Reshaping EU International Cultural Relations

Learning from cultural mobility practice

Almost ten years have passed since the European Union (EU) last set out a comprehensive vision for its international cultural relations, and the Culture Compass for Europe, released in November 2025, opens the first genuine window since then to rethink that vision from the ground up. The Culture Compass tasks the European Commission with producing a new strategy in this field, one meant to carry forward the 2016 Joint Communication ‘Towards an EU Strategy for International Cultural Relations’, jointly presented by the Commission and the European External Action Service, while embedding more coordinated partnerships across the globe.

However, a structural contradiction sits at the heart of how the EU currently conducts its cultural relations with the wider world: the rhetoric consistently points towards mutual benefit, diversity and partnership between equals, yet the instruments, funding rules and institutional habits built up around that rhetoric often end up entrenching the very imbalances they were meant to dissolve. Much of this traces back to something quite concrete — the legal bases underpinning many EU programmes with an international reach, which in practice bar direct funding to organisations and individuals located outside the European Union. Given this, a new strategy will achieve little if it is simply layered on top of what already exists; the architecture itself needs rethinking.

What follows is On the Move’s attempt to sketch what that rethinking should look like. It draws on positions the network has developed over time in dialogue with its members and through the discussions generated at its annual Cultural Mobility Forum and its thematic Webinars, and it is grounded in the evidence gathered across successive editions of the Cultural Mobility Yearbook and the Cultural Mobility Flows policy papers.

The structural roots of the imbalance

None of this comes down to a shortage of good instruments; it comes down to how cultural relations have been designed from the outset. A substantial body of postcolonial and decolonial scholarship has shown that cooperation built around exchange, dialogue and mutual understanding can just as easily entrench the inequalities it claims to dissolve. For much of its history, European cultural diplomacy has functioned closer to an act of representation — telling Europe’s story to the world — than to a meeting of equals, and the imprint of that history still shows in who sets the agenda, who receives the funding, and whose mobility gets facilitated in practice. Article 16 of the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions was written precisely to correct one dimension of this pattern, requiring developed countries to extend preferential treatment to artists, professionals and cultural goods and services from developing countries. Two decades on, UNESCO’s own monitoring shows that obligation to be only partially honoured.

Independent research into the EU’s cultural relations reaches a parallel conclusion: declared commitments to partnership and co-creation continue to sit alongside instruments that are fragmented, underfunded, shaped more by security logic than cultural logic, and built around assumptions that quietly treat Europe as the reference point for everyone else. None of this is unfolding in a stable environment, either. Democratic backsliding, resurgent nationalism and sharpening geopolitical competition are placing fresh strain on arrangements that were already unequal, and the rapid spread of artificial intelligence adds a further, still largely unaddressed risk: that the tools now mediating cultural visibility worldwide will flatten or misrepresent precisely the minority languages and traditional expressions that an international cultural relations strategy needs to protect.

A strategy serious about correcting this cannot be built field by field. Public policy and institutional design, the ecosystems that sustain cultural and creative industries regionally, the networks connecting institutions across borders, the grassroots collaboration that artists and communities sustain on their own initiative, and the digital and AI-mediated infrastructure now shaping all of the above, are not separate files to be coordinated after the fact; they function as a single system, and need to be designed as one. Only by holding these dimensions together can a new strategy connect its formal frameworks to the informal relationships through which most meaningful cultural exchange actually happens, and it is important to recognise that how these pieces are arranged determines not just how much cooperation takes place, but its quality, and the value it ultimately delivers — culturally, socially and economically.

Core principles for a new European ICR strategy

Four principles follow directly from this diagnosis, and On the Move would encourage the European Commission to treat them as design requirements rather than aspirations. The first is horizontal partnership rather than institutionally led exchange: the most dynamic, generative and durable forms of international cultural exchange are not institutionally led or diplomacy led, but sector led, artistically driven and demand responsive, built on long-term relationships between artists, organisations and communities that often predate, outlast and operate independently of any formal programme or policy framework. Strategy design should follow that reality rather than compete with it.

The second is demand-led rather than offer-led design, so that instruments respond to the priorities articulated by practitioners rather than the thematic and geographic priorities set centrally by funders.

The third is equity by design as a structural requirement, not an afterthought. Communities that remain structurally marginalised within existing frameworks (independent artists, grassroots organisations, practitioners from peripheral regions, minority cultural communities, disabled creatives, parents and carers, LGBTQI+ artists, and Indigenous practitioners among others) need adapted funding conditions, accessibility standards, governance quotas and language-sensitive processes built into instruments from the outset, together with cultural rights as an explicit foundation and a more distributed, participatory model of decision-making that On the Move describes as constellation governance.*

The fourth principle is attentiveness to Europe’s own internal diversity. Categories such as Global North/South or post-colonial asymmetry, however analytically useful in some contexts, do not translate uniformly across the full diversity of European and international cultural ecosystems. A cultural organisation in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Finland or North Macedonia navigates a very different set of historical relationships, institutional constraints and international connections than one in France, Portugal, Spain or Belgium. A credible strategy has to hold together equity between Europe and its partner regions and equity within Europe itself, rather than addressing the former at the expense of the latter.

