De Nederlandse verkiezingen: wat is er misgegaan voor GroenLinks-PvdA?

Nederland heeft op 29 oktober 2025 parlementsverkiezingen gehouden. Diezelfde avond trad Frans Timmermans, de leider van de gezamenlijke lijst van GroenLinks (Europese Groenen) en de Partij van de Arbeid (Partij van Europese Socialisten), af. De gezamenlijke lijst verloor 3 procent van de stemmen (en vijf zetels) in vergelijking met 2023 en daalde van de tweede naar de vierde grootste politieke macht in het land. Waarom presteerden ze zo slecht? En, terwijl de twee partijen zich voorbereiden op een volledige fusie in 2026, wat zijn hun toekomstperspectieven?

Waar het allemaal begon

De Partij van de Arbeid  is van oudsher de grootste centrumlinkse partij van Nederland. Tussen 1946 en 20171 was het de grootste of de op één na grootste partij in het parlement en de partij zat ongeveer 40 van de afgelopen 80 jaar in de regering, in een coalitie met de christen-democraten of de conservatief-liberale VVD, die drie premiers leverden.

Vergeleken met andere Europese partijen van dezelfde politieke kleur  is de PvdA groener en staan ze meer open voor postmaterialistische waarden. Zoals veel sociaal-democratische partijen in Europa, legden ze de basis voor de verzorgingsstaat in de jaren vijftig, maar draaide  eind jaren tachtig naar de derde-wegpolitiek, als weerspiegeling van de neoliberale consensus. Na de wereldwijde financiële crisis ging de partij weer naar links. Maar tussen 2012 en 2017 heeft de partij in de regering met de VVD een agenda van bezuinigingen en structurele hervormingen doorgevoerd. Bij de volgende verkiezingen daalde het aantal stemmen van 25 naar 6 procent van de stemmen en de partij is daar nooit volledig van hersteld.

GroenLinks is in 1989 ontstaan uit de fusie van vier partijen die allemaal gericht waren op de Partij van de Arbeid. De Communistische Partij van Nederland en de Pacifistische Socialistische Partij waren van mening dat de PvdA te gematigd was en te vaak bereid om compromissen te sluiten met centrumrechtse krachten, terwijl de Politieke Partij Radicalen en de Evangelische Volkspartij zich afsplitsten van christen-democratische krachten, op zoek naar nauwere samenwerking met de Partij van de Arbeid .

Bij de fusie in 1989 hebben de vier partijen een groen profiel aangenomen. Later, in 2004, was GroenLinks mede-oprichter van de Europese Groene Partij. Binnen zijn partijfamilie is de Nederlandse GroenLinks meer links op economisch gebied dan veel Europese groene partijen. Ondanks deelname aan gesprekken over coalitievorming in 2006, 2012, 2017 en 2021, heeft GroenLinks niet deel uitgemaakt van de regering. De verkiezingsresultaten van de partij fluctueerden door de jaren heen en bereikte een hoogtepunt in 2017 (9 procent).

Naar elkaar toegroeien

Het idee om een gezamenlijke lijst te vormen ontstond in 2021. Zowel GroenLinks als de PvdA deden het slecht bij de verkiezingen van dat jaar, voorbijgestreefd door D66, die naar de tweede plaats stegen en “nieuw leiderschap” beloofden. Die belofte werd niet nagekomen, aangezien het CDA en de VVD D66 overhaalden om een andere centrumrechtse regering te vormen.

Die verkiezingen brachten de GroenLinks en de PvdA echter dichter bij elkaar. Al tijdens de campagne gaf de leider van de GroenLinks Jesse Klaver aan dat hij wilde dat zijn partij nauwer samenwerkte met de PvdA. Tijdens de coalitiebesprekingen onderhandelden de twee partijen als één blok. Toen ze eenmaal in oppositie waren beland, werd hun samenwerking geïntensiveerd.

Zoals journalist Coen van de Ven in zijn boek over het fusieproces uiteenzette, werd de samenwerking sterk ondersteund door zowel de partijleiders als de leden van beide partijen, met uitzondering van enkele kritische stemmen binnen de PvdA. Deze critici vreesden dat een fusie zou leiden tot een meer amorfe linkse partij, die niet in staat zou zijn de arbeiderskiezers terug te winnen die de PvdA in 2017 verloor. Deze vleugel heeft ook de neiging om meer conservatieve opvattingen over immigratie te hebben, waarbij de Deense sociaal-democraten vaak als inspiratiebron worden genoemd.2

Acting Out: Arts and Culture Under Pressure – Our latest print edition is out now!

Read it online or get your copy delivered straight to your door.

READ & ORDER

In het voorjaar van 2023 vormden de twee partijen een gezamenlijke fractie in de Eerste Kamer en in het najaar diende ze een gezamenlijke lijst in de Tweede Kamerverkiezingen onder leiding van Frans Timmermans, toen eerste vice-voorzitter van de Europese Commissie. Door samen te werken, hoopten de partijen de grootste politieke kracht van het land te worden, waardoor de kiezers de concrete mogelijkheid kregen van een progressieve regering. De gezamenlijke lijst behaalde 25 van de 150 zetels (tegenover 17 die voorheen in het bezit waren van de twee partijen samen), maar voldeed niet aan de verwachtingen. Wat erger was, de extreemrechtse PVV won de verkiezingen, veroverde 37 zetels en vormde een rechtse coalitieregering.

GroenLinks/PvdA bleef in oppositie. In juni 2024 won de alliantie de Europese verkiezingen als een gezamenlijke lijst onder leiding van Europarlementariër Bas Eickhout van GroenLinks, waarmee 21 procent van de stemmen en acht zetels in het Europees Parlement werden behaald. Ondertussen kregen de plannen voor een fusie vorm, waarbij leden van beide partijen overweldigend voor stemden. De denktanks van de partijen hebben een ontwerp voor een nieuw manifest van principes geschreven, gericht op de waarde van solidariteit.

Toen de rechtse regering viel na iets meer dan een jaar van onderlinge strijd en incompetentie, bereidde de GroenLinks/PvdA zich voor op nieuwe verkiezingen, nog steeds als een gezamenlijke lijst. De alliantie heeft een duidelijk links en groen manifest opgesteld, met bijzondere nadruk op het bouwen van meer woningen om de huizencrisis aan te pakken. Wat migratie betreft, helt de gezamenlijke lijst echter naar rechts, wat een weerspiegeling is van een bredere verschuiving in de Nederlandse politiek. Het manifest onderschreef het idee dat het overheidsbeleid een maximumaantal immigranten zou moeten vaststellen, en bekritiseerde arbeidsmigratie als motor van uitbuiting en sociale problemen. De partij keurde ook het EU-pact inzake migratie en asiel goed, inclusief de overeenkomsten met derde landen buiten de EU om asielzoekers op te nemen.

Een beslissende campagne

Het plan om de rechtse regering te vervangen door een progressieve regering onder leiding van Timmermans kwam echter niet uit. De belangrijkste reden hiervoor was de onverwachte opkomst van D66. D66 leider, Rob Jetten, beweerde dat de verkiezingen minder een keuze waren tussen links en rechts dan over de ‘vibe’ die je voelt bij een partij. D66 projecteerde een optimistische sfeer en benadrukte dat ambitieuze plannen mogelijk worden als partijen samenwerken.

Hoewel de positie van de D66 op het gebied van migratie niet significant verschilt van die GroenLinks/PvdA (in ieder geval is de D66 liberaler op het gebied van arbeidsmigratie), presenteerde de partij zich als nationalistischer. Op het congres van zijn partij stond Jetten voor een grote Nederlandse vlag en probeerde dit symbool van rechts terug te winnen.

Gedurende de hele campagne werd Jetten ook gezien als sympathieker dan Timmermans. Hoewel de verkiezingen voor D66 en GroenLinks/PvdA in de maanden voor de verkiezingen relatief stabiel waren, kende D66 een sterke stijging in de laatste weken van de campagne (zie afbeelding 1 hieronder), waarbij stemmen van rechts en vervolgens van links gewonnen werden. Deze stijging begon toen de frontman van de PVV, Geert Wilders, zich terugtrok uit een debat met de leiders van de grootste partijen, en Jetten zijn plaats in nam. In dat debat zei Jetten dat Nederland onder zijn leiding 100.000 nieuwe huizen zou bouwen – een belofte die Timmermans verwierp als onrealistisch, schijnbaar niet wetende dat de gezamenlijke lijst dezelfde toezegging deed in een politieke reclamespot die vlak voor het debat werd uitgezonden.

Figuur 1. Rode lijn: GL-PvdA; Zwarte lijn: D66, met een betrouwbaarheidsinterval van 95 procent. De kringen geven de verkiezingsresultaten aan. Bron: Peilingwijzer.

Dit is slechts een voorbeeld van een slecht gerunde campagne die, zoals journalist Yasmin Ait Abderrahman opmerkte, duidelijk focus miste. In een onhandige poging om te voorkomen dat de D66 linkse kiezers zou winnen, begon de gezamenlijke lijst zich de afgelopen weken voor de verkiezingen te concentreren op de gezondheidszorg, hoewel dit voorheen geen deel uitmaakte van de belangrijkste campagnethema’s. Bovendien was het leiderschap geïsoleerd van de rest van de partij en niet ontvankelijk voor feedback. 

Het is dan ook niet verwonderlijk dat Timmermans verloor van het optimisme, de consistentie en de sterke organisatie van de D66, die de laatste dagen voor de verkiezingen bleef toenemen terwijl de alliantie daalde. Peilingen geven aan dat de alliantie van GroenLinks/PvdA ongeveer vijf zetels verloor aan D66.

Strijden om dezelfde kiezers?

In veel landen spreken Groenen en Sociaal-Democraten traditioneel andere kiezers aan: de eerste richt zich op universitair geschoolde stedelingen en de tweede op mensen uit de arbeidersklasse zonder universitaire opleiding die vaak lid zijn van vakbonden. In Nederland was dit tegen de tijd dat GroenLinks en de PvdA begonnen samen te werken niet meer het geval. Bij de verkiezingen van 2017 had de PvdA haar traditionele arbeidersbasis verloren en beide partijen doen nu vooral een beroep op hoogopgeleide kiezers, ook al blijft het electoraat van GroenLinks aanzienlijk jonger dan dat van de PvdA.

Bij de verkiezingen van dit jaar kregen zowel Groen/Links als de D66 de meeste van hun stemmen van universitair geschoolde burgers (ongeveer 20 procent elk – zie afbeelding 2 hieronder). Ze presteerden het slechtst onder mensen met diploma’s van beroepsopleidingen. Beide partijen deden het iets beter bij mensen met een middelbare schooldiploma, wat waarschijnlijk wordt verklaard door hun aantrekkingskracht bij jongere kiezers die nog geen universitair diploma hebben.

Figuur 2. Rode balken: GroenLinks/PvdA; Paarse balken: D66, met een betrouwbaarheidsinterval van 95 procent. Bron: Leids Kiezersonderzoek.

Verschillen tussen het electoraat van GroenLinks/PvdA en die van D66 zijn sterker in termen van economische en culturele opvattingen (zie onderstaande tabel 1). GroenLinks/PvdA presteert zeer goed onder kiezers die economisch links zijn (voor herverdeling van inkomen, tegen buitensporige ongelijkheid) en cultureel progressief (met name op het gebied van immigratie): 50 procent van hen stemde voor de gezamenlijke lijst. De alliantie doet het echter slecht onder economisch linkse, cultureel conservatieve kiezers (13 procent), onder economisch rechtse, cultureel progressieve kiezers (10 procent) en onder economisch rechtse, cultureel conservatieve kiezers (slechts 2 procent) . 

D66 trekt een relatief economisch meer rechtse kiezers aan: 27 procent van de economisch rechtse, cultureel vooruitstrevende kiezers en 24 procent van de economisch linkse, cultureel progressieve kiezers. Ondanks de overgang naar een veel nationalistischere retoriek, doet de partij het slechts iets beter onder cultureel conservatieve kiezers dan de GroenLinks/PvdA. Al met al was het electoraat van de D66 slechts iets cultureel conservatiever dan GroenLinks/PvdA, en een stuk economisch rechtser.

Tabel 1: D66 en GroenLinks/PvdA in een tweedimensionaal model 
  Economisch
  LinksRechts
CultureelProgressiefGL/PvdA: 50%D66: 24%GL/PvdA: 10%D66: 27%
 ConservatiefGL/PvdA: 12%D66: 13%GL/PvdA: 2%D66: 9%

Tabel 1. Bron: Leids Kiezersonderzoek.

Een eerste afrekening

Het verkiezingsresultaat van de gezamenlijke lijst werd ontvangen als een vernietigend verlies, wat leidde tot het aftreden van Timmermans, nogal wat zelfonderzoek en een terugkeer naar talkshows van de sociaal-democratische critici van de samenwerking. Door de krachten te bundelen, hoopten de twee partijen hun aantrekkingskracht uit te breiden. In plaats daarvan kregen ze minder dan 13 procent van de stemmen (een daling ten opzichte van 2021, maar een stijging ten opzichte van 2017). Het resultaat laat duidelijk zien dat de samenwerking met GroenLinks de achteruitgang van de PvdA sinds 2017 niet heeft teruggedraaid.

Het is echter ook belangrijk op te merken dat de kloof tussen de grootste partij – D66 – en GroenLinks/PvdA slechts 4 procent bedroeg. Sommige commentatoren concludeerden dat de gezamenlijke lijst structurele problemen heeft, maar men zou kunnen stellen dat deze in het laatste deel van de campagne eenvoudigweg werd overtroffen door D66.

