Looking Into the Future?

In Fractured times: Culture and Society in the 20th Century, a posthumously published collection of essays, the historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) argues that the high culture that was once the basic diet of the European elite is shrivelling fast—either unknown to new generations or else swamped by ‘the present creative flood drowning the globe in image, sound and words, which is almost certain to become uncontrollable in both space and cyberspace’ (Hobsbawn 2012: xv). Fractured Times has the rare quality of looking into the future of cultural life in Western society, discussing topics like ageing audiences and the prospects for artisan crafts in the wired twenty-first century. This final chapter of Cultural Policy in the Polder has a similar aim, though with a much more modest focus. It looks into developments that could influence the aims, the administrative level and the instruments of Dutch national cultural policy, in particular the Cultural Policy Act.

Can one describe developments that have not yet taken place? Hobsbawm felt he was looking ‘guideless and mapless, to an unrecognisable future’ (p. ix). On the one hand, he is right: even experts cannot make predictions, because data about the future can never be verified. On the other hand, the future is not fully undetermined either (Adam & Groves 2007). Therefore, instead of predicting the future, nowadays it is more common to use foresight to get some idea of what might happen. The aim of this is to try to identify possible consequences of policy for the longer term or developments policymakers should relate to (Van Asselt et al. 2010). Both of these aims will be pursued in this chapter.

But what developments or policy consequences should we look at? A lot has changed since the introduction of the CPA in 1993. The political consensus on cultural policy has crumbled under pressure from new political parties such as the Freedom Party (PVV) (Van der Meer 2016, Smithuijsen 2005). This has resulted in fluctuations in the level of culture budgets, which was the most drastic with the cuts implemented 2011. Economic globalisation and more open borders have put pressure on the facilities provided by the welfare state, including the facilities provided under the heading of cultural policy.