This editorial introduces Acting Out: Arts and Culture Under Pressure, the winter 2025 print edition of the Green European Journal. You can read all articles online, or order a print copy.

This year, the 50th anniversary of the death of dictator Francisco Franco, Spain’s progressive government launched its Cultural Rights Plan. This 200-page document aims to transform Spanish cultural policy by redefining it through a human rights perspective. It states that “the future is a cultural construct: it is not something that is waiting for us, but something that is shaped from the present, by the way we inhabit the world, build relationships and share meanings.”

Today, the ability of arts and culture to foster a sense of community and help us understand the past, interpret the present, and imagine the future is often celebrated. But Spain’s approach to cultural rights represents an exception rather than the rule in European cultural policy. Artists and cultural workers across the continent are facing job precarity, marginalisation in policymaking, defunding, and instrumentalisation.

The Covid-19 pandemic didn’t so much create as expose widespread economic vulnerability within culture and the arts, with artists and cultural workers from across the EU demanding recognition and protection. But not much has changed since. Today, government expenditure on culture in OECD countries remains below pre-2008 levels.

Part of the problem lies with economic orthodoxy. The conviction that the “cultural and creative industries” could support a new wave of economic growth and stimulate consumption at a time of deindustrialisation was never going to be sustainable. Neoliberal laissez-faire did the rest, leading to financial insecurity and precarisation. The ongoing shift in European priorities towards economic competitiveness is reinforcing the neoliberal mindset that values human activities only to the extent that they contribute to GDP growth. Culture’s more indirect contributions to the economy and social cohesion are challenging to prove, especially at a time of political fragmentation and polarisation.

The rise of the far right is also to blame for the erosion of free, democratic culture. Far-right forces have demonstrated a fundamentally ambiguous attitude towards culture. They have clearly understood its capacity to shape hearts and minds and have invested significant resources in building cultural power to normalise their discourse. At the same time, they see free culture as a threat to their existence and resort to censorship and defunding to silence critical voices.

This mix of strategies is visible across Europe. Italy’s far-right government has monopolised public media and cultural institutions in the name of restoring pluralism. Viktor Orbán has gone to great lengths to weaponise cultural heritage and push the government’s narrative, including by flooding Hungarian town and village squares with monuments of dubious artistic quality. The Sweden Democrats have used music to convey a narrow understanding of Swedish culture and identity. And in Spain, Vox has adopted a negative approach to cultural policy, seeking to control regional cultural portfolios only to censor progressive voices.

Technological developments – treated as a natural phenomenon, incompatible with democratic steering and oversight – are adding another set of pressures on artists and cultural workers. The world’s largest corporations dominate the production and distribution of culture. Artificial intelligence (AI) promises expanded creativity, yet it relies on familiar forms of extraction and dispossession. Its advance also raises existential questions around the future of human creativity, authorship, and imagination. Meanwhile, non-transparent algorithms reinforce the individualisation of cultural consumption and feed cultural and ideological bubbles. For Europe, these challenges are made all the more serious by the fact that it does not own or control the rapidly evolving technologies it timidly tries to regulate.

In a tense geopolitical landscape, the control of digital platforms is part of a broader competition for hegemony conducted via both soft and hard power tools. Under Trump 2.0, the US has subordinated cultural influence to economic and military coercion but is still waging culture wars in order to undermine pluralism and fuel the far right in Europe. Putin’s Russia, in its full-scale war against Ukraine, has combined propaganda with attempts at cultural erasure by military means.

Meanwhile, Xi Jinping’s China is profiting from the US withdrawal to position itself as a global supporter of multilateralism, severing culture from its connection to human rights and open societies. Erdoğan’s Turkey is also utilising cultural products such as TV series to defy Western narratives and has achieved notable success, particularly in the Balkans.

Responding to these complex challenges is not easy. But there are new ideas and sparks of cultural resistance to build on and draw inspiration from.

Leading economists are disputing the notion that culture should serve as a tool for GDP growth or other numerical metrics. For example, in this edition, Mariana Mazzucato emphasises the capacity of arts and culture to reshape and redirect the economy towards public value and sustainability. Meanwhile, cultural economist Justin O’Connor proposes viewing culture as foundational for democracy, alongside education and healthcare. This requires stronger public funding and support, as well as cultivating the commons – “third spaces” that exist outside both state control and market logics. Fostering participation while addressing socioeconomic inequalities and urban-rural divides is also at the core of Spain’s Cultural Rights Plan.

Under the right circumstances, technology can make a positive contribution to this mission. For example, as cultural geographer Rowan Jaines demonstrates in this edition, progress in the field of satellite imagery has empowered architects to reimagine the future of rural landscapes beyond extraction and dispossession, thereby questioning the notion that the urban is the primary space of democratic and cultural life. More generally, artists and cultural practitioners are not passive receivers of new technologies but engage with them critically to reflect on issues of ownership, enclosure, and control in the age of automation. In her article, Seden Anlar foregrounds the efforts of researchers and activists to preserve the community value of culture and critique colonial logics in cultural production and consumption.

The EU can be an ally in this struggle, as long as it doesn’t reinstrumentalise culture as a soft power tool or a “democratic shield” against hybrid warfare and other security threats. Instead, it should value artistic freedom within its borders and strengthen its role as a global enabler, building on existing cooperation in the field of international cultural relations. As Mafalda Dâmaso stresses in her essay, this could help the EU find its place in the multipolar world order without renouncing its values.

Moreover, culture and the arts can serve as a vehicle for ecological transformation, remedying the failure of institutional politics to act on the climate crisis at the scale and pace required. This mission isn’t simply fulfilled by adding greening requirements to cultural funding (which can result in greenwashing or higher burdens for a sector already gasping for air). Instead, in the words of Lucile Schmid in her conversation with Ladislav Miko and Edouard Gaudot, it is about giving space and voice – with no strings attached – to “the complexity, tensions, and contradictions that are intrinsic to any agenda of change”. Through their participation in coalition governments, Greens have forged and refined their approach to cultural policymaking, promoting their core values of inclusion, accessibility, and sustainability. Yet a distinct and coherent green vision for culture remains elusive. Sam Murray recommends prioritising the localisation of cultural funding and access to culture in rural communities. Attaching cultural provisions to green industrial and energy projects is also essential in fighting the far right, which seeks to blame the loss of collective identity in local communities on immigration and the green transition.

This edition aims to open a space for what both the green movement and the cultural and creative sectors identify as the prerequisite and essence of healthy democracies – dialogue, imagination, pluralism, and mutual understanding – without erasing disagreement and productive conflict.