GroenLinks/PvdA doet een beroep op een electoraat dat in het algemeen vrij veel lijkt op dat van D66. Onder deze omstandigheden is het belangrijk dat beide partijen in de top vier zijn beland. Vergeleken met de gezamenlijke lijst heeft de D66, die economisch meer centristisch is, kiezers van een bredere groep partijen kunnen aanspreken, terwijl GroenLinks/PvdA haar populariteit onder linkse progressieven consolideerde, ten nadele van de andere linkse partijen.

Van de vele Nederlandse politieke krachten die in ten minste enkele opzichten links zijn (waaronder een dierenrechtenpartij, een gepensioneerdenpartij, een linkse populistische partij, een pro-Europese sociaal-liberale partij, een christelijk-sociale partij, en een partij voor biculturele burgers), verloren bijna allemaal stemmen en geen enkele won meer dan drie zetels. 

Wat nu? 

Wat er nu zal gebeuren, hangt grotendeels af van de uitkomst van de lopende coalitiebesprekingen. Momenteel gaan de onderhandelingen duidelijk in dezelfde richting als in 2021, toen de D66 een progressieve coalitie beloofde, maar uiteindelijk capituleerde voor het veto van de VVD en een centrumrechtse regering steunde. Als grootste politieke kracht bevindt de D66 zich vandaag in een sterkere positie dan vier jaar geleden, maar de partij geeft opnieuw toe aan rechtse eisen.

Voor de toekomst van de nieuwe partij die GroenLinks en PvdA officieel zullen vormen in 2026, is de inzet hoog. Als de partij in de oppositie blijft, zoals waarschijnlijk lijkt, kan de nieuwe partij mogelijk de meer progressieve vleugel van het D66-electoraat winnen (zoals in 2023). Als de partij tot de coalitie zou toetreden, zou het door een complex fusieproces moeten navigeren en tegelijkertijd proberen een duidelijk ideologisch profiel te behouden in een regering met alleen partijen aan de rechterkant.

Vertaling: Floris Meijers | Voxeurop

  1. Met één uitzondering, tussen 2002 en 2003 ↩︎
  2. Uit onderzoek van onder meer Tarik Abou-Chadi en Markus Wagner blijkt echter consequent dat conservatieve standpunten over migratie de sociaal-democraten stemmen te kosten, in plaats van ze electoraal ten goede te komen. ↩︎

Partying to Protest: Are Artivists Reigniting Political Engagement?

While far-right movements tighten their grip on Europe’s politics and seek to capture culture – buying media outlets, installing partisan figures in cultural institutions, and shifting the boundaries of public discourse – a counterwave is emerging. Across the continent, “artivists” are reclaiming culture as a space for democratic resistance and using art to promote solidarity and inclusion. Can they reawaken Europe’s political imagination and reengage citizens?

It’s a rainy Saturday night in September, at an old, decommissioned railway site in the southeast of Paris – now turned into a temporary venue for events celebrating social and cultural innovation. Despite the downpour on this second night of the Fluctuations Festival, the audience – a lively mix of men and women aged roughly between 20 and 45 – is dancing hard and chanting loudly. On stage, four members of the French collective Planète Boum Boum have put up an energetic performance.

The crowd shouts in unison: “La vraie menace n’arrive pas en bateau, elle est ici, c’est les fachos !” (“The real threat doesn’t arrive on boats, it’s here already: the fascists!”)

As frenetic techno beats slash through the crowd, the four performers are yelling their slogans into the microphones with conviction. They engage in simple but efficient choreographies that the audience can easily mirror back. Staying in tune is beside the point; onstage and off, everyone is having a great old politically conscious time.

Yet beyond the concert venue, the political atmosphere is radically different. The first shockwave came in 2002, when Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of Front National and an army veteran accused of torturing Algerian independence fighters in the 1960s, reached the second round of the presidential election. Sixteen years later, however, the party rebranded itself as Rassemblement National (RN, National Rally), and it now enjoys unprecedented support: RN has the most representatives in the European Parliament and is the single largest party in the National Assembly.

Across Europe, too, the political landscape is turning a dark shade of blue. Far-right parties are in government in more than a quarter of EU member states. Even in countries where they are not ruling, they wield considerable influence over political and public discourse. This is also visible at the EU level, where the European People’s Party – the largest political group in the European Parliament – has increasingly sided with the far right.

These developments make spaces for resistance – like the one in the southeast of Paris – crucial. Throughout Europe, collectives, non-profits, and individuals are organising to rekindle the fire of democratic engagement. Some of the most successful initiatives have been mobilising tools taken from beyond the traditional political militancy playbook: the arts. The term “artivist” is increasingly being used to describe people who take part in protests through art.

Acting Out: Arts and Culture Under Pressure – Our latest print edition is out now!

Read it online or get your copy delivered straight to your door.

READ & ORDER

Cultural resistance, rediscovered

A portmanteau of “art” and “activist”, this term first emerged in 1997 to describe the union of Chicano artists in the United States and the Zapatista movement in Mexico. It captured a moment when artistic expression and grassroots activism merged to challenge social and political inequities in both countries. Today, as right-leaning governments in countries like Italy, Germany, Hungary, and France increasingly defund independent art practices or install politically aligned figures at the head of key cultural institutions, the (re)emergence of this politically engaged approach to art seems especially significant.

“We haven’t invented anything new,” says Marie Cohuet, a member of the Planète Boum Boum collective. “When you look at the history of struggles everywhere, there were always people making music, singing, putting on shows, and doing things that, in one way or another, help to keep the struggle going in the long term, to create a sense of cohesion.”

Planète Boum Boum, a collective of nine activists that met through the organisation Action Justice Climat, says its goal is to “bring partying to protests and protesting to parties”. They energise marches or political gatherings and are now also more regularly invited to DJ in “apolitical” clubs and events.

Only one member of the group has formal musical training, as most only started singing when the collective was formed. When these activists noticed music and dance were effective levers, they decided to incorporate them into their work. Their approach – which they describe as “techno-activism” – combines the historical nature of raves, made to bring people together, and the theories of French philosopher Florian Gaité, a free party expert. Gaité espouses a radical vision of clubbing and dancing wherein the useless, futile, and unproductive exhaustion of the body is an act of anti-capitalist resistance.

Credit: ©Planète Boum Boum

Planète Boum Boum’s rise in popularity started in 2023 when footage went viral showing some of its members leading a march against unpopular pension reforms through dance. Since then, their Spotify profile has amassed hundreds of thousands of streams.

“These are difficult times we’re living in. Our political context is deteriorating. Racist attacks are exploding, and we have deep inequalities. On a global scale, it’s terrifying,” Cohuet says. “I think there’s a real need to come together and feel that we have a certain power and strength when we unite. Music really creates that. That’s what works well with Planète Boum Boum: we use a lot of caricature, satire, and humour. It’s important to feel that we’re not doomed, that we have the ability to change things.”

The collective engages with a wide variety of topics. Planète Boum Boum addresses social and climate justice from different angles, including by calling for the preservation of public services, criticising unjust pension reforms amidst global warming, and highlighting the incompatibility of far-right ideologies with environmental action. This comes at a crucial time for Europe: despite the rising ecological awareness, Green parties and environmental regulations have taken a hit as the continent grapples with the high cost of living and a war on its soil. At the same time, far-right parties have capitalised on these crises to both fuel and speak to citizens’ sense of insecurity. Still, thanks to social media, artivist visibility has grown, sustaining social, green, and anti-fascist organisations.

thanks to social media, artivist visibility has grown, sustaining social, green, and anti-fascist organisations.

“We regularly collaborate with unions, socially committed media outlets, and cause-driven collectives. The goal is to try to spotlight their efforts and to give them strength, either by mobilising people who wouldn’t normally hear about these issues or by pointing them to a specific action, such as coming to a demonstration on a given date, signing a petition, or joining a collective,” Cohuet explains. “We’ve managed to participate in raising awareness about causes at key moments, such as the vote against the inclusion of PFAS in everyday products, the privatisation of rail freight by the government, or issues surrounding the Duplomb law.”

These success stories resonated deeply within French society. In February 2025, legislators voted to ban PFAS (known as “forever chemicals”) from cosmetics, clothing, shoes, and ski waxes starting in 2026. In the dead of summer in 2025, over 2.1 million citizens signed a petition housed on the National Assembly’s official platform to demand the repeal of the Duplomb law, which included a clause that would have allowed the reintroduction of acetamiprid, a highly carcinogenic pesticide. Under public pressure, the French constitutional court struck down the controversial provision.

Music driving change in Greece

Meanwhile, other artivist organisations have chosen to act on a more local level. For example, El Sistema Greece uses music education to enhance social inclusion. It offers free music classes in refugee camps and shelters for unaccompanied minors, as well as for the local population in urban centres in Athens and Corinthos.

“We work on three levels: our students, their families, and then society,” Angeliki Georgokostas, the general manager of El Sistema Greece, explains. “We work with our students to increase their self-esteem. We try to create an environment that will encourage and motivate children to become active citizens. When we have our classes, our concerts, we have people from different ethnicities, languages, and religions, and they are all coming together just for music.” She adds that the organisation’s goal is to make Greek society more open to diversity, and to get over the fear of the newcomer we see growing in the country”.

Since 2016, more than 3,500 people have taken part in El Sistema Greece’s classes. In the 2024-2025 school year alone, nearly 16,000 people attended their performances.

El Sistema Greece’s students in class. Credit: ©Ilias Stefanidis

“We do concerts not only in our community settings but also in the biggest theatres of Athens, like the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre and the Athens Concert Hall. We try to be in mainstream culture. This way, people who are not directly connected to the students also see this orchestra achieving a good result from individuals of 40 different nationalities and such different backgrounds. We hope this can spread the seed that this could also be our society,” Georgokosta says. “We often also use repertoire that is not classical or Greek. We have used repertoire from the countries of each of our students. We want to celebrate all of the people that exist within our community.”

Greece has been tightening immigration controls since 2019, going so far as to issue a three-month suspension of asylum applications in July 2025 in violation of international law. Its government has also been accused of corruption. At least 325.000 protesters gathered in Athens and Thessaloniki in February 2025 to seek justice for the 57 people who died in the 2023 Tempi crash between a passenger train and a freight train. This rail accident, the biggest in the country’s history, has led to an ongoing political scandal. Official reports say the crash was due to human error and an ill-maintained railway network, but families of the victims claim details of the accident are being covered up. An expert report they commissioned shows the freight train was carrying chemicals that led to its explosion and the asphyxiation of passengers previously unharmed by the collision.

But El Sistema Greece’s artivism creates bridges in communities fractured by polarised political discourse, and its students are turning to the organisation to navigate Greece’s politically charged atmosphere. “We’re seeing that [these political developments are] hard for everyone to process, even our team. So we’re meeting with universities and people who have been working in social sciences for many years so they can lead discussions on these topics with all of our students. We see how crucial it is. We cannot avoid it anymore.”

This engagement will expand what the organisation had already initiated with its Young Leaders programme, a cohort of 15 students who met once a month for workshops on how they could use music, El Sistema Greece, and its community to make decisions and talk about subjects they care about. One key aim of the programme was to teach participants about children and human rights so that they could understand and defend their and other people’s rights.

El Sistema Greece held the Echoes of the World concert in 2025. Credit: ©Ilias Stefanidis

“We are becoming a more holistic programme that is not only about music but how it can be used as a powerful tool to talk about the most pressing social issues of our times.  It’s also about creating the space for children to talk for themselves and speak out and express what their future should be, and for them to have a say.”

Re-enchanting politics

What is at stake for artivists, whether on a national or local scale, is narrative change, both in who is telling the story and embodying new futures, as well as what collective imaginary is being promoted.

“Art and culture are the last shields we have to defend democracy, freedom, our capacity to understand, respect, and discover each other, and to go beyond what makes us different. It also trains our creativity,” says Paula Forteza, the founder of the Paris gallery Artivistas, which promotes Latin American artivists living in France and in South America.

The Artivistas team, with Paula Forteza at the centre, in Paris, on the symbolic Place de la République. Credit: ©Anne Le Breton

Forteza is the co-president of the non-profit Démocratie ouverte and was a member of Parliament in France from 2017 to 2022. She turned to artivism as a way to explore new paths to democratic participation once she realised that the conventional political route would not be the most effective for her, given the institutional distrust from citizens.

“What I felt in politics is that it really lacked creativity. I think politicians would do well to take art classes or workshops to renew their ideas,” Forteza says. “I think we really need to develop art practices. They’re antidotes to far-right values and what their spokespeople are trying to implement: intolerance, disdain, aggression, violence, and polarisation.”

This cultural battle is growing increasingly complex as the far right has also been investing heavily into the cultural sphere to amplify its messages and shift the Overton window to spread hate-fuelled speech – by acquiring media outlets and publishing houses as well as funding cultural products that perpetuate outdated historical narratives of white hegemony.

Works by Cristian Laime and VicOh, represented by the Artivistas gallery at the Spera Art Fair in Montrouge in 2025. Credit: ©Artivistas Spera art fair

As people turn away from traditional media and politics, artivists play a key part in keeping the fight against injustice alive. Guided by creativity, joy, and non-violent resistance, their actions can help build a caring and participatory society.

“When I was studying in Argentina, I wrote a thesis where I cross-referenced periods of economic crisis with cultural activity and artistic production. Through the data, it became very clear that in times of crisis, cultural activity exploded,” Forteza recalls.

“Artivism can certainly re-enchant politics – in the noble sense of the word – and the battles around values. I think that it speaks to a wider audience. It has the kind of sincerity that’s inherent to artistic expression, which comes from the heart.”

Europe, Stand Up For Democracy Worldwide

Europe’s democratic systems are facing serious challenges from within. However, the European Union shouldn’t look exclusively inward but focus on the global stage, where a confrontation is unfolding between democracy and autocracy. Promoting democracy worldwide is vital for warding off domestic and foreign threats.

