting a series of alternatives: to remain dependent or to be bold, to ignore reality or to be ‘clear-eyed about the world’, and more.
Beneath this urgency and rhetoric of choice, the appeal to clear-eyedness reflects another emerging trend in political debate: a growing collective realisation that many systems, including international institutions, have not been functioning as we trusted them to, and that pretending otherwise has come at a cost.
The recent Davos speech by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney resonated widely, perhaps because its central appeal addressed what many miss in today’s politics - honesty. About how power works, about what is broken, and about who pays the price. Carney called on leaders to ‘take on the world as it is, not wait around for the world we wish it to be’. He also spoke of the need to stop pretending that old systems still function and of the courage required to stand up for values in a world that increasingly rewards cynicism. ‘The power of the less powerful starts with honesty’, he argued. ‘This rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is’.
Honesty is inseparable from courage, and courage is inseparable from freedom. Across Europe today, freedom has returned as a central political concept. We hear calls for independence, self-determination, strategic autonomy - not only rhetorically, but through new strategies and agendas. Teresa Ribera, First Executive Vice-President of the European Commission for a Clean, Just, and Competitive Transition, has spoken of transforming the Green Deal into a ‘Freedom Deal’, pointing to the need for Europe’s economic independence. The Commission President’s 2025 State of the Union address was framed as ‘Europe’s Independence Moment’, the same title as of the Commission Work Programme for 2026. Freedom and independence in the State of the Union speech resonated even more strongly than economic competitiveness, accompanied by a call to reimagine a united Europe as autonomous and strong, grounded in consolidated values such as democracy and freedom of expression.
In this sense, the crossroads moment appears resolved. The choice has been made: toward honesty; emancipation; autonomy; independence - in its various forms, from military to economic and technological; and freedom.
But if we speak about honesty and independence at the level of states and institutions, what about citizens? What about artists - those whose role is precisely to imagine, question, disturb, and expand the space of freedom? Because this renewed political language of freedom is unfolding against a troubling backdrop.
Freedom for artists?
The Global Expression Report 2025 shows that more than two-thirds of the world’s population now enjoys less freedom of expression than a decade ago. The Economist Intelligence Unit finds democracy in decline: its Democracy Index 2024 traces a persistent backsliding that began around 2007, with the years since the COVID-19 pandemic marking an especially sharp rollback of freedoms.
Statements that ‘democracy is under threat’ are common in EU political speeches and official documents. Meanwhile, European citizens are not very satisfied with the state of democracy either: as the Flash Eurobarometer 522 Democracy (2023) revealed, more than half of EU citizens surveyed (51%) are dissatisfied with the way democracy works in their country.
Artistic freedom is not immune to these broader trends. A recent study by the Performing Arts Coalition (PAC) - Beyond Rhetoric and Reality: Cultural Rights, Artistic Freedom, and Democratic Resilience - confirms what organisations such as Freemuse have documented for years: artistic expression is under increasing pressure, not only globally but also across Europe, including in countries where freedoms were once considered secure.
Nearly half of the survey’s respondents - 261 performing arts professionals, mostly based in Europe - regard artistic freedom as endangered. One third report having experienced government censorship in the recent past, sometimes through direct bans but more often through subtler mechanisms such as funding cuts, shifting priorities, or procedural exclusions.
Many described a landscape in which the most critical, experimental, or politically challenging voices are quietly pushed out — not necessarily through prohibition, but through administrative complexity, opaque criteria, or chronic underfunding.
Culture called to rescue democracy
At the same time, as democratic erosion becomes more widely acknowledged, the role of culture in responding to it has steadily risen on the EU policy agenda. This shift culminated in the joint document - the Declaration on the Necessity of Culture and Media as a Safeguard for European Democracies, signed by nearly all EU member states (except for Hungary), and joined by Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine, in late 2025. The declaration presents culture, democracy, and security as an interlinked triangle: Europe’s security depends on democratic resilience; and heritage and cultural diversity form an essential part of it.
The newly adopted Commission’s strategy for culture - the Culture Compass for Europe - identifies artistic freedom as a priority, recognises culture’s democratic function, and connects it to the European Democracy Shield, the EU’s new democracy strategy. Notably, the Democracy Shield is one of the few, and perhaps the only, EU policy documents outside the cultural field that recognises, even if briefly, artistic freedom as a pillar of democracy.
A key EU development in linking culture with democratic priorities is the Commission’s proposal to merge Creative Europe with the CERV Programme (Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values) within the next Multiannual Financial Framework (2028–2034), as part of a new funding programme, AgoraEU. The programme is framed largely around EU values and democratic resilience - which, according to the proposal text, are undermined by external and internal threats, highlighting culture’s importance for identity, participation, citizenship, equality, and non-discrimination.