From soft power to shared values: the narrative the EU should pursue

On the Move would encourage the EU to build its new strategy around four explicit reorientations: from soft power to shared values; from offer-led programmes to demand-led instruments; from institutional partnerships to constellation governance; and from cultural diplomacy as projection to international cultural relations as a form of democratic practice. This is a deliberately different narrative from the one that has historically underpinned EU cultural diplomacy, which, whatever its stated intentions, has tended to remain organised around the projection of influence rather than the cultivation of genuine reciprocity.

This is not a call to set aside the EU’s own stated external-action objectives. Key Direction 4 of the Culture Compass is explicit that preserving peace, preventing conflict and strengthening international security sit among the EU’s core external priorities, and that culture contributes to these goals as an enabler of peace, a catalyst for sustainable development and a bridge between people. The Culture Compass is equally frank that, in a fragile geopolitical landscape marked by foreign information manipulation and interference, culture has become a strategic domain of influence, with some states actively using it to shape perceptions and legitimise political objectives, and that the EU must respond by reinforcing a value-driven approach and treating its own cultural diversity as a strategic asset for resilience, stability and reconciliation.

On the Move’s argument is that shared values and strategic resilience are not in tension, provided the strategy is honest about who does the work. A strategy that leads with projection dressed as partnership will struggle to build the trust that genuine resilience against manipulation and interference requires; a strategy built on reciprocity, sector leadership and demonstrable fairness (visa processes that work, not obstruct; funding that reaches third-country partners directly; mobility that is genuinely two-way) builds exactly the kind of credibility that Key Direction 4 says the EU needs. The ask for the new strategy is therefore not simply more funding, even if more funding is needed, but a change in the underlying logic of what these programmes are for, in service of the same peace and resilience objectives the Culture Compass already names.

International mobility as the backbone of the new strategy

If the narrative needs to change, so does the instrument mix that gives it substance. The following recommendations set out where On the Move believes the most immediate, practical gains are to be made.

On the Move recommends a demand-led individual mobility instrument, modelled on the principles established by Culture Moves Europe but extended in two crucial respects: to enable Europe-based artists and cultural professionals to access mobility grants to travel the world, and to provide direct support to cultural professionals based in third countries — addressing the legal basis that currently prevents existing EU instruments from doing so. Building on the earlier i-Portunus pilot study published in 2019, On the Move recommends significant ambition in both geographical scope and budget, reflecting both growing demand and the scarcity of comparable schemes, together with a deliberate shift in design logic: from an offer that primarily supports organisations to host, towards one centred on the needs of individual artists and collectives, including dedicated support to access artist residencies, festivals and other touring possibilities and learning and/or connecting opportunities.

Design choices matter as much as funding levels. Evidence from mobility schemes shows that their strength lies in their capacity to respond to artists’ self-determined motivations, and institutions should therefore give preference to open, regular and ongoing calls over thematic calls that constrain applicants to predefined subjects, reserving the latter for strategic partnerships where the added value is clear. Reciprocity should be built into scheme design from the outset — mobility is most valuable when it generates value at both ends of an exchange — with Europe encouraged to invest actively in relationships with destination-side partners, and to study those partners’ needs, so that hosting and reciprocity are treated as jointly held responsibilities rather than a one-directional service.

An expanded mobility fund of this kind should operate on a permanent open-call basis, with no thematic restrictions, and should include dedicated top-ups for practitioners with disabilities, for parents and caregivers, and for practitioners based in peripheral or geographically isolated regions. Recurring grants should be permitted, in recognition that sustained international relationships require repeated engagement over time.

Beyond this ambitious new international mobility fund, the future strategy should use and upgrade existing successful support mechanisms — European Capitals of Culture, Creative Europe cooperation projects and the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values programme — to embed a genuine international dimension across the board. As a reminder, the Culture Compass’ concrete international cultural relations actions are, for now, narrow: they involve a new phase of the EU4Culture programme in the Eastern Neighbourhood, and a Euro-Mediterranean initiative for culture, sport and tourism under the New Pact for the Mediterranean.

On the Move insists that mobility does not fail, or succeed, in isolation. It is shaped by a wider set of administrative, protective and regulatory systems that rarely speak to one another, and the strategy needs to address them together.

The new strategy should also embed the following structural components:

Structural barriers to international mobility

International relations and cultural mobility intersect with immigration, social protection, taxation, trade, development cooperation and digital infrastructure, yet are rarely treated as a cross-cutting priority within national governments. The EU should establish coordination mechanisms bringing cultural ministries together with foreign affairs, interior and finance ministries to identify and remove structural barriers, and should consider designating cultural attachés or dedicated cultural mobility officers within consular networks, trained specifically in the working conditions of the sector and linked actively to national cultural agencies, Mobility Information Points and relevant professional organisations.