“So long as democracy exists, […] totalitarianism is in deadly danger,” wrote George Orwell in his renowned essay The Lion and the Unicorn. It was 1941, and Europe was shaking under the overwhelming advance of autocratic Italy and Germany, supported by the Soviet Union. The world seemed to be sliding inexorably towards a system of strong totalitarian states flanked by ailing democracies.

Today, many Europeans feel caught in a similar state of free fall. In International IDEA’s latest report on the global state of democracy, the trend is negative for the ninth year in a row. In 2024, 54 per cent of all countries slid down the democratic scoreboard, while only 32 per cent made progress in any aspect of democracy. Year on year, there is a growing sense that the system of universal values on which the international legal order is built is slipping away. This is punctuated by the occasional shock of a democratic ally unexpectedly taking an autocratic turn. The least bad scenario seems to be a world of coexistence: a bloc of autocratic superpowers surrounding – and only reluctantly tolerating – a fragile group of European democracies.

Orwell rejected such a scenario. For him, the idea that a system of democratic freedoms and a system that deliberately restricts these values could tolerate each other was contradictory. As the later author of the anti-fascist parables Animal Farm and 1984 explained, “The two creeds cannot even, for any length of time, live side by side.” Or, as Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov once put it: “A country that does not respect the rights of its own citizens will not respect the rights of its neighbours.”

Europe must therefore prepare itself for ongoing conflict over the dominant world order. Wherever the EU is active, it will see its own principles clash with opposing values. As democracy and autocracy are mutually obstructive by nature, this will inevitably lead to competition.

Acting Out: Arts and Culture Under Pressure – Our latest print edition is out now!

Read it online or get your copy delivered straight to your door.

READ & ORDER

More democracy, fewer wars

Strengthening democracy worldwide is one of the fundamental principles of the European Union. Article 21 of the Treaty on European Union states: “The Union’s action on the international scene shall be guided by the principles which have inspired its own creation, development and enlargement, and which it seeks to advance in the wider world: democracy, the rule of law, the universality and indivisibility of human rights and fundamental freedoms […].” The EU therefore has an obligation to promote democracy beyond its borders.

This is more than a matter of principle. The stronger the group of constitutional democracies, the better Europe’s interests are served. Robust democratic institutions and strong civil society organisations contribute to more ambitious climate targets and more manageable refugee flows, while democratic regression undermines global digital regulation and the investment environment for businesses. The attack on Europe’s digital laws and the introduction of trade tariffs since Trump’s return to the White House are a case in point.

The more the group of democracies shrinks, the greater the risk of violent conflict. Many wars are preceded by a steady decline in democratic governance on the part of the aggressor. If Russia had been a well-functioning democracy, it would never have invaded Ukraine. Investing in democracy beyond EU borders is therefore vital for the Union.

European instruments

The EU is on the eve of several major decisions that will determine its approach to democracy for the long term. It is setting up a European Democracy Shield within its own borders and will set out its priorities for promoting democracy worldwide in the upcoming update to its Action Plan for Human Rights and Democracy. But the most sizeable changes will be financial in nature. These involve the Global Gateway initiative – the EU’s new global investment vehicle – and the upcoming Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF). With both instruments, Europe is attempting to hold its own in a rapidly shifting world. But what is at stake here?

Simply put, the position of the Global South in the geopolitical arena. In between world power China, aggressor Russia, the US under Trump, and a questing EU, a large group of emerging countries are trying to find their place in the new world order. Through Global Gateway, the EU, with a budget of three hundred billion euros at its disposal, wants to trigger large-scale investments in the Global South, particularly in areas such as transport, energy supply, and digitalisation. This is Europe’s response to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s strategy to increase its economic access and build political goodwill in the Global South through financial injections in developing countries.

The Global Gateway strategy is a comprehensible step in Europe’s search for economic opportunity and critical raw materials. But it would be unwise for the EU to simply copy the Chinese model. Due to unfavourable results in low-income countries, where the investment environment is uncertain, China has significantly scaled back its programmes under the BRI in recent years. The EU must learn from this by ensuring parallel investment in transparency, oversight, and the rule of law within partner countries.

More importantly, Global Gateway offers the opportunity to engage partner countries in shaping the future world order. By linking investments to good governance, the EU can serve not only its short-term economic interests but also its geopolitical goals for the coming decades. This involves strengthening alliances along the new geopolitical fault line: between a rules-based order rooted in democracy, human rights, and the rule of law, and a system of authoritarian dominance that operates through the philosophy of “might is right”.

The MFF is the other financial tool with which the EU can exert influence. It is commendable that the seven-year budget of 2 trillion euros proposed by Commission president Ursula von der Leyen in July aims to maintain Europe’s role on the world stage. Under this proposal, expenditure on external policy will double to 200 billion euros, although this increase is largely due to a substantial reserve for support to Ukraine. But, as with any budget, the devil is in the details.

The MFF proposal frequently refers to values such as democracy. Yet while there remains scope for strengthening democracy in geographic programmes, all thematic programmes in this area would be significantly reduced. It is precisely these thematic programmes that have enabled bold initiatives to be developed in recent years, such as support for NGOs in the Global South that doesn’t require the approval of national authorities.

Furthermore, no longer will a fixed percentage of the foreign aid budget be earmarked for democratic governance. The European Commission advocates greater flexibility in a world that is lurching from crisis to crisis and therefore refuses to commit to specific amounts. The idea is that in a constantly changing world, greater flexibility better addresses new geopolitical urgencies.

However, strengthening democracy is rarely an urgent matter. Instead, democratic decline is often a process of gradual erosion. Democracy requires ongoing maintenance, not just emergency aid. The MFF must therefore include sufficient long-term investment in democracy promotion. This is all the more urgent now that Trump has eliminated US support for democracy, previously provided via USAID and the State Department.

Democracy requires ongoing maintenance, not just emergency aid.

Alliance of democracies

The world is at a tipping point between a legal order based on democratic values and what is sometimes euphemistically referred to as a “fragmented world” or a “world of parallel orders”. Fragmentation and duplication of order are, in fact, synonymous with disorder. Such chaos would neither serve Europe’s security and economic prosperity nor help solve the climate crisis.

Europe is faced with a choice. It can take the lead, together with countries in the Global South that also see democratic decision-making as the basis for the international rules-based order. Bringing together major economies such as India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, and Mexico with “middle powers” targeted by Global Gateway and the MFF – from Bangladesh to Paraguay – would forge a formidable alliance of democracies. Their combined weight could be decisive in shaping the world order.

It must be acknowledged that each of these countries, like Europe itself, has internal problems with its democracy. But in most cases, democratic institutions still form the cornerstone of their political systems, however ailing they may be. It is crucial to keep these countries on board and help strengthen their democratic governance. Europe must not be deterred by the fear of interventionism, an allegation that Russia is keen to spread. Democracy is not a Western model, but a universal value; human rights activists from Zimbabwe to Belarus can testify to this. Supporting their struggle is in both their and our interest.

The alternative, whereby the EU would neglect its democracy agenda and focus solely on economic interests, would be a fatal mistake. Given the long-term incompatibility of democracy and autocracy, this would mean ultimately surrendering the world order to authoritarian forces. Europe would have itself to blame. In Orwell’s words, “If the thing we are fighting for is altogether destroyed, it will have been destroyed partly by our own act.”

This article is written in a personal capacity.

Shaping What We Value

Arguments in favour of public support for arts and culture tend to focus on either their intrinsic benefits for social cohesion or their contribution to economic prosperity. Economist and professor Mariana Mazzucato argues that we should move beyond this binary by recognising the potential of culture to shape society’s imagination and redirect the economy from narrow GDP growth towards sustainability and public value.

Green European Journal: In the neoliberal framing, arts and culture are valued to the extent that they contribute to economic growth. In a recent paper, however, you argue that we should instead value their ability to shape the direction of economic growth. What’s the key difference?

Mariana Mazzucato: The dominant approach to measuring and appraising the value of arts and culture uses static methods like cost-benefi­t analysis that monetise short-term outcomes and inputs. More recently, countries have begun to value arts and culture’s immense economic multipliers in terms of jobs or gross value added. While these metrics are important, they tell us little about the type of growth being generated and whether it is inclusive, sustainable, or enriching for society. We need a shift towards valuing art and culture’s dynamic spillovers and market-shaping abilities.

In my paper “The Public Value of Arts and Culture”, I argue that arts and culture don’t just add to economic output; they reflect and shape what we value. They help us imagine the kind of society we want to build and therefore the kind of economy needed to get there. For example, our study with the BBC showed programming has the ability to shape markets. The corporation’s coverage of the 2019 Women’s Football World Cup catalysed new and inclusive markets for women’s sports broadcasting and influenced social norms.

While the creative industries in the UK contribute 124 billion pounds to the economy annually and have been identi­fied as a high-growth sector, the arts also possess the ability to interrogate questions such as “What is economic growth for?” and “How does growth look and feel?” So rather than asking how investment in culture can boost growth, we should ask how it can direct growth towards public purpose. This is what it means to move from market ­fixing to market shaping.

We need a shift towards valuing art and culture’s dynamic spillovers and market-shaping abilities.

Could your vision perpetuate the instrumentalisation of culture by the economy, even while providing a more expansive notion of economic indicators than narrow GDP metrics?

In the literature, debates about arts and culture are often framed around a dichotomy between their “intrinsic” bene­fits, such as empathy, imagination, belonging, and their “instrumental” benefits, such as contributions to health, education, or urban regeneration. I believe we need to move beyond this binary. Arts and culture can be both a means and an end: a goal of economic policy as well as a precondition for economic transformation. As a “means”, arts and culture do more than simply represent their “sector” or “industry”. They are also an evolving set of practices that can be “used” to support ambitious missions such as net zero – by helping people to understand the urgency of climate action and to envision what economic transformation might look and feel like.

At the same time, arts and culture can also be their own “end”. From 2022, my team and I worked with the Barbados government and Prime Minister Mia Mottley to set out six missions – one of which focused on culture as the goal. Under the broader challenge of social cohesion, the mission aims to “transform Barbados into a society of active, involved citizens, where all Barbadians feel empowered and engaged in the social, economic, and cultural development of the country”.1

Rather than instrumentalising culture, this approach recognises that culture doesn’t just serve the economy – it shapes it. It helps de­fine the purpose, values, and relationships on which a more inclusive and imaginative economy can be built.

Treating culture as an “industry” has led to declining state support. Should we abandon the “cultural and creative industries” framing altogether, or can we envision the likes of a bold industrial policy for the cultural sector?

Declining state support for arts and culture stems from insufficient ways of thinking about value and the role of the state, leading to austerity. When governments treat culture as an “industry,” they tend to justify public investment through a narrow market failure logic that intervenes too little, too late – when markets fall short, or when culture can demonstrate measurable returns in terms of jobs or GDP. This approach reduces the “cultural and creative industries” to something that competes for public resources rather than recognising arts and culture as an ecosystem that generates public value across the entire economy and society.

 What we need instead is a mission-oriented approach to industrial policy.6 This means moving beyond focusing on speci­fic “winning” industries and instead galvanising cross-sectoral collaboration to shape the direction of growth to deliver public value. In this approach, arts and culture are active contributors to de­fining what growth is for.

We cannot ignore the fact that there is an industry of people doing creative work. The point is not to abandon the idea of industrial policy but to reimagine and embed arts and culture in its design. We need an ambitious industrial strategy that is outcome oriented and invests in capabilities, institutions, and ecosystems – from arts education and public cultural institutions to creative practitioners and civic spaces that foster experimentation and participation. This is not about subsidising the arts but about co-creating the economy and society we want to live in.

The point is not to abandon the idea of industrial policy but to reimagine and embed arts and culture in its design.

Are there any positive examples the EU could take inspiration from in its approach to arts and culture?

Putting culture at the centre of economies is both an enormous challenge and a powerful lever that Europe must confront if it is serious about addressing its policy challenges.

That is why I find examples such as Barbados’s culture mission particularly inspiring. It reflects a government actively positioning culture as a mission and as a shared national endeavour that shapes the direction of growth itself. The mission recognises that investing in imagination, identity, and creative capability is essential to building resilience, social cohesion, and sustainable prosperity. It treats artists and cultural institutions not as recipients of public subsidy but as co-creators of public value.

Similarly, in Mexico City, the “Utopías” initiative (short for Unidades de Transformación y Organización Para la Inclusión y la Armonía Social, “Units of Transformation and Organisation for Inclusion and Social Harmony”) is a powerful example of how the state can invest in beauty at the community level to provide care, rebuild trust, and steer the economy towards creativity and inclusive growth. The Utopías are multifunctional cultural and civic spaces co-designed with residents to transform neglected urban areas into hubs of participation, collective healing, and pride.

By embedding art, green spaces, sports, cultural programmes, and social services into public infrastructure, the state demonstrates that all people, especially the most marginalised, deserve dignity, beauty, and joy. This investment in the aesthetic and social fabric of everyday life fosters self-worth and belonging, leading to greater civic engagement and economic participation.

Historical precedents also remind us of what is possible when governments boldly invest in arts and culture. The German Bauhaus and the US Works Progress Administration of the 20th century both treated culture as a foundation for reimagining society, integrating artistic imagination with social purpose and public investment. They understood that to rebuild economies and democracies, we must also rebuild meaning and connection.

These initiatives, alongside work from across the world, should inspire EU budget and cultural policy to value the market-shaping effects of arts and culture. All efforts should be context-specific, but the overall goal of Europe’s budget and industrial policy should not be to instrumentalise culture for economic growth. Instead, it should direct the economy towards public value through arts and culture. That requires new metrics, new partnerships, and, most of all, a renewed sense of imagination in policymaking.

