University College of Southeast Norway Look to Norway™ Current Norwegian foreign cultural policy foreign cultural policy Norwegian Current Look to Norway™ Faculty of Humanities, Sports and Educational Sciences — Doctoral dissertation no. 26 2017 Ola K. Berge Look to Norway™ Current Norwegian foreign cultural policy — Ola Kveseth Berge Ola Kveseth Ola K. Berge Look to Norway™ Current Norwegian foreign cultural policy A PhD dissertation in Culture Studies © 2017 Ola K. Berge Faculty of Humanities, Sports and Educational Sciences University College of Southeast Norway Kongsberg, 2017 Doctoral dissertations at the University College of Southeast Norway no. 26 ISSN: 2464-2770 (print) ISSN: 2464-2483 (electronic) ISBN: 978-82-7206-445-6 (print) ISBN: 978-82-7206-446-3 (electronic) This publication is, except otherwise stated, licenced under Creative Commons. You may copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. You must give appropriate credit provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ deed.en Print: University College of Southeast Norway Cover Photo: Ola K. Berge Berge: Look to NorwayTM Current Norwegian foreign cultural policy Preface In 2009, being the first assignment as a rookie researcher at Telemark Research institute, I conducted a small project on the international work of the performing arts organization, the Performing Arts Hub Norway (PAHN). The project aimed at finding trends and tendencies concerning what art and artists who travel where and for what reason. 1 This project sparked a research interest that was further strengthened by working with a project commissioned by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) in 2011-2012, in which my colleague Ole Marius Hylland and I evaluated the Norwegian travel support scheme for artists seeking foreign markets and audiences and the music export office, Music Export Norway.2 Thus, foreign cultural policy has been an important part of my professional work up until this day, culminating with this thesis: Look to NorwayTM Current Norwegian foreign cultural policy. The thesis formally concludes a research project started in 2013, with financial support from the Norwegian Research Council, and as part of the SAMKUL project “The relational politics of aesthetics: Negotiating relations between art and society through cultural policy.” By asking: Does art develop society?, this project studies the relations between aesthetics and politics, highlighted through public measures to ensure a social impact on the arts. Here, aesthetics denotes processes of ascribing artistic value and beauty to certain objects, while politics denotes processes of governing or influencing the development of a society. In the project, the relations between these processes are studied by an empirical analysis of attempts to give arts developmental agency: through the democratization of culture, through pedagogical work, through a general music policy, and through the use of culture in foreign policy. The latter is investigated in this thesis. The fact that the project was part of an ongoing Norwegian Research Council 1 The project report is found here: www.telemarksforsking.no/publikasjoner/filer/1672.pdf (in Norwegian) 2 The project report is found here: www.telemarksforsking.no/publikasjoner/filer/2063.pdf (in Norwegian) ___ i Berge: Look to NorwayTM Current Norwegian foreign cultural policy project also meant that I could conduct the research as part of my regular work at the Telemark Research Institute (for which I am deeply grateful). In addition, the PhD project was part of the PhD program in Cultural Studies at the University College of Southeast Norway, within which I also completed my mandatory PhD courses and training. Bø, Norway, March 24. 2017 Ola K. Berge ___ ii Berge: Look to NorwayTM Current Norwegian foreign cultural policy Acknowledgements I am alone fully responsible for the thesis, including any flaws or weaknesses. For any achievements, however, they could never have come about without a number of people who have helped and guided me in this comprehensive research process. First, I would like to thank all the informants who have contributed with empirical data. Without your kind and patient participation, this project could not have been realized. I would also like to thank the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for their generous help and support. In particular, I wish to thank the employees of the Foreign Service stations who I visited during the fieldwork. I would also like to thank my supervisors, Geir Vestheim at the University College of South East Norway (HSN) and Halvard Leira at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), for all their help, critical readings, professional advice and general support. Furthermore, a big thanks goes to all of my colleagues at the Telemark Research Institute, for their inspiration, critical readings and cheering. In particular, I would like to thank my fellow researchers at the cultural section, Heidi Stavrum, Per Mangset, Bård Kleppe, Mari Torvik Heian, Åsne Dahl Haugsevje and Nanna Løkka. A very special thanks goes to Ole Marius Hylland, as well as a special thanks to (the patient CEO of the Telemark Research Institute) Karl Gunnar Sanda. Thanks also to my colleagues in the SAMKUL research team, Jane Woddis (University of Warwick), Egil Bjørnsen (Agder Research), Erling Bjurström (Linköping University), and again, Ole Marius Hylland, Heidi Stavrum and Per Mangset. Thanks to my fellow PhD students attending the Cultural Studies PhD program at the HSN. A special thanks to discussant at the final assessment seminar, Nils Asle Bergsgard. ___ iii Berge: Look to NorwayTM Current Norwegian foreign cultural policy Thanks to Frode Nyvold for getting me interested in anthropology. Thanks to Ingmar Meland for getting me interested in philosophy. Thanks to Per Mangset for getting me interested in sociology. But, most of all, thanks to my family: Unni, Knut, Anders, Hølje, Johannes, Mother and Father. ___ iv Berge: Look to NorwayTM Current Norwegian foreign cultural policy Abstract The thesis Look to NorwayTM Current Norwegian foreign cultural policy (2017) investigates the field of foreign cultural policy. Culture and the arts have had a continuous prominent position within foreign policy and diplomacy as they have been considered to have central representative functions, both mirroring and constituting national cultural distinctions. At the same time, culture in a broad sense has constituted what has been regarded as important national self-images. To engage successfully in international relations, cultural relations included, is a highly prioritized governmental work task in today’s globalized world. How this is best done in a world that is increasingly complex and competitive is a question that presumably ranks high within the same governments. This PhD thesis attends directly to this question, examining how culture and cultural policy are conceived, legitimated and operationalized within the Norwegian foreign cultural practice. Foreign cultural policy potentially spans over culture in both a broad and narrow sense, from culture in an anthropological meaning of the term to art and artist policy, and – in an interrelated manner – identity policy. In this thesis, the focus is primarily on culture in the narrow sense, and therefore on the MFA’s relationship to cultural expressions and artists and cultural workers (and the organizations and institutions and art field). Nonetheless, since general interests are such an inherent part of foreign policy, cultural policy, for example in its identity policy mode, it is impossible not to include to some degree. Since the main responsibility for Norwegian foreign cultural policy is explicitly placed with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), this ministry constitutes the empirical focal point of the study. This focus also includes the field that it is set to cooperate with and serve, i.a. other ministries, councils and the closely related art field (with its institutional and individual agents). Following from these thematic and empirical grounds, the thesis aims to answer the following research questions: What position does culture have in foreign policy? What explains this position? And, what are the operational consequences ___ v Berge: Look to NorwayTM Current Norwegian foreign cultural policy of this position? The empirical data used to answer this was sampled by using a multi- sited ethnographical strategy, and consists of qualitative data from participating observation, qualitative interviews and document studies, covering the MFA’s cultural policy operations during the project period (2013-2016). Theoretically, the work places itself within the disciplinary tradition of cultural policy research. More specifically, it takes on a discursive approach, highlighting how authoritative texts, images and narratives underlie and determine how policies, positions and practices are thought and acted on. The thesis concludes that Norwegian foreign cultural policy has developed towards an increasingly mainstream rational and purposive operationalization of culture and cultural policy. Within this regime, the focus has changed from seeing culture and the arts mainly as a component of a broad international cultural cooperation and national self-presentation, to more specialized approaches to release an expected capacity to compete in a global market of expressions, attitudes and ideas, all serving interests of