Administrative procedures built around other categories of traveller are poorly suited to artistic mobility, where invitations arrive late, timelines are variable and working conditions bear little resemblance to salaried employment. A new international cultural relations strategy should work with Member States to build dedicated visa pathways within the Schengen Area that are faster, more flexible and genuinely adapted to how artists and cultural professionals actually work, and should invest systematically in the cultural literacy of the people who assess these applications — consular staff and civil servants in the interior and foreign affairs ministries alike. Moreover, Article 16 of the 2005 UNESCO Convention places an explicit obligation on developed countries to facilitate access for artists and cultural professionals from developing countries, an obligation current visa practice frequently undermines in effect, whatever the intent behind it.

Artists and cultural professionals at risk

Geopolitical crises have driven a marked increase in the number of artists at risk, with many practitioners obliged to seek refuge in third countries before they can enter the EU at all. On the Move’s recommendation is for a comprehensive review of the legal framework governing the mobility and temporary protection of artists and cultural professionals in at-risk contexts, and, more ambitiously, for the EU to recognise protection of artists at risk as a fully fledged dimension of cultural policy in its own right, potentially through a dedicated European emergency protection, support and resilience programme that channels sustainable resourcing to the specialist intermediary organisations that currently carry much of this responsibility with insufficient means. A new international cultural relations strategy should encourage robust coordination among Member States in fulfilling their obligations to protect artists at risk.

Environmental sustainability without new exclusions

Climate considerations are increasingly present in mobility funding calls, yet concrete changes to funding frameworks — additional support for slower or lower-carbon forms of travel, for instance — remain rare, and when such measures do exist, their conditions are often designed around a context that doesn’t match the one cultural players actually operate in, leaving them to tick boxes for options that simply are not available to them. Artists and cultural professionals from developing countries and less-connected regions have raised a specific and legitimate concern: that carbon-footprint considerations, however well intentioned, could be used as a pretext to place further restrictions on mobility that is already constrained by visas, cost and distance.

Green top-ups, offering enhanced financial support to artists choosing sustainable transport, are one of the few concrete mechanisms translating environmental ambition into funding practice, precisely because they add support rather than adding conditions, and the new international cultural relations strategy should extend this model rather than allowing sustainability criteria to function as an additional filter on who gets to travel. Responsibility for the sector’s carbon footprint should be treated as collective rather than individual: funders and networks should develop shared, easy-to-apply carbon methodologies sensitive to the very different implications of travel within Europe and beyond it, building on existing guides and calculators rather than leaving each artist to calculate and justify their own footprint. At the same time, artists based in peripheral regions, islands and rural areas, for whom sustainable travel options may not exist or may be prohibitively costly, should not bear a disproportionate share of this transition; territorial equity should be an explicit design criterion for green mobility measures, in line with the climate-justice approach that On the Move calls for.

Digitalisation, AI and cultural visibility

Digitalisation and artificial intelligence (AI) are not a side issue for international cultural relations; they are becoming the infrastructure through which most cultural visibility, translation and interaction now happen, and the strategy needs to treat them as such rather than adding a digital chapter as an afterthought. Three forces are driving the shift: an ever-larger share of cultural life is lived online, algorithms increasingly decide what surfaces and what disappears, and cultural exchange itself is being converted into something that can be tracked, scored and monetised. It can widen an artist’s reach, break down language barriers and put cultural content in front of the audiences most likely to value it.

However, generative AI systems trained overwhelmingly on data from a handful of dominant cultures tend to render everything else as caricature, smoothing distinct traditions into generic exoticism or compressing complex histories into a single flattened narrative, close to the opposite of what cultural exchange is meant to achieve. Recommendation engines compound the problem, narrowing what audiences see over time rather than widening it, which should give European policymakers real pause about whether AI-mediated exchange can build the kind of durable, cross-cultural trust that diplomacy still depends on. And because the infrastructure behind all of this sits overwhelmingly with a handful of global technology companies rather than with public institutions, control over how European culture — and everyone else’s — is represented online is drifting steadily out of public hands. The strategy needs to close the growing distance between how much cultural exchange now happens through these channels and how little of it is currently accountable to anyone.

None of this is an argument for moving mobility online. Since the pandemic eased, artists and cultural professionals have returned overwhelmingly to in-person formats, a pattern too consistent to read as anything other than a genuine preference rather than a temporary rebound. Hybrid formats still have real value: they can widen access for practitioners facing visa obstacles or disability-related barriers, and they lower the environmental cost of an exchange. But they work best as a deliberate option chosen for those reasons, not as a cheaper substitute imposed by tight budgets. A mobility offer built primarily around digital participation would quietly create a second-tier form of exchange, open mainly to those with reliable connectivity and equipment, cutting directly against the equitable access the EU has committed to under the 2005 Convention.

Taken together, these principles and recommendations describe a strategy that looks quite different from a simple update of 2016. This strategy is one built on reciprocity rather than projection, resourced with instruments designed around artists’ own priorities rather than institutional convenience, and it is clear-eyed about where digitalisation and artificial intelligence help, and where they hinder, genuine cultural exchange. The Culture Compass has opened the door to that conversation. On the Move’s contribution, in this article and in the publications it draws on, is intended as a practical starting point for walking through it.

References

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