  1. Mariana Mazzucato (2025). The Public Value of Arts and Culture, p. 15. ↩︎

Policy vs Perception: Barcelona’s Culture War Over Urban Space

A project to transform Barcelona’s traffi­c-choked Eixample district into a greener, pedestrian-friendly urban space has evolved into a contest over identity and belonging, demonstrating how cities today are microcosms of fi­erce ideological battles raging across Europe. While disagreement keeps dialogue alive, antagonism can paralyse much-needed urban change.

Strolling along Consell de Cent, in the heart of Barcelona’s Eixample district, one notices more green space than anywhere else in the centre. It is vibrant and full of movement, with delivery trucks, families, residents, tourists, cyclists, and passersby constantly crossing paths.

The Eixample’s distinctive grid pattern, often celebrated as one of the great achievements of modern urban planning, was designed by engineer Ildefons Cerdà in the mid-19th century. It was conceived as a rational and hygienic expansion of the overcrowded medieval centre. Cerdà imagined wide avenues, chamfered street corners, and tree-lined boulevards that would ensure light, air circulation, and equality of access for all residents, combining social reform with spatial order. Yet over time, much of this vision was undermined by the rise of motorised traffi­c. The grid that once embodied modernity and progress turned into a dense, traffi­c-dominated landscape with limited green space.

©Catarina Heeckt, 2025

Today, Barcelona faces the consequences of that transformation. The city regularly exceeds air pollution levels recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). According to the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), cutting traffic by just 25 per cent could prevent around 200 premature deaths linked to nitrogen dioxide exposure annually. Another ISGlobal study estimates that environmental factors such as air pollution, heat, noise, and lack of green areas contribute to more than 1000 premature deaths every year, with fi­ne particulate matter (PM2.5) identi­fied as the main cause.

Recognising this urgent need to make the city more liveable, Barcelona City Council launched the “Superilles”1 programme in 2015, developed from a theoretical framework devised by urban ecologist Salvador Rueda. Academic evaluations and international case studies suggest that the Superilles model offers a replicable blueprint for transforming dense urban environments worldwide, converting traffic-heavy grids into walkable, greener, and socially vibrant spaces. As the Barcelona City Council described in their original Superilles plan, “the programme sought to transform city streets by reclaiming space from private vehicles and returning it to pedestrians.” Conceived as a long-term model for urban transformation, the Superilles programme aimed to “create healthier and greener public spaces, prioritising social interaction, local economies, and safer environments.” After initial pilot projects in neighbourhoods such as Poblenou, Horta, and Sant Antoni, the programme expanded to include major interventions in the Eixample district, where it brought the most visible transformations.

The geometric and symbolic heart of Barcelona has become the laboratory of the city’s new urban model, featuring eixos verds (“green axes” containing extensive vegetation) and squares where pedestrians are prioritised. Stretching across the Eixample from west to east, the Consell de Cent was initially planned to form part of a larger Superilla, a cluster of blocks closed to through traffic. Over time, however, it evolved into the ­first and most emblematic eix verd of the city. What was once a heavily trafficked street became a continuous pedestrian-friendly corridor, with wider sidewalks, treelined pathways, benches, and permeable paving. This transformation not only rede­fined mobility patterns in the Eixample but also became symbolic of Barcelona’s attempt to reclaim public space, improve air quality, and foster social life.

The geometric and symbolic heart of Barcelona has become the laboratory of the city’s new urban model.

Internationally celebrated, locally contested

In 2023, the Eixample became the epicentre of a broader political and cultural struggle over the city’s future. The Superilles plan had started as an ambitious urban design experiment, but it evolved into one of the most divisive issues in local politics. Internationally hailed as a paradigm shift in urban planning, the initiative received a far more ambivalent response on the ground. While many residents within superilles supported the transformation towards greener, more pedestrian-friendly streets, opposition grew among those living elsewhere in the city. Rapidly, a discussion began on how the superilles went against the legacy of Cerdà and restricted the free circulation of cars. This unease was amplifi­ed by right-wing media outlets and on social media and was strategically channelled by Barcelona’s political and economic elites into resistance against the administration of Ada Colau, leader of the left-wing municipalist platform Barcelona en Comú.

As the 2023 municipal elections approached, the controversy over the Superilles project crystallised into a deeply polarised debate, unprecedented in the city’s history of mobility interventions. Business association Barcelona Oberta spearheaded a campaign against the project, framing it as a threat to economic vitality and urban identity, and even filed a lawsuit ordering the dismantling of parts of the intervention. This was upheld by the courts. There is no empirical evidence on the extent to which conflict cost Colau re-election, but the contestation over the Superilles programme clearly dented her popularity. Beyond party politics and the usual grievances surrounding construction works, the backlash revealed something more profound: conflicting imaginaries of what the city should be and who it is for.

Colau’s administration had positioned itself within a wider Southern European municipalist movement – exemplifi­ed by other cities such as Naples, where grassroots coalitions reclaimed public services and common goods, and Zagreb, where citizen-led initiatives advanced participatory and transparent governance – seeking to democratise urban governance, reclaim public space from private interests, and challenge the blind pursuit of economic growth in urban areas at the expense of residents.

Yet the fi­erce reaction to the superilles in the Eixample showed that transforming urban mobility is never merely a question of engineering. It touches on collective memories, urban attachments, and everyday practices that de­ne urban life itself. The conflict over the superilles thus exemplifies how cultural politics can both make and unmake urban transitions.

©Catarina Heeckt, 2025

Urban culture wars

Europe is living through a profound crisis of values. Polarisation, distrust, and disillusionment are eroding the fabric of public life, while digital platforms amplify division at unprecedented speed. What once unfolded in the intimacy of homes or neighbourhoods now reverberates instantly across global networks, shaping narratives in real time. These platforms have opened up new arenas for democratic participation and contestation, but they have also created fertile ground for misinformation, manipulation and political exploitation.

Far-right forces have proven remarkably adept at navigating and exploiting this turbulence by translating widespread discontent into powerful narratives of resentment. For example, they have effectively framed climate action, feminism, and migration not as shared challenges but as elite conspiracies against “ordinary people”. Through culture-war tactics, they have successfully recast debates on sustainability and social justice into polarising moral struggles. After a period of genuine momentum, Europe’s green agenda faces mounting resistance. This so-called “greenlash” has exposed the fragility of climate consensus across the continent.

Cities, once celebrated as laboratories of democratic innovation, are now microcosms of these broader ideological battles. Disagreements around issues such as housing and mobility policies pit residents against one another and deepen distrust in institutions. Even seemingly mundane debates about bike lanes, low-emission zones, or local urban redesign can turn into symbolic battlegrounds over identity, belonging, and control.

Cities, once celebrated as laboratories of democratic innovation, are now microcosms of broader ideological battles.

This dynamic is not unique to Barcelona. In Brussels, heated disputes over new bike lanes have exposed divisions between environmental priorities and everyday mobility concerns. In Berlin, the reopening of the Friedrichstraße to car traf­fic has come to symbolise a retreat from ambitious sustainable mobility goals. In Oslo, controversies over reversing low-emission zones and cutting climate budgets have illustrated a growing pushback against green urban policies. Meanwhile, in France, protests in cities like Paris and Marseille – where slogans such as “Fin du monde, ­fin du mois, même combat” (“End of the world, end of the month, same fi­ght”) link ecological transition to economic precarity – reflect a broader tension between environmental imperatives and social justice.

To counter the far right’s surge, progressive forces must urgently rediscover the power of narrative. Understanding the cultural politics of contestation – that is, the processes through which particular cultural representations are created, stabilised, contested, and potentially reassembled (see Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social) – is not an academic exercise but a political necessity. It can help identify new opportunities to build broad coalitions, craft shared imaginaries, and unite people in common struggles against the concentration of power and wealth. To this end, we must learn to read political conflicts, including those around urban futures, not merely as policy disputes but as struggles over meaning. They are spaces where new, more inclusive futures can still be fought for and forged.

©Catarina Heeckt, 2025

Engaging with conflict

“Consell de Cent has been the scene of a pitched battle. The transformation attacks a bourgeois territory par excellence. Some people have said to me: ‘How dare you act in the Eixample, in the neighbourhood of the bourgeoisie?’ I think the Eixample has a showcase effect on what the city means.”

Former Barcelona city offi­cial

The transformation of Consell de Cent did not just change a street; it touched a nerve. A thoroughfare that had once thrummed to a steady rhythm of cars, noise, and exhaust became a space for walking, for meeting, for sitting in the sun. For some, this change symbolised a new kind of city life – cleaner, slower, and more human. For others, it felt like an intrusion, an assault on individual freedom and on a “way of life” that had long defi­ned the Eixample. The conflict revealed something deeper than a disagreement over traffi­c: it became both a mirror and a catalyst of Barcelona’s social and cultural divides, reflecting existing tensions while also deepening and crystallising them through new forms of urban conflict.

At ­first, much of the resistance centred on the Eixample’s historical identity. This district has long been associated with the bourgeois values of order, modernity, and prosperity imagined by Cerdà in the 19th century. To many residents, its symmetry and openness represent civic pride and a certain ideal of progress. Blocking cars and recon­figuring intersections seemed, to some, like tampering with the very DNA of that model.

But the reaction was not uniform. The residents of the neighbourhoods involved expressed a range of emotions. There was nostalgia for the old city rhythms but also a quiet hope that the new green corridors could bring cleaner air, safer crossings, and more spaces for children to play.

On social media, especially on Twitter (now X), this ambivalence played out in real time. #ConselldeCent became a popular hashtag, and the debate turned into a citywide performance: engineers and architects argued with residents, local businesses shared “before” and “after” photos, and neighbours exchanged stories, frustrations, and jokes.

“The Eixample superilla is a bodge that attacks the avant-garde, hygienist, and rational urbanism bequeathed to us by Ildefons Cerdà,” someone complained on X. A resident wrote: “I’m lucky to live in Consell de Cent and that the superilles just happened to be here. Those who live on [nearby] Carrer de València […] these poor people are getting all the traffic.” Others agreed: “[The Eixample superilla] creates more space that isn’t dedicated to consumerism. Public space, enjoying it, is a right and should be for everyone.”

Such differences in opinion are neither new nor intrinsically counterproductive. Cities are spaces where cultures overlap, collide, and constantly renegotiate their coexistence. As political theorist Chantal Mouffe reminds us, democracy depends on this kind of friction, or what she calls “agonistic pluralism” – disagreement that keeps dialogue alive. The real challenge arises when disagreement turns into antagonism, when opposition stops being productive and becomes paralysing. In moments like these, public space turns from a shared arena into a battlefield of mistrust.

For Barcelona, the lesson is simple but profound. Change cannot rely on consensus alone, nor can it silence contestation. To transform the city, leaders and planners must learn to engage with conflict rather than fear it. That means recognising the attachments people have to streets, cars, and routines, and allowing those emotions to inform design. It also requires honesty about trade-offs and patience with adaptation.

©Catarina Heeckt, 2025

More than two years after the ­first eix verd was completed in spring 2023, most residents agree that Consell de Cent has improved. Children play where cars once sped by, terraces fil­ll with laughter, and trees have begun to offer shade where there was once only asphalt. Yet challenges remain: researchers such as Isabelle Anguelovski warn of the risks of “green gentrification”, where environmental improvements may attract the affluent and push out lower-income residents. Others also point to the threat of further touristification, given that fears of overtourism have fuelled some of the opposition to the Superilles initiative and raised concerns about the balance between liveability and global visibility. Still, the overall view is one of general satisfaction. The contest that once defined this street has become part of its story, a necessary tension that forced the project to mature.

The case of Consell de Cent reminds us why cultural politics matter. Urban change is never only about infrastructure or design; it is also about meanings, identities and emotions, and the pace at which these can shift. The Superilla project shows that even well-designed policies can falter when they become too tightly tied to a partisan project. The lesson is not that conflict should be avoided, but that it must be managed over time: disagreement can be productive when it remains within an agonistic rather than antagonistic frame.

In Barcelona’s case, the benefits of the transformation became visible only after implementation, yet the political polarisation surrounding it risked paralysing debate. Recognising this temporal lag between policy and perception may be key to understanding why cultural change is as crucial and as slow as spatial transformation itself.

Urban change is never only about infrastructure or design, but about meanings, identities and emotions.

Listening, dialogue, and conflict

Barcelona’s superilles tell a story that goes far beyond urban planning. For many of the city’s residents, these changes mean the loss of a familiar way of life, a shared language, or a web of everyday relations. Nostalgia and fears of gentrification coexist with curiosity and hope. What may look like progress from the outside can feel imposed from within. Urban change, after all, is also about emotions, memory and belonging.

These tensions are not unique to Barcelona. Across Europe, projects that seek to rethink mobility or economic growth often face initial resistance before being accepted by majorities. But when the benefi­ts and burdens of change are unevenly distributed, even the greenest urban visions risk reproducing the very inequalities they seek to overcome.

In a context of deep polarisation and a wave of far-right politics, paying closer attention to inequalities is essential. True urban transformation takes more than a mix of asphalt and green. It requires listening, dialogue, and an acceptance of conflict as a natural part of democratic life. If cities learn to address these frictions and turn them into opportunities, they can imagine fairer and shared futures, where green spaces and conviviality grow together with respect for collective memory.

The author of this article is part of a research project funded by the British Academy and led by an interdisciplinary team from LSE Cities and the University of Amsterdam, entitled “Towards Post-Growth Cities: The Cultural Politics of Mobility Transitions in Barcelona and London”

  1. A superilla (literally ”super island”, translated as “superblock”) is a cluster of city blocks closed to through traf­fic. ↩︎

International Cultural Relations: A Blueprint for the EU’s Global Role

The US’s retreat from multilateralism should prompt the EU to establish new connections and strengthen its international presence, particularly in the Global South. But can this endeavour succeed without resulting in a form of neocolonialism? European action in the ­eld of cultural relations serves as a positive model to build upon.