The overall rhetoric of AgoraEU, focused on defending shared values against mounting threats, creates a strong sense of urgency: to withstand, protect, preserve, and safeguard what Europe considers central to its identity. While these calls are timely and justified, the guiding vision of a programme that supports not only rights defenders and wider civil society but also creativity and the arts appears to lack a more positive, innovative, and courageous outlook - one that emphasises imagining, inventing, and inspiring new futures, precisely the domains in which artists and creative workers excel.
Culture is undeniably fundamental to democracy and civic rights. Yet, in conflating culture with the defense of democracy within the same funding tool, and ending a standalone programme for culture, we may also be witnessing a deeper shift: a retreat from recognising culture’s imaginative and future-shaping potential within political thinking.
‘Negative’ freedom is not a destination
Could it be that the way the European Union currently frames the role of culture is symptomatic of its own perception of freedom? A Europe confident in its future would ask culture to imagine, provoke, invent, and take risks. Instead, culture is increasingly tasked with stabilising, preserving, and reassuring, as if the horizon were something to protect ourselves from rather than to move toward. This defensive framing of culture’s role is, in many ways, the clearest manifestation of Europe’s struggle with what historian Timothy Snyder calls ‘positive freedom’: a vision of not only what Europe wants to be free from, but what it wants to be free to become. When culture is reduced to a tool of cohesion and protection, its imaginative capacity is sidelined - and with it, societies’ ability to desire, to propose, and to project a future that is more than a guarded extension of the present.
This distinction matters because Europe today speaks the language of emancipation largely in negative terms: freedom from dependence - economic, military, technological; freedom from coercion; freedom from vulnerability. Today’s Europe knows what it does not want to be, what it does not want to depend on. This is what Snyder would call negative freedom - the removal of constraints, the absence of domination. While necessary, it is not in itself a destination. Societies must also develop positive freedom: the shared capacity to act, to choose a future, and to build institutions that express collective purpose. Negative freedom without a positive vision creates a vacuum, one that can easily be filled by cynicism, resentment, or authoritarian temptation.
Perhaps, then, the crossroads remains unresolved. The question is not whether Europe should claim its independence, but whether it has imagined what it seeks to become once free in a changing global reality.
Throughout history, positive freedom has been inspired and brought into being by creative and artistic minds. The arts have long been the space where freedom is imagined, debated, and enacted in lived experience.
“Europe struggles with what historian Timothy Snyder calls ‘positive freedom’: a vision of not only what Europe wants to be free from, but what it wants to be free to become. Europe today speaks the language of emancipation largely in negative terms.”
‘The audience needs to know that the artist is honest’
This brings us back to artistic freedom. Thirty-seven percent of respondents to the survey of the study by the Performing Arts Coalition told us they had self-censored in the recent past, and another thirty percent in one or another way acknowledge that this tendency exists within the broader peer arts community. According to the respondents’ testimonials, most often, self-censorship happens in relation to funding: language is adjusted; names are removed; ideas are reframed; risky concepts are softened. Projects are not abandoned because they lack value, but because they lack safety. In some countries, respondents spoke of the need to maintain a ‘good profile’ with funders: to avoid criticism, to stay agreeable, to not disturb.
This does not always mean silencing oneself completely, but it does mean that imagining the reaction of conservative audiences, political actors, or administrators has become part of the creative process itself. Social polarisation has also become a significant factor of self-censorship. Polarised societies are characterised not only by hostility between ideological camps, but by shrinking tolerance for disagreement within them. Controversy becomes risky and complexity unwelcome - conditions that are at odds with artistic expression.
Self-censorship has for some time been discussed in the cultural sector as a coping mechanism. As the Freemuse Report 2025 notes, in some contexts, censorship itself may no longer need to occur on a large scale when artists begin to censor themselves as a matter of survival.
Self-censorship is damaging not only for artists, organisations and their creative processes, but also for societies. I discussed self-censorship in the Western context with Sverre Pedersen, Freemuse Director, earlier this month. He reflected:
“When we are self-censoring ourselves, we are actually violating the role of the free arts in a society. The audience needs to know that the artist is honest. When the audience realise that the artist is self-censoring because bread and butter is more important than actually the creation, the audience will lose their trust and confidence with the arts and the artist.”
So, is time running out?
Artistic freedom issues have been raised by the sector all across Europe in recent years, and EU policy-makers have listened to these concerns. The Culture Compass emphasises artistic freedom as one of its priorities. Yet it does not set out particularly bold solutions to strengthen it. It focuses instead on collecting cases and monitoring artistic freedom through the new State of Culture in the EU report. Although this is not sufficient on its own, such periodic documentation would still be a step forward, as no systematic EU-level monitoring of artistic freedom currently exists.
