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The “Rougemarine Dilemma”: how much Trust does a State Deserve when it Subsidises Cultural Goods and Services?
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1830-7728
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EUI MWP; 2008/22
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GERMANN, Christophe, The “Rougemarine Dilemma”: how much Trust does a State Deserve when it Subsidises Cultural Goods and Services?, EUI MWP, 2008/22 - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/9027
Abstract
This paper focuses on the way welfare states distribute subsidies to cultural industries. It
takes the example of the film industry and analyses jurisprudence which addresses socalled
“selective state aid” schemes based upon European and Swiss law. States grant
selective aid as opposed to “automatic aid” by asking independent experts to decide
upon the merits of projects according to criteria that usually refer to subjective elements
such as quality or cultural value. Decisions founded on such experts’ opinions normally
cannot be challenged in the courts. In fact, these decisions constitute a legal “no man’s
land” through which these states preserve a strong decision-making power that allow
them to reject projects for “implicit” or “tacit” reasons under the cover of stated
conditions and reasons that leave a broad margin of assessment. If states abuse this
power, they are able to censor content as well as tolerate and even facilitate forms of
clientelism and corruption that can eventually destroy artistic creativity and
entrepreneurial innovation. These possible consequences are not only detrimental to the
competitiveness of the cultural industries affected by such practices, but also to cultural
diversity within and beyond the borders of the states that proceed in this way. The
author of this paper therefore advocates protecting cultural industries not only from
market economies that suffer from oligopolitic private power, but also from the abuse of
the power of the states to correct market failures that damage cultural diversity. He
suggests the introduction of the constitutional principle of an effective separation
between the state and the culture by analogy of the separation between the church and
the state as inspired by the rationale underlying the French “principe the laïcité”. This
new principle should promote freedom of opinion and expression by protecting the
authors of contemporary cultural expressions from the control of states, their
bureaucracies and favouritism in a way that would be legally enforceable.