As we enter the post-American world order, the European Union must decide what its role in the emerging international system will be, and how it will balance its response to increasingly concerted efforts to spread illiberalism globally – including from within the EU itself – with its historic responsibility as the home of former colonising states. How can the EU respond to the American withdrawal from multilateralism and build coalitions to uphold human rights without engaging in a form of neocolonialism?

The EU’s global cultural and media action provides a path forward that can be extended to other forms of cooperation – particularly with the Global South.

The end of the American world order

The American retreat from multilateralism and international cooperation has created a space that China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other illiberal state actors have already begun to occupy. They aim to reinforce their image in the Global South as supporters of multilateralism, while at the same time delinking the idea of international cooperation from human rights, pluralism, and fairness. This risk alone should convince the European Commission, the Council, and the Parliament of the need to boost the EU’s global presence in response to Trump’s destructive foreign policy agenda.

To ­fight back against the increasingly coordinated strategy of illiberal actors – which, across Left and Right, are united by the aim to weaken democracies, oppose women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights, reduce cultural diversity, preclude global wealth taxes, and limit the bargaining power of the global majority – the EU must be bold. However, its efforts should avoid reinforcing a Eurocentric view of the world, which could be met with a rejection of liberal democratic principles (here understood as the combination of democratically elected governments, the rule of law, and human rights).

Instead, it is time for the EU to strengthen the role that it has gradually and implicitly begun to take on over the last decade in the cultural sphere, as a global enabler, a distributor of power, and a serious ally of the Global South.

To fight back against the increasingly coordinated strategy of illiberal actors, the EU must be bold.

A global cultural enabler

The role of the EU as a global enabler – not just in the sphere of culture – has legal basis in Article 3 of the Consolidated version of the Treaty on European Union. It makes an explicit link between the protection of the Union’s citizens and global cooperation to ensure “peace, security, the sustainable development of the Earth, solidarity and mutual respect among peoples, free and fair trade, eradication of poverty and the protection of human rights, in particular the rights of the child, as well as [to] the strict observance and the development of international law, including respect for the principles of the United Nations Charter”.

This positions the EU as a global actor that must not be guided by its own self-interest alone. Of course, profound contradictions remain between these principles and some of the EU’s actions – for example, its migration policies, the watering down of climate efforts, extractivist initiatives, and the selective championing of human rights. While these realities must not be forgotten, we can build on a parallel set of positive EU actions, as exemplified by the quiet paradigmatic shift in global cultural and media action that has developed over the last decade.

This shift represents a significant transformation. Traditionally, the global cultural action of EU member states is aligned with cultural diplomacy – the efforts to extend cultural influence beyond the limits of a state, namely through activities led by national cultural institutes. These might range from a personal tour of a heritage site by a head of government to demonstrate generosity and open up new government-to-government engagement to cultural events or exhibitions showcasing a state’s culture and are done in support of a state’s foreign policy goals. For example, the French model of rayonnement culturel (“cultural radiance” or “influence”) is implemented by the branches of the Institut français and the Alliance française.

The European Union’s approach to culture in its foreign action is aligned with the British and German model of cultural relations1 – a bottom-up, two-sided, collaborative model whose emergence in these two countries cannot be separated from their pasts as former colonisers and occupiers – and the recognition of the need to rebuild trust with foreign populations. The adoption of this model by the Union is consistent with the principles underlying the Global Strategy for the European Union’s Foreign and Security Policy, published in 2016, which identified ­five priorities for the EU’s global action: the security of the Union; state and social resilience to the East and South (into Central Asia and down to Central Africa); an integrated approach to conflicts and crises; cooperative regional orders; and global governance for the 21st century. The understanding of international relations and of the EU’s global role that was implicit in the document – reflecting the approach taken by Federica Mogherini (then High Representative for Foreign Affairs) – focused much more on collaboration and the development of long-term relationships than on security.

In the cultural relations paradigm, culture is understood as more than a means to open up conversations or increase the visibility and strength of a state in support of its foreign policy interests, as is often the case with cultural diplomacy. Instead, cultural relations understand culture as the catalyst for long-term and, crucially, equal relationship building.

The EU’s 2016 Joint Communication by the European Commission and the High Representative establishes the bloc’s foreign policy position on culture. Its rejection of the language of cultural diplomacy is highly significant. While it does not question the ability of member states to engage in cultural diplomacy, its emphasis is on strengthening ties among EU actors and reinforcing cooperation with partners – in other words, it accompanies and supplements the cultural diplomacy efforts of its member states.

Importantly, the joint communication also gives international cultural relations projects a clear structure: they are to be designed, implemented, and assessed in a collaborative manner by EU actors, the cultural institutes of EU member states, and local actors. A subsequent document drafted by the Council’s Cultural Affairs Committee and approved by the Foreign Affairs Council foregrounded the centrality of “cooperation of local stakeholders and civil society at all levels (planning, design, implementation) and on an equal footing, aiming at a bottom-up and people-to-people approach, local empowerment, participation and co-creation”.

In practice, the EU’s international cultural relations support and implement a wide range of initiatives. These range from those led by the EU National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC) network, to activities funded by the Cultural Relations Platforms or by EU delegations around the world, to cultural projects initiated by the Directorate-General for International Partnerships (DG INTPA) and other actors.

Although many limitations and paradoxes remain in the EU’s global action in the cultural and media spheres (such as persistent asymmetries of power, a super­ficial approach to cultural cooperation in some instances, and the EU’s continued tendency to support free trade norms at the expense of cultural diversity), the EU is beginning to emerge as a global enabler of cultural diversity around the world through trade agreements, policy arrangements and paradigms, financial measures, and modes of governance. To give three examples, the EU promotes cultural diversity in the Latin American audiovisual industry through the EU-funded Ibermedia programme, which involves regional stakeholders and receives input from multiple grassroots associations regarding its implementation. Through this policy arrangement, the EU supports cultural diversity not only from the top down but also from the bottom up. At the same time, through ACPCultures+, the largest audiovisual assistance initiative aimed at cultural workers in the Global South, the EU co-produced multiple African ­films in ways that, according to African ­film professionals, were central in their artistic and cultural endeavours and supported their local industries and communities. All ­films that received this fi­nancial support from the EU were shot in – and had casts from – ACP (African, Caribbean and Paci­c) countries.

The international cultural relations approach has been adopted by not only the EU and EU member states’ organisations but also non-EU cultural practitioners, leading to the gradual emergence of a global cultural network that places international cooperation and intercultural dialogue at the centre of its actions. Importantly, enabling cultural diversity requires a redistribution of power, that is, placing European actors and other interlocutors on an equal footing across projects, policy frameworks, and modes of work.

The EU versus the US and China

By design, cultural diplomacy serves the foreign policy interests of a state. The focus of international cultural relations is different: it lies in co-creation and relationship building rather than in the transmission of ideas through pre-established relations. But it would be insincere to pretend that it is disinterested.

Cultural diplomacy serves the foreign policy interests of a state. The focus of international cultural relations is different.

The question is not, then, whether the EU’s international cultural relations serve a purpose but, instead, what purpose they serve. The EU’s stance as an enabler of cultural diversity is in direct opposition to the ways other global powers understand the role of culture in international relations. Until Trump 2.0, the US aligned its international global action with soft power, a term coined by Joseph Nye in the 1990s. The idea was simple: in the context of the Cold War, culture – alongside policies and values – could attract foreign populations and win their hearts and minds. In so doing, it would support the geopolitical alignment of their countries with the US. Soft power was imagined as a new form of power that could be deployed alongside hard power – financial and military – to maintain American global hegemony. That is, soft and hard power worked as aligned pull-and-push forces – the carrot and the stick – to maintain American geopolitical dominance.

China has understood the importance of winning hearts and minds and decided to engage in similar efforts to challenge American domination. In the last decades, it invested significantly in a vast network of Confucius Institutes, and Xi Jinping has mentioned the importance of cultural relations and mutuality in multiple speeches. However, in doing so, China strips cultural relations of a politics of equality and delinks culture from human rights and pluralism. While the US co-opted culture to support its dominating role in global affairs, China co-opted the language of cultural relations to establish itself as an ally of multilateralism – an approach that some would describe as a rhetorical tactic that masks an interest in the establishment of a Chinese-led international order.

In both cases, be it using the language of soft power or cultural relations, and despite the fundamental differences between their regimes, America and China’s approaches instrumentalise culture to maintain or assert geopolitical dominance. Under Trump 2.0, however, soft power has been relegated to irrelevance – as revealed by the closure of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the de facto dismantling of the US Agency for Global Media and, subsequently, of Voice of America. Nonetheless, this should not be understood as a denial of the importance of cultural elements in politics and international relations. The emphasis on limitless free speech that is shared by Trump’s administration and European far-right forces implicitly rejects the principles of pluralism and cultural diversity that are the core of the European project.

In response, the EU could build on its own work in the cultural and media spheres and begin to use its weight to redistribute power. It could redefine itself as a global diversity multiplier and coalition builder. It could recognise its privilege as a historical debt towards the Global South that gives it the responsibility to support the emergence of equal, inclusive, and fair international arrangements, institutions, and multilateral frameworks. This is aligned with calls for the EU to become a “consolidator of global partnerships” as a way “to give birth to a new multilateral order that can tread the path to sustainable peace and development”.

Using the EU’s privilege to reinforce Global South voices that have been hitherto silenced by their economic and trade dependencies on the US, China, or EU member states is the historically right course of action. At the same time, doing so would weaken the relative power of the US and China. Becoming a global enabler that uses its own power to redistribute power would not be easy – but it would serve the global common good rather than just the EU’s own interests.

Beyond great power realism

The idea of the EU as a global enabler of cultural diversity and global justice can push back against the great power realism that dominates geopolitics today. The late 20th century and beginning of the 21st century saw a shift away from a realist understanding of international relations, wherein states are in permanent conflict due to self-interests, towards a liberal school of thought that focuses on the shared benefi­ts of international cooperation and the development of global policy frameworks. The Russian occupation of Ukraine, Trump’s rejection of multilateralism, and NATO’s (and the EU’s) ongoing reinforcement of military capacity reflect a return of great power realism – as is also evident in the EU’s increasing emphasis on strategic autonomy and competitiveness.

The EU could build on its own work in the cultural and media spheres and begin to use its weight to redistribute power.

There is space for a different approach, one that, in alignment with the work of Global South thinkers such as Walter Mignolo, delinks power from domination and uses it not to control others but to reinforce them and their own power. Like the liberal school of international relations, this enabling approach would focus on the co-development of shared institutions that respond to common needs and reject zero-sum logics. However, unlike liberalism, which emphasises state sovereignty and has gradually transformed into a nonnormative and nonideological framework, this new approach would see diversity, mutuality, global justice, and a fair distribution of power as its ultimate goals. There is space for a global politics of allyship and abundance that rejects economic growth and competition for power as its main priorities and, instead, places vitality and regeneration – cultural, geopolitical, and environmental – at its centre. The EU can enable it.

Some might say that there is no desire for such a role among actors in the Global South. The evidence tells a different story. Cultural professionals from countries outside of the EU value its policy frameworks and call for further opportunities for equal collaboration with their European counterparts to strengthen and diversify their cultural ecosystems. The EU could accelerate this process by convening forums linking EU and non-EU citizens from countries whose global policies have been supportive of cultural diversity, such as South Africa and Brazil, to identify common needs and strategies and begin to imagine new international institutions and frameworks in the cultural sphere and beyond. The time is right.

  1. For a summary of the processes explaining the adoption of this model by the European Union, see Mafalda Dâmaso & Andrew Murray (2021). “The EU’s Dualistic Regime of Cultural Diversity Management: The Concept of Culture in the Creative Europe Program (2014-2019; 2021-2027) and in the Strategy for International Cultural Relations (2016-)”. Journal of Cultural Management and Cultural Policy, 7(1), pp. 153–184. Available at: <https://jcmcp.org/articles/the-eus-dualistic-regime-of-cultural-diversity-management/?lang=en> ↩︎

Learning by Erasure: Culture, Resistance, and Recovery in Ukraine

In Russia’s war on Ukraine, long-buried histories, landscapes, and relations are being recovered and re-forged. The rebuilding not only of Ukraine’s physical but also nonphysical infrastructure, underway as destruction continues, is a vital part of war resistance.

In July 2022, what started eight years before as the Ukraine Reform Conference reinvented itself as the Ukraine Recovery Conference (URC). Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, this annual international event, attended by heads of state, a wide range of government officials, members of parliament, representatives of international organisations, civil society, and the private sector, was primarily focused on economic and democratic reforms in Ukraine. By and large, it was conducted within the discourse of international development aid, at a time when Ukraine was seen as just another country undergoing a lengthy transformation to catch up with the political and economic standards of the “developed world” or, at least, the European Union, and in constant need of supervision and various kinds of stimuli.

The focus change from “reform” to “recovery”, inevitably brought by the Russian war on Ukraine and the urgent need to express “support for the only country on the European continent currently affected by armed conflict” (as stated during the first URC in Lugano in 2022), was more than just a change in rhetoric. It was a major discursive transformation from the prescriptive certainty of “reform” to the complete uncertainty of “recovery”, both the meaning and the goals of which would be defined and redefined in the process. Even if not seen or fully comprehended in 2022, one of the biggest challenges for recovery in the Ukrainian case was that it had to be systematically planned and carried out while destruction was ongoing – an exceptional case in European and global history.

Moreover, this war, now in its fourth year, has proven to be a long one. Peace talks do not mean ceasefire, freezing the frontline does not mean an end to the drone and ballistic missile attacks on the cities deep inside the country, and any peace deal cannot secure a sustainable end to war. The most complicated negotiation point remains security guarantees.

