On April 5, President Barroso stressed the fact that culture is the cement that binds Europe together. Indeed, Culture has a core place in European funding and this place is increasing with the implementation of the next cultural framework programme for the 2014-2020 programmation “Creative Europe”

The Creative Europe programme aims to foster the safeguarding and promotion of European cultural and linguistic diversity and will combine by 2014 the three former programmes : Culture, Media and Media Mundus.

This ‘one-stop shop’ aims to foster the capacities of cultural actors, transnational circulation of cultural art works and the promotion of European cultural and linguistic diversity in Europe. This programme, with a 1.801 billion euro budget (+ 37% compared to the current budget) aims to achieve several goals:
– to support the capacity of the European cultural and creative sectors to operate transnationally
– to promote the transnational circulation of cultural and creative works and operators and reach new audiences in Europe and beyond
– to strengthen the financial capacity of the cultural and creative sectors, and in particular small and medium-sized enterprises and organizations
– to support transnational policy cooperation in order to foster policy development, innovation, audience building and new business models

This objectives will be implemented through three strands :
–CULTURE strand concerning international touring, events and exhibitions, this strand will financed actions enabling operators to internationalize their careers in Europe and beyond and provide support for literary translation. This strand will be implemented particularly through European prizes for culture, European heritage label and European Capital of Culture.

– MEDIA strand aiming to facilitate circulation of European films worldwide and of international films in Europe on all platforms, this strand will financed initiatives presenting and promoting a diversity of European audiovisual works

– A CROSS SECTORIAL strand aiming to stimulate cross-border cooperation between professionals, institutions platforms and networks in the cultural and creative sectors.

The last strand is the genuine innovation of this programme and will be divided in two parts:
– a guarantee funds managed by the European Investment Funds and targeting small operators in the field of the culture and the creation;
– a funds conceived for the conduction of study and analysis (including concerning the adhesion to the European Audiovisual Observatory) as well as measures focused on supporting the international politic cooperation and training to culture and medias.

In addition, the geographic area of this programme is extended. Whereas only European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries (Islande, Norway, Liechtenstein and Switzerland) and Croatia were enabled to apply for the Media programme, Creative Europe will be open to Member States, as well as the EFTA countries, EU accession and candidate countries, potential candidates and neighborhood countries.

Thanks to this programme, more than 1 000 European movies will benefit from a support with view to their broadcast all around Europe and beyond, in regular circuits of numeric broadcasting networks, thousands of European organizations and professionals will benefit from training enabling them to acquire new competences and better prepare to work at a international level.

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