In the European Commission’s proposal for the AgoraEU regulation, artistic freedom is framed as a part of the objectives (which is not the case for the current Creative Europe programme), and there are tentative indications that access to EU funding could become conditional on respect for artistic freedom. The proposal states that implementation of the culture-specific objective must be carried out with “full respect for artistic freedom and the diversity of cultural expressions, while contributing to the improvement of working conditions for artists and cultural and creative professionals.”
More recently, the sector itself has mobilised around a proposal to adopt a European Artistic Freedom Act, drawing inspiration from the European Media Freedom Act. As the initiators define it, an Artistic Freedom Act would serve to secure “an environment in which artists and cultural workers can operate without fear of censorship or retaliation and contribute to a democratic, diverse, and resilient Europe.”
These initiatives suggest that artistic freedom is finally entering the centre of European political attention. What matters now is whether the conditions for genuine artistic freedom can be secured in practice, not only in principle. This requires a closer look at the gaps that remain and the areas where decisive effort and attention are needed.
Artistic Freedom begins with who gets to speak at all
There is often a problem in how artistic freedom is understood, both within the sector and at the political level. Too often, it is defined as merely the absence of political repression. As long as no one is officially banned, arrested, or censored, freedom is assumed to exist. Governments can then wash their hands of the issue and regard it as not their problem.
Yet in systems marked by precarity, defunding, market dominance, unregulated digitalisation, and eroding cultural infrastructure, many voices never reach the point of being censored. Some artists never have the conditions necessary to speak in the first place. Some communities never gain access to cultural spaces or to artistic education. Some practices never become visible enough to be suppressed. Defending only the freedom of those who already have a voice offers, at best, a partial response.
A holistic approach to artistic freedom, one that includes but goes beyond a narrow focus on direct government censorship, must also consider the cultural rights of the population, as well as social dynamics and the behaviour of digital platforms. Although the term ‘holistic’ is overused and often impractical, this is a call for a practical strategy. It concerns where we place our attention: what we measure when assessing the state of artistic freedom, which cases we collect, which indicators we develop, and, ultimately, where we seek solutions. Alongside monitoring censorship by governments and audiences - undoubtedly a growing and serious threat - we should also develop and refine methodologies to map access to artistic expression: how and for whom it exists through education, funding, and visibility platforms, and for whom it does not.
“Defending only the freedom of those who already have a voice offers, at best, a partial response.”
Self-censorship: We can’t fix what we don’t understand
We must also establish and strengthen methodologies for monitoring self-censorship, a concept whose definition remains rather vague both among artists and within policymaking. One step is to ask artists about their experiences of self-censorship; another is to ensure a shared understanding of what the term means. For example, some consider adjusting the vocabulary of project applications to fit funders’ requirements a form of self-censorship, while others argue that it is not, and that such adaptation has existed for as long as public funding for culture itself.
Self-censorship needs to be defined more clearly and continuously refined as we learn more about its contexts, forms, and lived realities, factors that themselves evolve and generate new pressures. Methodologies for measuring self-censorship must also be developed. In a conversation with Sverre Pedersen, Director of Freemuse, he explained:
“Self-censorship is hidden, and nobody is proud of censoring themselves. You don’t go to social media or the press and say, “I have to self-censor”. We are therefore totally dependent on creating safe spaces where people can share their experiences. When you create these safe rooms, you can gather a great deal of information on a personal level, which makes it possible to develop strategies to confront these threats.”
When we cannot clearly define a problem - and especially when we lack the tools to discuss it - we cannot solve it. Such safe spaces are therefore crucial today, not only within local communities but also across borders. Creating and maintaining them requires time and resources.
“Self-censorship is hidden, and nobody is proud of censoring themselves. You don’t go to social media or the press and say, ‘I have to self-censor’.”
— Sverre Pedersen, Freemuse Director
The role of the freedom act: More than labels, please
Freedom is collective, and its erosion in democratic societies ultimately produces negative ripple effects for freedoms in places already struggling to secure them. If the European Union describes itself as a ‘global leader in culture and creativity’ (citing the Culture Compass), one essential step it can take is to proactively recognise and strengthen artistic freedom, beginning with its own artists. What is needed is a consolidated EU-level approach to artistic freedom, designed, however, with great care.
A bold EU-level action on artistic freedom, such as a European Artistic Freedom Act, could strengthen recognition of artists as providers of truth and critical perspective in society. At the same time, it could reinforce their portrayal as opponents or enemies in authoritarian contexts. While acknowledging and promoting the critical role of artists is essential, it is equally important to move beyond symbolic recognition that offers no real protection and may unintentionally expose the arts sector to greater suspicion from anti-democratic actors.