Envisioning recovery and re-construction is not possible without constant witnessing and addressing destruction and de-construction on multiple levels. It is impossible to think about the recovery of the economy, critical infrastructure, energy security, transportation networks, or urban structures without acknowledging the destruction of the core connections and relations between people and their homes, communities, natural and cultural landscapes, but also memories, legacies, heritage, and identities. It is on this horizontal level of human, cultural, and environmental entanglement that the war is lived, destruction is experienced, and daily reconstruction and recovery are already happening.

Zemlia

In her recent book, Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War, Ukrainian researcher Darya Tsymbalyuk writes about death as the episteme of war: “It becomes the dominant morbid frame of learning about one’s homeland, when we only find out about the existence of someone or something when they are gone – erased, murdered, or destroyed.”1 The growing number of deaths and the extent of destruction creates a vast network, spreading over the whole society, linking everything and everyone.

In Russia’s war of aggression, landscapes, histories, and stories once destroyed, censored, crippled, or marginalised by the empire – first Russian, then Soviet – are being rediscovered through loss. This gruesome paradox of learning by erasure lies at the core of the recovering and regrowing connections between people, lands, and environment, at the core of the grassroots resistance to war and violence.

Tsymbalyuk puts soil and land (which in the Ukrainian language are embraced in one word, zemlia – a word she consistently uses, along with other Ukrainian terms) at the centre of the war experience. Being contaminated or destroyed, occupied or depopulated through the displacement of people and other species, zemlia stops being “a territory” and becomes a home, a shelter, a history, a living world.

In fact, the notion of “territory” belongs exclusively to the vocabulary of empire, as imperial imaginations erase peoples, homes, histories, and landscapes, reducing them to allegedly empty spaces and resources awaiting extraction. On the ground, the land – zemlia – is always a homeland, which cannot be simply given up, even for promises of ephemeral peace. This Russian war against Ukraine, which started in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and the temporary occupation of parts of the Ukrainian east, tore people away from their lands and homes and, simultaneously, reconnected them. The imminent threat of yet another erasure unearthed – sometimes in a very literal sense – previous losses and erasures, histories, legacies, and memories taken away.

In personal and collective relations, natural environments transcended their imposed agricultural or industrial functionality and imagery of the last centuries, recovering their meaning as cultural landscapes, which connect generations of people and layers of history, weaving links between them. This war also brought back the notion of “frontier”, not as a zone of clashes or conquests but as a space of constant contact, hybridity and complexity of relations, openness and multilayered identities in continuous flux.

The growing number of deaths and the extent of destruction creates a vast network, spreading over the whole society, linking everything and everyone.

Dakh

This year, another Ukrainian word made its way into the global language, trying to get a grip on this war – dakh. Originating in Old High German, it means “roof”. Dakh: vernacular hardcore is the title of the exhibition housed by the Ukrainian pavilion at the 2025 Venice Biennale. Dakh II and Dakh III were presented during the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Rome this year.

The foundation of the project is a 50-year monumental research work entitled “Atlas of Traditional Ukrainian Housing from the Late 19th to the Mid-20th Century”, compiled by three generations of women architects: Tamara, Oksana, and Bogdana Kosmina, the latter of whom co-curates the pavilion. “Dakh spans the trajectory of the Ukrainian home at war: a site of sanctuary, a terrain of destruction, a project of rebuilding – and a cradle of resistance,” writes Michał Murawski, another co-curator of the pavilion.2 Here, the roof is more than just an architectural element. It is a symbol of safety and protection, a basic structure that shields from violence and destruction, which falls daily from the sky. It is also a symbol of fragility; roofs are among the most damaged parts of houses, the crucial ones that volunteers have to rebuild first.

The Dakh structure consists of metal rods that form a load-bearing structure but also signify missiles and shrapnel, metal sheeting used in emergency roof repairs, and a wedge-shaped roof made of reeds. Its shielding capacity is not only spatial but also temporal: elements of traditional architecture come together with both assaultive and protective references to the current war. Vernacular hardcore, used in the title of this project, symbolically merges vernacular architecture – a sustainable way of building that relies on locally available materials, traditional or local architecture, grassroots architecture without architects – and hardcore as a fundamental part of processes, and as a mixture of bricks, rubble, and other hard materials traditionally used to lay foundations of buildings. This project rests against “a vernacular hardcore, rooted in the experience of generations, in the trauma of war, and in the power of resistance,” writes Murawski.3 Dakh envelops the space of simultaneity of destruction and reconstruction.

Together, zemlia and dakh delineate the shape of the renewed, but old, the recovered, but never really lost, the rebuilt, even if destroyed, home – dim. This is where solidarity stretches through generations and connects neighbours; where care embraces humans, non-humans, and wider landscapes; where steppe, rivers, estuaries, and forests are active fighters in the war and crucial participants in cultural history; where recovery and reconstruction, which started 11 years ago and never stopped, involves not only tangible assets – buildings, infrastructure, the physical environment – but also intangible ones such as heritage, memories, and identities.

Dim

“When the trenches were dug, cultural heritage spilled out of them,” states cultural journalist and curator Yuliia Manukian, using a somewhat brutal metaphor to link the changing attitude and understanding of cultural heritage during the war. Once seen as dusty and unimportant, emasculated, erased, or artificially constructed and imposed, cultural heritage has recovered a different meaning and sense of urgency through the episteme of war.

Resistance in this war is, among other forms, also epistemic. It involves careful and scrupulous revision and rethinking of how knowledge has been produced and shared, who has controlled the narratives, and how and why identities have been forged. Here, cultural heritage turns from the inheritance of the past into a living matter being formed in the present, an active liaison between the past and the future. Cultural practices become critical tools of reflection, embracing, acknowledging, and tracking the multiplicity of ways in which society organises, reorganises, and rethinks itself through legacies of the past, experiences of the present, and visions of the future.

Resistance in this war is, among other forms, also epistemic.

Manukian spoke at the conference entitled “Kherson on the Frontier: Steppe, River, Fortress”. It was the closing event of the exhibition Kherson: The Steppe Holds at the Mystetskyi Arsenal museum complex in Kyiv earlier this year. Both the exhibition and the conference were suggested as a frame to look at the region, which was once seen as inconspicuous and peripheral, brought into existence by the Russian Empire and further resourcified by the Soviet Union, and at the city. Kherson survived the brutalities of the Russian occupation in 2022 and the aftermath of the destruction of Kakhovka dam in 2023; located at the frontline, separated from the Russianoccupied territories only by the Dnipro River, the city was severely damaged, daily assaulted by drones and missiles. Yet it is still very much alive. How and why did people stay or return to the city in the face of permanent danger, looking after each other, temporarily abandoned houses, pets, and plants, and continuing to work on recovery and reconstruction as the daily destruction went on?

Architect and cultural heritage expert Andrii Lutsyk notes that “what is happening in Kherson right now is a cultural heritage of the future. A new or renewed identity is being forged before our very eyes.”

In the exhibition, personal stories, family legends, historical inquiries, local mythology, natural and cultural landscapes, and daily urban and rural rituals from the previous 30 years, times before the full-scale invasion, revealed the vernacular hardcore, a tight interlacing of various simple and often invisible or seemingly unimportant elements that connected people to each other and to their zemlia. This forms the core of identities that enable resistance in the face of death.

This exhibition, like the Dakh project or Darya Tsymbalyuk’s book on ecocide, like an exponentially growing number of other exhibitions, books, artistic and discursive projects and events, is an attempt to make sense of daily life inside the war, to trace the multiplicity of solidarities, local and nationwide caring networks of support and reconstruction – to pay tribute to those people, places, legacies, environments, taken by the war, to preserve their names and identities as a form of much-needed justice. This is culture as resistance, recovery, and security.

“Ukrainian culture in all its forms, with its history of resourceful resistance to imperialism and erasure in the face of Russian efforts to diminish its global reach, is an essential ally of open democratic societies in the fight against totalitarian threats,” writes Ukrainian researcher Sasha Dovzhyk in the editorial of the latest issue of London Ukrainian Review, dedicated to “Culture as Security”.

When spaces for democracies are dangerously shrinking and totalitarian threats are alarmingly growing, radically rethinking the role and place of culture in a new global security architecture and in the ongoing and future recovery of Ukraine is long overdue.

  1. Darya Tsymbalyuk (2025). Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War. Cambridge: Polity Press. ↩︎
  2. Michał Murawski (ed.) (2025). dakh (дах): vernacular hardcore. Mini-Atlas. [The guide to the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture] ↩︎
  3. Ibid. ↩︎

Scraping the Sacred: Big Tech’s New Cultural Colonialism

The corporations driving the charge in AI development present their products as tools that allow endless creativity. Yet behind that rhetoric lies an exploitative system built on the uncredited labour of artists whose works are scraped without their permission. Still, even as artificial intelligence repeats the colonial pattern of extraction, enclosure, and commodification, artists and communities are pushing back, reclaiming authorship and demanding accountability.

At London’s National Gallery X, visitors linger before striking portraits and glowing landscapes. Figures gaze out with uncanny confidence, framed by vibrant colours and luminous textures. Each piece feels polished and looks as though it belongs in a centuries-old tradition of portraiture, yet infused with something undeniably contemporary.

Meanwhile, in Berlin, the Museum für Kommunikation’s New Realities invites audiences into reimagined realities. Everyday objects – a desk lamp, a rubber plant, a vintage phone – are arranged in unfamiliar constellations, their sharpness almost unsettling. The show gestures to “digital workplaces”.

The two exhibitions have something in common: the pieces displayed weren’t made with brushes or charcoal. Instead, they are the result of interactions between human artists and machines – not imitations, but experiments. Each work probes what authorship and creativity mean when algorithms become part of the artistic process, as artists use AI to question precisely the systems of automation and authorship that now define cultural production.

Outside the gallery, however, the same tools move from experiment to industry. What serves as a medium of exploration for some becomes, in other contexts, a mechanism of mass production, trained on vast archives of human creativity. Type in “portrait in the style of Van Gogh” or “Afrofuturist astronaut” and within seconds, an image appears. It might seem like an instantaneous or easy process, but behind the screen are sprawling datasets – such as LAION-5B – containing billions of images scraped from across the open web. These archives – the backbone of products like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E – remix countless examples to conjure something new.

To the casual visitor or user, this might feel like magic; creativity without limits. But scroll through online artists’ forums, and the mood is far from celebratory.

A theft alleged

Andrew Menjivar, a senior concept artist at American video game developer Blizzard Entertainment, puts it bluntly: “The technology works on theft, plain and simple. Artists do not need to compete with automated slop built off the backs of their hard work.” His words capture a growing anger that spilled onto ArtStation in 2022, when thousands of artists staged a mass digital protest, flooding the platform for artists and designers with banners reading “NO TO AI GENERATED IMAGES.”

That sense of dispossession runs deep. In the United States and beyond, artists have raised alarms about AI systems that can replicate their signature styles – reproducing visual motifs, lines, or character designs without permission. Some works, such as Zarya of the Dawn (a comic entirely illustrated using image generator Midjourney), have triggered legal and copyright scrutiny over whether AI-made art should be protected. In Japan, manga creators have already seen their drawings scraped, altered, and reposted through AI tools – stripped of their original meaning. In Europe, photographers were unsettled to find AI-generated images bearing faint traces of the Getty watermark – the basis for Getty Images’ lawsuit against Stability AI, which it accuses of stealing millions of photos to train its deep learning model Stable Diffusion.

Musicians face a similar erosion of authorship. In 2023, an AI-generated track imitating Drake and The Weeknd went viral on TikTok before being pulled down at the request of Universal Music. Since then, automation has gone further: in mid-2025, an entirely AI-generated “band” drew more than a million Spotify streams, raising fresh concern that machine-made music could further squeeze the livelihoods of independent artists, already struggling under streaming platform economics. With the line between experiment and exploitation blurred, what sounded like a novelty to listeners felt, to working artists, like an existential threat.

Whether in comics, photography, or music, the story is the same. Generative AI is sold as a revolution, a tool that promises limitless creativity. But for many, it feels ruthlessly extractive: a machine that mines culture and centuries of artistic labour, processes them into patterns, and resells the result as novelty.

While art has always evolved through new tools, what is new here is the speed, opacity, and concentration of control through which creativity becomes data and who gets to own and govern it. So a question hangs in the gallery air: if art can be scraped, stripped, and remixed by machines, what remains of authorship itself?

Generative AI is sold as a revolution, a tool that promises limitless creativity. but for many, it feels ruthlessly extractive.

Digital empires, familiar habits

For critics and artists alike, the answer feels uncomfortably familiar. What artists describe as theft is, at a deeper level, part of a wider pattern – a replay of older histories of power, where culture is treated as a resource to be harvested. What might appear as a narrow dispute over copyright instead points to something larger: the continuation of extractive logics that echo colonial dynamics.

Ethiopian scholar Abeba Birhane has argued that AI systems reproduce the hierarchies of empire, treating people and cultures as raw material. In Race After Technology, Princeton University sociologist Ruha Benjamin shows how supposedly new tools often extend old patterns of racial and cultural domination. And communications scholars Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias describe this as “data colonialism”: the capture of human life and creativity for corporate profit.

Seen through this lens, generative AI is a tool for dispossession – taking without consent, stripping work of meaning, and enclosing it as property. Culture has long been shaped by systems of ownership and control – from imperial plunder to the market’s commodification of art. What AI does is translate those older dynamics into data form and scale them beyond human sight, binding creative life to the same infrastructures of extraction that once fed colonisers. Colonisers once looted artefacts and filled museums, and today’s corporations mine cultural archives to train their models. The resources have changed, yet the logic is the same: extraction, enclosure, commodification.

