Cultural policy : issues of culture and governance

![CDATA[My brief for this paper is to place our concerns in the field of culture, society and market in a broader setting by, first, reviewing the historical development of modern forms of cultural policy and, second, deriving from that history a preliminary mapping of the issues of culture and governance that are at stake in contemporary cultural policies. With a topic so broad, some limitations are necessary and I can perhaps best explain the ones that I shall be operating with by elaborating a little further the difference I have in mind between the broad category of culture and governance and the somewhat narrower and historically more specific one of cultural policy. For, understood in their broad sense as concerning the ways of life, beliefs and attitudes of different sections of the population, questions of culture have occupied a central place in all systems of rule. Their role in the relations between Christianity and feudalism in regulating the relations between different estates is as evident as is their significance within contemporary theocratic regimes. It is equally the case that in the present, questions of culture—again, in the broad sense—are involved in many different areas of policy that we would not normally want to call cultural policies: immigration policies, for example, both depend on and have consequences for the forms of cultural diversity that are possible within particular societies, but are not themselves cultural policies.]]