What Makes a Citizen? The Right to Culture - European Integration

 Witold Mrozek – born in 1986 – is a Polish theatre critic, activist
and columnist of Krytyka Polityczna
('Political Critique').
 

“Civil
society” is a term that has been eagerly used and abused, ever since the Polish
political transformation of 1989 took place. Within the confines of a
conservative-liberal fantasy, private foundations and church groups were
supposed to take over many functions previously taken care of by the “welfare
state” (albeit one defined in a particular, “real-socialist” manner). And thus,
it was thought best to replace the actual welfare with the eagerly touted
“charity” and hand over the schools to various non-governmental organisations.
Even though this fantasy was ultimately never realised, it was still
successfully promoted as a model of sorts: an ideal everyone should aspire to.

However,
in the case of culture – ironic as it may seem – it was civil society that
turned its expectations towards the state in order to remind those in power of the
state’s role and responsibilities. NGO activists, representatives of cultural
institutions, artists, intellectuals – all of them took the opportunity
presented by the 2009 Congress of Polish Culture[1],
and demanded that 1% of the total budget be directed to the cultural sector.
The movement which has formed around this demand voiced a new kind of political
consciousness. The members of the movement named themselves “Citizens of
Culture”. Together, they reminded everyone that the state does have its
responsibilities in both cultural and educational sectors – and that it
shouldn’t neglect them. They reminded people that citizenship involves being
part of a culture.


One
should remember that the word “citizen” never extended its meaning to all
members of a given community. The right of citizenship has always been – and in
many places still is – severely limited by wealth, blood ties, or the law of
the land. All those limitations have their counterparts in the sphere of
“cultural citizenship”. For that citizenship, too, is influenced by wealth (it
costs money to participate in any culture), by blood ties (family still determines
the cultural competences of its members all too sharply), and by the law of the
land (the mere distance to the nearest theatre building or a well-supplied
library often establishes additional boundaries of the said cultural
competence). Emancipation is an act of extending the actual citizenship to fit
the widest possible group of people.


Meanwhile,
in smaller communes, film theatres and local libraries are disappearing. The
degradation of public transport outside big cities along with the ever-decreasing
number of trains and buses in the Polish “provinces”, also limits the
possibilities of participation in culture. Culture is not, after all, some
autonomous sphere – the widening social gap is making itself visible in it,
too. Cinema serves as a good example. Even though the number of tickets sold
increased recently, the actual number of people frequenting movie theatres grew
smaller. Thanks to the activities of the Polish Institute of Film Art, the Polish
Film Archive and the New Horizons Association, Poland has some well-functioning
and innovative programmes of audiovisual education. The problem, though, lies
in their still-limited availability.