Postwar

paying annual salaries with full benefits and state pensions to performers, musicians and stage hands. By 2003 there were 615,000 people in Germany officially classified as full-time ‘artistic workers’.

In France, too, the arts (theatre especially) flourished in far-flung provincial towns—thanks in the French case to direct aid distributed from central funds by a single Culture Ministry. In addition to building his eponymous library and other monuments, President Mitterrand spent sums unprecedented since the reign of Louis XIV not just on the Louvre, the Opera de Paris and the Comedie Francaise but also on regional museums, regional arts centres, provincial theatre companies, as well as a nationwide network of cinematheques to store and show classic and modern films.

Whereas in Germany the high arts were proudly cosmopolitan (Vladimir Derevianko, the Russian director of Dresden’s Opera-Ballet, commissioned works from William Forsythe, an American choreographer, for enthusiastic German audiences), much of the point of artistic subsidies in France was to preserve and display the riches of the nation’s own heritage—France’s exception culturelle. High culture in France retained a broadly acknowledged pedagogical function, and the canon of French theatre in particular was still rigorously inculcated in the national curriculum. Jane Brown, the London headmistress who in 1993 forbade a school visit to a performance of Romeo and Juliet—on the grounds that the play was politically incorrect (‘blatantly heterosexual’ in her words)—would not have made a career across the Channel.

The scale of public funding was perhaps most striking in France and Germany, but the state was the main —and in most cases the only—source of funding for the arts all across Europe. Indeed ‘culture’ was the last important area of public life in which the national state, rather than the European Union or else private enterprise, could play a distinctive role as a near-monopoly provider. Even in Eastern Europe, where the older generation had good reason to recall with trepidation the implications of allowing government a controlling say in cultural life, the impoverished public treasury was the only alternative to the baleful impact of market forces.

Under Communism the performing arts had been worthy rather than exciting: usually technically competent, almost always cautious and conservative—anyone who saw Die Zauberflote performed in, say, Vienna and Budapest could hardly fail to note the contrast. But after Communism, while there was considerable low-budget experimentation—Sofia in particular became a hotbed of recherche post-modern experiments in choreography and staging—there were almost no resources and many of the best musicians, dancers and even actors headed west. Joining Europe could also mean becoming provincial.

Another reason for this was that the audience for Europe’s high arts was now itself European: national companies in major cities performed in front of increasingly international audiences. The new caste of transnational clercs who communicated readily across frontiers and languages had the means and the time to travel freely in pursuit of entertainment and edification no less than clothing or careers. Reviews of an exhibition, a play or an opera would appear in the press of many different countries. A successful show in one city—London, say, or Amsterdam—could hope to attract audiences and visitors from as far afield as Paris, or Zurich or Milan.

Whether the newly cosmopolitan audiences were genuinely sophisticated—as distinct from merely well- heeled—was a point of some contention. Long-established events such as the annual Salzburg Festival or the periodic Ring cycle performances at Bayreuth still attracted an older audience, familiar with not just the material being performed but also the attendant social rituals. But the trend was towards energetic efforts to popularize traditional material for younger audiences, whose acquaintance with the classics (and the original language) could not be taken for granted—or else to commission novel, accessible works for a new generation.

For those who looked with favour upon them, the updated opera productions, ‘cutting-edge’ dance troupes and ‘post-modern’ art shows illustrated the transformation of the European cultural scene: youthful, innovative, disrespectful and above all popular—as befitted an industry that depended so much on public largesse and thus had an obligation to seek out and please a broad constituency. To their critics, however, the new art scene in London (‘Brit Art’), like William Forsythe’s controversial ballets in Frankfurt or the quirky operatic ‘adaptations’ occasionally mounted in Paris, confirmed their dyspeptic prediction that more would only mean worse.

Seen thus, European ‘high’ culture—which had once played to its patrons’ inherited familiarity with a common canon—was now exploiting the cultural insecurities of a neophyte audience who could not confidently distinguish between good and bad (but who could be counted upon to respond enthusiastically to the dictates of fashion). This was not as unprecedented a situation as cultural pessimists were wont to assert—the exploitable anxieties of under-cultivated nouveaux riches had been a theme of literary and theatrical mockery at least since Moliere. What was new, however, was the continental scale of the cultural shift. The composition of audiences from Barcelona to Budapest was now strikingly uniform, and so, too, was the material on offer. To critics this merely confirmed the obvious, that the arts and their clientele were caught in a reciprocally detrimental embrace: EuroCult for Eurotrash.

Whether the ever-closer Union of Europeans rendered its beneficiaries more cosmopolitan or simply blended their separate parochialisms was not just a question for the high-arts pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) or the Financial Times. The FAZ, the FT, Le Monde and to a lesser extent Italy’s La Repubblica were now genuinely European papers, universally available and read all across the continent. The mass-circulation tabloid press, however, remained firmly circumscribed by national languages and frontiers. But their readership was down everywhere—highest in Great Britain, lowest in Spain—so distinctive national traditions in popular journalism mattered less than they used to: except, once again, in England, where the popular press fanned and exploited Europhobic prejudice. In eastern Europe and Iberia, the long absence of a free press meant that many people, especially outside of the large cities, had missed out altogether on the newspaper era—transiting directly from pre-literacy to the electronic media.

The latter—television above all—were now the main source of information, ideas and culture (high and low) for most Europeans. As with newspapers, so with television: it was the British who were most attached to the medium, regularly topping European viewing figures, followed closely by Portugal, Spain, Italy and—though still with some lag—eastern Europeans. The traditional state-owned television stations faced competition from both terrestrial commercial companies and satellite channels; but they had retained a surprisingly large audience share. They had also for the most part followed the lead of the daily press and sharply reduced their foreign news coverage.

As a consequence, European television at the close of the twentieth century presented a curious paradox. The entertainment on offer varied little from one country to the next: imported films and sit-coms, ‘reality shows’, game shows and other staples could be seen from one end of the continent to the other, the only difference being whether imported programmes were dubbed (as in Italy), sub-titled or left in their original language (increasingly the case in small or multi-lingual states). The presentational style—in news broadcasts, for example—was remarkably similar, borrowing in many cases from the model of American local news.[404]

On the other hand, television remained a distinctly national and even insular medium. Thus Italian television was unmistakably Italian—from its curiously dated variety shows and stilted interviews to the celebrated good looks of its presenters and the distinctive camera angles deployed when filming scantily clad younger women. In neighbouring Austria an earnest moral seriousness informed locally produced talk shows, contrasting with Germany’s near-monopoly of the rest of the programming. In Switzerland (as in Belgium) each region of the country had its own television channels, employing different languages, reporting different events and operating in sharply contrasting styles.

The BBC, as its critics bitterly observed, had abandoned the aesthetics and ideals of its earlier days as the nation’s moral arbiter and benevolent pedagogue in the drive to compete with its commercial rivals. But in spite of being dumbed-down (or perhaps for that reason) it was even more unmistakably British than ever. Anyone in doubt had only to compare a report, a debate or a performance on the BBC with similar programmes on France’s Antenne 2, or TF1: what had changed, on both sides of the water, was far less striking than how much had remained the same. The intellectual or political concerns, the contrasting attitudes to authority and power, were as distinctive and different as they had been half a century before. In an age when most other collective activities and communal organizations were in decline, television was what the mass of the population of every country had in common. And it served very effectively to reinforce