The machinery of extraction

If the gallery walls showcase the spectacle, the supply chain tells the hidden story. Long before algorithms touch a canvas or compose a song, the culture that AI repackages rests on other forms of exploitation: the earth beneath us, the power grids around us, and the human labour hidden behind the screen.

The promise of frictionless creativity hides a material footprint that is anything but light. The computers behind generative models are built on cobalt and lithium, pulled from mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Bolivia, often under hazardous and exploitative conditions. These same minerals power our phones and electric cars, but the hunger of AI accelerates demand at industrial scale. As one Congolese miner told Amnesty International, “We dig to feed the world but remain hungry ourselves.”

Once assembled, the machines do not rest. Training a generative model like OpenAI’s GPT-3 is estimated to consume over 1,000 megawatt-hours of electricity – about as much as 130 US homes use in an entire year. Keeping those vast server farms cool also requires millions of litres of water. Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have shown that training state-of-the-art models can require as much water as producing hundreds of cars.

And then there is the human cost hidden in the click of a prompt. To make AI systems usable, an invisible workforce of low-paid workers is contracted to filter, tag, and sanitise training data. In Kenya, employees hired to review violent and sexually explicit content for OpenAI earned less than two dollars an hour. “We were exposed to disturbing content every day,” one worker told Time magazine. “But the pay was barely enough to survive.”

This double drain – of natural resources and human labour – mirrors older colonial economies all too neatly. Land stripped for its minerals, workers pressed into survival wages, and the profits funnelled towards distant centres of power.

And all of this leads back to culture – the very thing AI claims to create anew. Just as veins of ore are carved from mountains and shipped abroad, cultural labour is scraped from the Internet and fed into corporate systems. An artist’s portfolio becomes a pattern, a song becomes a dataset, a photograph becomes another pixel in a training set. In the process, the works are stripped of meaning, context, and connection, and turned into a slurry of training data ready to be recombined.

To call this merely “data” flattens centuries of meaning and reduces culture to raw material residue. What disappears in the process are the cultural values that made the work significant in the first place – the years of study, the traditions of practice, the communities from which they emerged. Instead, everything becomes flat, interchangeable, and ready to be resold.

Seen together, these layers – the minerals, the water, the labour, the art – form a single picture. AI is not immaterial magic; it is an extractive industry, rooted in the same logics of exploitation and dispossession that have structured global injustices for centuries. The only difference is the resource: today, the mine is not just in the ground but in culture itself.

From commons to commodity

But extraction is only half the story. What makes generative AI so powerful – and so troubling – is what happens next: the transformation of those resources into proprietary products, enclosed and resold as if they were corporate assets all along.

Consider the lawsuits now winding their way through courts, where questions of enclosure come sharply into focus. Getty Images suing Stability AI is just one example. Groups of artists have filed class actions against companies whose models mimic their signature styles without permission. Musicians have raised alarms about voice cloning software that can spit out tracks with a few lines of text. In each case, what was once the product of individual skill or collective heritage is captured, automated, and packaged for profit.

Corporations like OpenAI, Google AI, and Stability AI present themselves as democratisers – offering tools that anyone can use. But while the data that fuels their models is drawn from a vast cultural commons, the outputs are locked behind paywalls, subscription plans, and enterprise licences. A poem written by an unknown writer in Lagos, a sketch uploaded by a student in Manila, a folk song recorded in rural Canada – once scraped, they feed corporate machines the original creators can neither access nor control.

This shift raises more than legal or economic questions. It cuts to the core of what culture is. In mainstream debate, authorship is often reduced to copyright – “If you use my work, you need to pay me.” But as critics like Abeba Birhane and Ruha Benjamin remind us, culture is more than property. It is memory, ritual, belonging – the ways people imagine themselves into the world.

The consequences reach far beyond livelihoods. When culture is treated as raw material, imagination shrinks. Sacred traditions are stripped of context and remade as styles; community songs become decorative “aesthetic choices”; political art is fed into the machine and spat back as wallpaper. What was once shared, messy, and alive becomes uniform, smooth, and owned.

This is why many critics now describe generative AI as a form of enclosure. The idea that culture can be owned is not new – copyright and museums alike have long fenced off the commons in the name of preservation or profit. But where copyright seeks to reward creation, AI enclosure monetises imitation: extracting collective creativity while giving little back. In this new economy, commons are not fenced but scraped. What once belonged to the many now circulates through the hands of the few – not as land or artefact but as data, subscription, and algorithmic output.

Where copyright seeks to reward creation, AI enclosure monetises imitation: extracting collective creativity while giving little back.

When the sacred is scraped

The enclosures of generative AI reach every corner of culture, but their impact is felt most deeply where creation itself is communal and sacred. Across the world, some traditions are inseparably intertwined with their context: songs that live only in ceremony, designs that carry ancestral meaning, stories bound to specific lands and the people who care for them. These are not products of individual authorship; they are collective inheritances – practices of survival and continuity carried through generations.

To call these practices “content” is to misunderstand their very essence. Once absorbed into datasets, their meaning fractures: a ceremonial mask becomes a “style prompt”, a sacred symbol re-emerges as digital wallpaper. What belongs to ceremony and ritual is offered up for anyone’s remix, stripped of relation and responsibility.

Artists and communities are already sounding alarms. In Nigeria, musicians warn that AI-generated deepfakes are encroaching on Afrobeats itself, with systems able to mimic the voices and styles of cultural icons without consent. In Australia, First Nations artists have raised concerns that their designs and stories are being scraped and remixed by AI tools, a practice they describe as cultural theft. And in Canada, the federal government was forced to apologise after publishing an AI-generated image of an Indigenous woman, sparking new ethics rules and corporate pledges to avoid replicating Indigenous art through AI.

From protest to protocol, Indigenous and community-led movements are setting their own terms for how culture should live in the digital realm. In Canada, the First Nations OCAP® principles (Ownership, Control, Access, Possession) enshrine the right of Indigenous peoples to govern their cultural data. In Aotearoa, the Te Mana Raraunga Māori Data Sovereignty Network describes data as a living taonga, a sacred treasure that carries mauri, or life force, and insists it must be governed according to Māori values of collective responsibility and handled with care, consent, and authority. And in Brazil, Indigenous technologists are developing sovereignty projects to keep sacred materials out of training datasets. The Indigenous Protocol and AI Working Group has gone further, outlining ethical guidelines for AI – such as the principle that ceremonial stories must not be reproduced outside ritual contexts.

These initiatives reject the colonial and capitalist logic of intellectual property – where ownership is individual and exclusionary – in favour of relational stewardship, where knowledge is held, cared for, and passed on collectively. They remind us that cultural knowledge is not raw material but a living trust, inseparable from the people and places that create and sustain it.

When generative AI scrapes the sacred, it risks reviving one of the oldest colonial patterns of all: the theft of meaning itself.

Seeds of resistance

Still, the story of generative AI is also a story of resistance. Across the world, artists, technologists, and communities are refusing to let culture be reduced to raw material. Their efforts are fragmented, sometimes fragile, but they gesture toward another future: one where creativity and cultural knowledge are protected rather than consumed.

Some of this pushback comes from artists themselves. From the same anger that fed digital demonstrations on ArtStation, practical tools emerged. Spawning, created by artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, lets creatives check whether their work is in training datasets and opt out of future use. Experimental projects such as Kudurru – an open-source initiative that embeds hidden “poison” signals into images to disrupt model training – show how artists and technologists are developing new ways to resist extraction through code. Meanwhile, Cara, a portfolio platform co-founded by Singaporean artist Jingna Zhang, offers an artist-first space designed to block scraping and protect creative work, with safeguards that continue to evolve.

Critical researchers are also pointing to alternatives. Timnit Gebru, through the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), advances community-driven research that foregrounds justice and accountability rather than profit. Abeba Birhane argues for relational ethics: an approach to AI that acknowledges histories of inequality instead of pretending datasets are neutral. These interventions may not topple Big Tech overnight, but they expand the horizon of what is possible.

Generative AI is not an unstoppable wave of progress; it is a contested field.

Alongside them, some artists are engaging with AI, not to celebrate it but to question it, using the tools themselves to expose bias, reclaim visibility, and imagine alternative futures beyond corporate platforms. Exhibitions such as National Gallery X’s AI: Who’s Looking? in London and New Realities at Berlin’s Museum für Kommunikation use human–machine collaboration to probe what authorship and creativity mean in the algorithmic age. Rather than surrendering to automation, these projects turn AI into a mirror, revealing who gets to create, who gets copied, and what kinds of stories technology makes visible or erases.

What unites these efforts is a refusal of inevitability. Generative AI is not an unstoppable wave of progress; it is a contested field. Lawsuits are testing the boundaries of copyright and consent. Opt-out tools are forcing corporations to adjust, from Stable Diffusion adding such mechanisms to OpenAI announcing a forthcoming Media Manager for rights holders. And Indigenous frameworks are carving out new protections through data sovereignty and protocol-driven guardrails. Cracks in the AI oligarchy are already visible.

The story is unfinished, but one thing is clear: culture is not waiting to be mined. It is pushing back, planting seeds of accountability in the shadows of an industry that insists it cannot be stopped or steered.

Europe’s digital mirror

Across Europe, too, communities are rising against new forms of digital extraction, as AI systems absorb and repackage cultural materials without consent.

In Sápmi, Sámi institutions are asserting digital sovereignty through the SODA (Sámi Ownership and Data Access) principles, affirming that cultural and linguistic data must remain under Sámi authority and serve the collective benefit of Sámi communities. For Roma artists and storytellers, projects such as RomArchive mark a different form of resistance  – building self-governed archives to reclaim visibility and authorship long denied in Europe’s cultural record. And in the Basque Country, the Kultura Data initiative treats digital heritage as a shared commons: open for reuse yet governed collectively to keep culture participatory, accessible, and protected from commercial enclosure. Together, these movements link consent, authorship, and collective governance to the survival of Europe’s living traditions in the digital age. And each, in its own way, attempts to reclaim control over how living traditions enter the digital realm and to ensure that technology sustains, rather than erases, cultural plurality.

For Europe as a whole, the stakes are high. Cultural participation is not just entertainment; it is part of democratic life. Through stories, rituals, and creativity, societies negotiate and celebrate differences, include new perspectives, and imagine shared futures. If those spaces are reduced to what algorithms can remix, the danger is cultural homogenisation – a Europe that speaks in borrowed styles but loses its plurality of perspectives and cultures.

Policy debates are beginning to catch up. The EU’s AI Act introduces measures such as labelling AI-generated content and limiting the use of copyrighted materials in training datasets. But significant gaps remain: questions of cultural rights, authorship, and community consent are still largely unaddressed. Critics warn that without explicit protections, Europe’s digital transition risks replicating the very extractive patterns it once exported.

Compounding this is a shifting political landscape. As far-right movements gain ground across the continent, the space for plurality – cultural, linguistic, and political – is shrinking. In such a climate, the commodification of culture by Big Tech risks aligning with forces that prize uniformity over diversity, echoing what Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias describe as “the enclosure of life under data colonialism”.

AI does not invent extraction so much as accelerate it, turning centuries of cultural exchange into the raw material of computation.

Imagination as a commons

In the end, the story of generative AI is less about machines than about the patterns they amplify. The enclosures we see today – the capture of art, language, and story – are not new inventions but extensions of older hierarchies: the museum’s glass case, the copyright ledger, the colonial archive. What is different now is the scale and speed with which these dynamics unfold, translated into data and automated across the globe – and, crucially, concentrated in the hands of a few powerful corporations.

AI does not invent extraction so much as accelerate it, turning centuries of cultural exchange – including the sacred knowledge of Indigenous and community traditions – into the raw material of computation. What was once held in ceremony is now repackaged as product and profit. But this transformation also makes the stakes unmistakably clear: whether culture will remain a living commons, rooted in plurality and care, or be reduced to an instrument of corporate power.

And yet, across disciplines and continents, resistance continues to grow. Artists and communities are reclaiming these tools to expose bias, recover erased traditions, and reassert creative agency. From Indigenous frameworks of data sovereignty to digital commons projects and opt-out campaigns, they are sketching another horizon – one where technology amplifies, rather than consumes cultural plurality.

Europe now faces a critical challenge: whether to narrow imagination through inherited systems of extraction, or to expand it by recognising culture as a living commons sustained through plurality, reciprocity, and shared stewardship. In the end, the crisis is not technological but political – a struggle over who gets to imagine and for whom.

Cultural Rights: The Elixir of Social Cohesion?

Spain is home to one of Europe’s last standing progressive governments, but its society is not immune to deep ideological divisions amplified by inequalities and exploited by the far right. In this context, culture is a contested political terrain, riven by battles over memory and identity as well as attempts at silencing critical voices. Can the promotion of cultural rights contribute to mending social divisions while advancing a green agenda? An interview with Culture Minister Ernest Urtasun.

Green European Journal: Your flagship initiative as Spain’s minister of culture has been the Cultural Rights Plan. What’s the vision behind it? And what exactly are cultural rights?

Ernest Urtasun: With this plan, we are trying to change the approach to public policies on culture. For many years, cultural policies have been interpreted as merely a means to support cultural consumption, such as by making culture more affordable. This is a bit strange, considering that the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights already recognised culture as a fundamental right in 1945. But member states never fully aligned their cultural policies with international law. Now we want to do precisely that: consider culture a fundamental right.

This means that culture needs to be accessible and affordable, but it is not limited to that. It also means that as a citizen, you have a right to participate in the cultural life of your community and to have the means for artistic creation. To achieve these general goals, the plan envisions hundreds of concrete actions, including removing barriers to cultural participation, promoting cultural education, ensuring gender equality, protecting multilingualism, and advancing digital governance.

Spain is one of the first countries in Europe to take such actions, but not in the world. Brazil, for instance, has been working with a cultural rights perspective for many years.