“If the Freedom Act were to be tied to EU funding conditionality, how can we ensure that it does not restrict access to cultural support for artists and cultural organisations? ”
Any EU Act on artistic freedom must therefore be actionable and effective, going beyond the mere acknowledgement of a right for free expression that is already, in one form or another, constitutionally protected in all EU Member States. If such an act is to exist, it must be ambitious enough to introduce real mechanisms for protecting artists’ rights, addressing the many ways artistic freedom can be restricted, including government pressures - in all their forms, both obvious and subtle, but also threats by polarised societies and the growing trend of self-censorship.
What about linking respect for artistic freedom to funding? For example, Member States, in their compromise text on AgoraEU, are now pushing for alignment with the European Media Freedom Act as a condition for countries to participate in the future AgoraEU programme.
Access to programmes such as Creative Europe and the future AgoraEU is vital for many artists and cultural actors who fall outside the recognition or protection mechanisms of anti-democratic governments. If the Freedom Act were to be tied to EU funding conditionality, how can we ensure that it does not restrict access to cultural support for artists and cultural organisations? Conditionality should target those who limit freedom or are obliged to protect it but fail to do so—not those who suffer from its restriction.
Artistic Freedom is built, not given
A legal tool that seeks to expand freedom will inevitably encounter resistance, both blatant and subtle. This is the reality; otherwise, there would be no need to establish such an act in the first place. Thus, for such an Artistic Freedom Act to have a post-adoption life, it will ‘take a village’ to take care of it.
In the State of Culture Report 2024, we end the chapter on artistic freedom with a question: “Will there be a moment when we will need to unlearn self-censorship?”
So, when protection mechanisms are introduced, will artists actually use them? Will they be brave enough to enact freedom, not only receive it, in a context that, sadly, is not going to become more welcoming soon? How can we ensure that freedom becomes a genuine commitment, collectively cared for in full solidarity across borders?
I discussed this with Sverre Pedersen last month. He emphasised that a commitment to freedom requires both establishing the discourse around it and building capacity within the sector so that artists can exercise their rights. Sverre explained:
“Such an act alone will not solve the problem. It can, of course, have an impact, but the root problems must be tackled by artists and their associations. They need to prioritise strengthening artistic freedom and maintain an ongoing discourse about it. Both those of us working in human rights and artist associations must be brave enough to engage in difficult conversations about exercising freedom, about self-censorship. Here in Western Europe, there is a tendency to say, 'Our government must solve this for us.' But we are a society, and solutions must come from within it.”
As shown in the PAC study's survey responses, the arts field largely recognises that, in the current context, building collective resilience is crucial. Networks, solidarity and safety nets, spaces for dialogue and resource sharing, collective strategies for legal protection, tools for media and social media resistance, and community support are all crucial, especially for individual artists and small organisations. Once attacked or threatened, artists should not only be able to withstand these pressures but also be empowered to go on with their work without losing courage.
Resilience-building cannot happen at the fringe of the cultural sector’s activity; it requires active support from funders. If policy-makers genuinely aim to support a free arts sector, they should help build artistic freedom infrastructures - legal mechanisms, but also awareness, and courage muscles within the sector to consolidate and enact its values. Artists must be aware of their rights, able to exercise them without fear, and capable of pushing back against attacks, whether from governments, politicians, the media, or society at large, while continuing their work.
Societies also have a crucial role to play. Yes, audiences need to know that artists are honest. But are audiences ready to support artists in being honest? The discourse on freedom, therefore, should extend well beyond the arts sector, and audiences should become allies in paving the way for artistic freedom.
Towards a positive freedom for the arts - and for Europe
Timothy Snyder wrote in his book On Freedom: “Negative freedom also offers an easy dodge: once the barriers go down, all is permitted, and somehow all will be well. But this approach provides no definition of freedom and provides no sense of how a free person behaves.”
Freedom - of Europe and of artists - must be recognised and protected, but protection alone is not enough. Freedom also needs to be enacted, played out, hosted, exercised. Artists Freedom needs institutions, spaces, and practices willing to hold controversy, honesty, plurality. Are our cultural institutions ready to see themselves as spaces of freedom? Are they willing to resist market pressures, social antagonism, and peer surveillance? Are they prepared to engage with a broader crisis of honesty that political leaders are trying to address today? And are political leaders ready to recognise artists and the arts as allies to imagine and enact Europe’s freedom?
Let us end this essay with another of Snyder’s definitions of freedom: “Freedom is not a drama we watch. It is a play we write on a stage we build for an audience of everyone.”
*First published on Culture Policy Room, 12.02.2026. See here.
Elena Polivtseva, Researcher & Co-founder of Culture Policy Room