Many of the issues the plan aims to address – economic precarity, discrimination, unequal access – reflect broader inequalities and divisions within society. Is culture the right tool to mend these divisions?

Absolutely. For citizens to be able to enjoy their cultural rights, we need to address the socio-economic inequalities that prevent them from participating in cultural life. There are several barriers that need to be removed. For example, Spain, like other European countries, has introduced a 400-euro grant for young people to spend on cultural products and activities such as books or theatre tickets. However, only 70 per cent of 18-year-olds make use of it, while the remaining 30 per cent don’t – either because they don’t know about it, or because they don’t have the opportunities to use it. This is a form of social discrimination. With the Cultural Rights Plan, we are working with what we call third-sector associations to reach these people and make them aware of the options they have.

Geography adds another level of discrimination. If you live far away from the big Spanish cities, you don’t always have access to cultural services such as public libraries, museums, or theatres. This prevents you from enjoying your cultural rights.

There’s also a huge gender gap in culture, which reflects the reality of Spanish society. Women in Spain have more difficulties in fully enjoying their cultural rights than men. For instance, if you are a female actor, there are very high chances that you have been sexually harassed.

All these inequalities – social, territorial, gender, and more – create unequal access to culture, which in turn reinforces disparities. By making culture a fundamental right and accessible to everyone, we also ­fight inequalities in general. S

By making culture a fundamental right and accessible to everyone, we also fight inequalities in general.

Some of the inequities you mentioned have contributed to fuelling the extreme right in Spain. How has the rise of the far-right party Vox, particularly at the regional level, affected culture?

The far right in Spain considers culture a threat. When they participated in regional governments in recent years, they often negotiated with the conservatives to get the cultural portfolio for themselves. Once they had control over cultural policies, they went on to massively cut subsidies for progressive cultural initiatives – promoting censorship by cancelling festivals, plays, performances, and other cultural events. This shows that the far right sees very clearly that culture is a powerful tool for critical thinking and therefore needs to be weakened or cancelled. As soon as we arrived at the ministry, we addressed this by creating a special unit to ­fight censorship in the regions.

Isn’t there more than just censorship in the far right’s vision of culture? In other European countries, they have put forward their own model, not defunding but monopolising cultural institutions and public media.

I don’t think that has been the case in Spain so far. Vox hasn’t taken advantage of the regional cultural portfolios to create anything particularly benefi­cial to their ideology. The only exception might be their massive support for cultural activities associated with Spanish nationalism, such as bullfighting.

Bullfighting isn’t just a far-right obsession, however. In October, the Spanish parliament repealed a popular legislative initiative that proposed eliminating the legal protection currently enjoyed by bullfighting due to its status as cultural heritage.

Bullfighting has a very strong tradition within Spanish society; it is deeply enshrined in our identity. But can bullfighting be considered a form of culture? The answer is yes, it undeniably belongs to Spanish culture. But it is a type of culture that we do not want to see any longer, because it entails animal torture. And luckily, if you look at surveys, it is an increasingly minoritarian cultural activity, and its support in society is declining. People are becoming more aware of the fact that torture is no longer acceptable in our societies.

But the Right and the far right still defend bullfighting as a culture war against the Left. They say that it is at the core of Spanish national identity, and the Left is attacking it. Now, the problem is that the Socialists are deeply divided on the matter because in some regions they have strong connections to ­fighting traditions. The reason why the popular legislative initiative was rejected in parliament – despite collecting more than 700,000 signatures – is that the Socialists abstained.

But to be honest, I think it is just a matter of time, because young people in particular are turning more and more against animal torture. Bull­fighting will be banned in Spain, sooner or later.

Memory politics is another deep cultural divide in Spanish society. The year 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of dictator Francisco Franco, and the legacy of the dictatorship remains quite contested. How are you navigating these issues?

For many years, we have argued that the far right was not as strong in Spain as in other European countries because our dictatorial past was still too close and its memory too vivid. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. Particularly among young generations, there’s very little knowledge about what the dictatorship was, and normalising the far right is increasingly common among young people. What we are trying to do in government, and particularly this year with the anniversary, is to try and explain what Spain was like under the Franco regime.

When it comes to culture specifi­cally, we are trying to complete the democratic transition that was left unfinished. For example, we have taken the initiative to return thousands of art pieces that were seized by the Francoist regime and never given back to their legitimate owners. We are also trying to close down the Franco National Foundation, which essentially promotes Francoist ideas and the legacy of the dictatorship. But in my view, addressing the fading of memory among the Spanish youth is the biggest challenge we face as a society.

The Right and the far right still defend bullfighting as a culture war against the Left.

The dictatorship isn’t the only contested chapter of collective memory. As a culture minister, you’ve spoken out about the need for a reckoning with Spain’s colonial past, including in state museums. Where does the country stand on that front?

Spain has not debated the need to critically address the colonial past in our museums in the way that other countries have done. One of the cases we have studied most closely is the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands, where a comprehensive process has been put in place to incorporate decolonial views into the museum. I brought up the issue in Spain because the Museo de América and the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Madrid, among others, have not yet had this type of conversation on decolonialism.

When I became minister, one of the things I did was to remove banners in the Museo de América that were openly racist towards Indigenous populations. This was a controversial move because the Right argued that I was meddling with fundamental issues of Spanish history. But we did it anyway, because we thought it was important. And I think more and more people now understand that our museums need to be respectful and grant a voice to those communities that have always been silenced.

I only regret that Spain is a bit late compared to other European countries, but we are catching up now, and this is very positive.

One of your other initiatives as a minister of culture has been the Libro Verde – the Green Paper on the Sustainable Management of Cultural Heritage. How do traditional green priorities like ecology, sustainability, and climate action intersect with the field of culture?

First, cultural activities can and should contribute to the energy transition. The Libro Verde aims to establish policies for our heritage sites and cultural venues to adopt renewable energies and become more energy efficient. For example, the Teatro Real, Madrid’s opera house, now has a roof fully equipped with solar panels, and it is entirely reliant on renewable energy.

But even more important than that, cultural and artistic activities can contribute to the shifts needed in society to fight climate change and adapt to its effects. We know that we need to change the way we live and think, as well as how we organise ourselves as European societies. Culture is an indispensable component of that transformation. This is why we have created the Climate Biennial, a meeting place that will use culture and art to encourage debate and action for a just climate transition.

Climate change is the most critical challenge for Spain, a country with a vast coastline that is struggling with desertification and drought and has already been hit hard by climate-induced disasters such as floods and devastating wildfires. Therefore, it is no surprise that the climate is increasingly present in our movies, literature, and other forms of artistic production. The arts are crucial to help us imagine and bring about a better future.

Another shift that is likely to change the way our societies are organised is the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence. Is the cultural sector ready to deal with this transformation? This is a huge debate in Spain. Artists and creators are very worried about the emergence of AI. One of the things they rightly ask is that we take steps to protect human creation. I think that AI can be a powerful tool for creators, but there always needs to be a human behind it in order for the result to be considered a cultural outcome.

Another concern for creators is that large language models are trained with artistic work subject to copyright. Yet AI companies are not paying authors and creators for using their work. This is a critical problem that EU regulation of AI has not solved, and we need to address it urgently. This year, Barcelona hosted MONDIACULT, a major UNESCO conference on cultural policies, bringing together more than 100 culture ministers from all over the world. Fair remuneration for authors in the age of artifi­cial intelligence was one of the measures we called for, and everyone recognises it as a key issue.

Of course, the fact that Europe doesn’t control many of these technologies adds another layer to the challenge. We need Europe to be present in the ­eld of AI. Spain has created a public, open-source AI foundational model called ALIA. Other countries are taking similar actions, but we are lagging behind on the global stage in the race for AI technologies.

Cultural and artistic activities can contribute to the shifts needed in society to fight climate change and adapt to its effects.

Aside from pursuing technological sovereignty, what can the EU do to reinforce a shared sense of European belonging at a time of resurgent nationalism?

Culture was essential in the second part of the 20th century to create a shared sense of European citizenship. We all have favourite musicians, writers, and filmmakers who come from European countries other than our own. The EU’s “cultural exception” protects cultural goods and services from free trade rules because it understands culture as a public good.

We cannot expect European integration to continue progressing in the coming years without a strong cultural component. But we need more effort in that direction. The new Multiannual Financial Framework [MFF, the EU budget for the years 2028-2034] should strengthen our common cultural tools. We hope that the Culture Compass, an initiative the European Commission is developing, can play a role in that.

The issue with culture is that it constantly needs to remind politicians of its value in order to be supported and recognised. I worry that with new priorities like defence and competitiveness, Europe will make the mistake of cutting cultural spending. I can say that this won’t be the case in Spain, and what we know so far about the next MFF suggests that the culture budget will increase at the European level too. But some member states are taking a different course, and that would be a huge mistake. In a tense geopolitical landscape, a strong European cultural sector is more – not less – necessary.

Iran’s Quiet, Loud Art

It deceives you, this red hue imprinted on the sky is no crimson dawn,

O Friend! It is a frost-numbed ear, the mark of winter’s icy slap.

And the cramped heavens’ frozen light, dead or alive,

Lies hidden in the nine-layered, death-laden casket of darkness.

Mehdi Akhavan Sales, Winter (1956)

Mehdi Akhavan Sales wrote these lines in the oppressive years following the 1953 coup that ended a brief era of free expression in Iran under Mohammad Mosaddegh’s premiership. With Mohammad Reza Pahlavi once again wielding almost unchecked power as Shah, the government soon began a wave of arrests, banned opposition parties, and exerted tighter censorship over the media and the arts. Some of Iran’s most prominent writers, including Akhavan Sales himself, were imprisoned for their critical work.

And yet, the poet and his contemporaries fought on. The 1960s and 1970s saw a wealth of politically charged writing from the likes of Nima Youshij (the father of free verse poetry in Iran), Ahmad Shamlou, Simin Behbahani, and Forough Farrokhzad (widely regarded as Iran’s greatest female poet).

This movement extended far beyond poetry. In painting, sculpture, cinema, theatre, and music, political expression became an inseparable part of art. Iranian artists of this period used covert language to circumvent censorship as they challenged repression. But there was also more direct and defiant criticism, visible in the works of figures such as writer and folklorist Samad Behrangi, journalist and poet Khosro Golsorkhi, and cartoonist Ardeshir Mohasses.

However, the 1979 revolution, the culmination of decades of struggle and protest, ultimately brought about further repression and censorship.

Art under the Islamic Republic

Just a year after the Pahlavi dynasty collapsed, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, which led to a bloody eight-year war. Although the conflict posed a significant threat to the newly minted Islamic Republic, it also allowed the regime to consolidate ideological control. Streets across the country were adorned with murals, posters, and billboards featuring fallen fighters, as well as religious figures and Iranian political officials. Moreover, radio and television produced a slew of programmes with themes of mourning, as the government attempted to instill a Shiite “culture of bereavement” while systematically marginalising deeply cherished, non-Islamic festivals.

It was also during the war with Iraq that the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (MCIG) was established, creating a comprehensive censorship regime. This body oversees all arts and cultural institutions in the country, and its approval is needed for all artistic works meant for public consumption. It also has complete control over public funding for artistic production and uses grants, work bans, and other tactics to force artists into submission. Works that do not comply with the MCIG’s notoriously opaque “Islamic principles” are either censored or banned. Persecution and imprisonment are rampant, too.

Violence against artists reached a peak during the 1988-1998 “Chain Murders”, when more than 80 activists, artists, and thinkers were killed or disappeared. The government at first denied involvement but then blamed the murders on “rogue elements”. No transparent trial was ever held to bring the perpetrators to justice.

Yet Iranian artists never stopped producing political works. Instead, they developed tactics to evade the state’s censorship apparatus.

Across different fields, Iranian artists have used symbolism and figurative language to convey social and political critique. As a result, metaphors, allegories, and fables are prevalent in artworks, while genres like surrealism and absurdism have become widely popular. At the same time, an underground scene has emerged where artists work away from public scrutiny and without obtaining formal permission from the MCIG. Moreover, works by anonymous artists appear on walls and online, openly challenging the government’s censorship and spatial dominance. But the event that led to the most remarkable outburst of artistic freedom and political expression in the Islamic Republic’s history was the death in police custody of 22-year-old Mahsa (Jina) Amini in 2022.

Woman, Life, Freedom

When news broke out that Mahsa Amini had died after allegedly being beaten by morality police officers for not wearing her hijab “properly”, Iranians from all over the country rose in defiance. At her funeral, women collectively removed their headscarves as crowds chanted “woman, life, freedom!”, which quickly became the slogan of the “Mahsa Revolution”. Soon, images and artworks showing her on life support took the internet by storm.

From the outset, art and artists were integral to the struggle. Singers and rappers like Mehdi Yarrahi, Toomaj Salehi, and Saman Yasin produced songs criticising the government’s corruption and calling on citizens to revolt. Two weeks into the protests, Shervin Hajipour released Baraye (“because of” or “for the sake of”), a song whose lyrics drew on a wave of tweets by Iranians mentioning their reasons for bringing about a revolution. Baraye was taken down days later under government pressure, but not before amassing tens of millions of views and becoming “the anthem of the revolution”. Some of the most famous names in Iranian cinema also supported the movement, including a number of female actors who denounced mandatory hijab.

The artworks of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement engaged in conversation with both Iranian and foreign cultural outputs. A Persian rendition of Bella Ciao; a poster juxtaposing Tehran’s famous Azadi (“Freedom”) Tower with Henri Matisse’s Dance; graphic designs featuring poems from the cherished 11th-century epic Book of Kings; and revolutionary songs inspired by Chilean protest anthems – they all tell the story of a movement that is every bit as artistic as it is political.