image credits: EDN Think-in at Tanztriennale, photo by Philipp Meuser

Culture is now a European priority

On 18 June 2026, the Presidents of the European Commission, the Council of the EU, and the European Parliament signed the Joint Declaration on Culture, Europe for Culture, Culture for Europe. For the first time in EU history, all three institutions have united behind a shared political commitment to culture.

The declaration formally recognises culture as central to Europe's democracy, identity, and future. It affirms freedom of artistic expression, cultural rights, and fair working conditions for artists and cultural professionals. It sends a message that European culture is a cornerstone of democracy and must be pursued with ambition.

What does this mean for dance?

Across our sector, dance development organisations are navigating funding cuts at national, regional, and municipal levels. Decades' worth of infrastructure is being dismantled faster than it can be defended. Funding is shifting away from core structural support toward short-term projects rewarding visibility over depth, scale over experimentation, and administrative capacity over artistic risk.

This is why the declaration's commitments matter for dance. Artistic freedom means little when funding cycles are too short to facilitate artistic risks. Fair working conditions make a difference between sustaining a career and sustaining a practice. And cultural participation rights would allow dance to reach everybody right where they are. These are not abstract principles. They are what dance development organisations navigate every day.

The declaration is the first milestone of the Culture Compass, the EU's strategic framework for cultural policy, which includes a forthcoming EU Artists' Charter as one of its flagship actions. It could set meaningful standards for remuneration, social protection, and working conditions across Europe. EDN has joined Culture Action Europe's action group on working conditions, which will directly inform its development.

Collective impact

Last week, EDN gathered in Hamburg for our annual General Assembly and Think-in, hosted by K3 Centre for Choreography | Tanzplan Hamburg inside the inaugural Tanztriennale, a new major European dance event built on the conviction that dance, as an art form, is a societal force and a practice of collective life.

During the Think-in, EDN brought together Senator Dr Carsten Brosda, Minister of Culture and Media for Hamburg, and Sylvain Pasqua, Senior Expert at the European Commission's Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture, in a dialogue facilitated by dance writer Emily May.

The conversation moved between what organisations are already building under funding pressure, the urgency of investing in young audiences and early-career professionals, and what becomes possible when the sector’s values are seen and recognised by policy.

What dance offers young people is specific: the body as a site of learning and encounter, spaces activated through movement and shared physical presence, an experience of agency that is felt rather than observed. What emerged from the dialogue was a shared conviction: that investing in young people's access to dance is an environmental, democratic, and artistic necessity. The Joint Declaration's commitment to young people's cultural participation gives that argument new institutional ground to stand on.

Transforming words into actions

Whether the declaration becomes more than a political signal depends on the EU's next long-term budget, the Multiannual Financial Framework for 2028–2034. The decisions made there will shape European cultural funding for seven years.

The architecture of AgoraEU, the successor to Creative Europe, is still being negotiated. A current draft proposal suggests fragmenting the programme by creating additional strands, including a dedicated strand for the music sector. This raises serious questions about equal treatment across cultural sectors. While some disciplines are singled out for specific recognition, others, including the performing arts, risk being unnamed and therefore unrecognised.

Together with our fellow performing arts networks, we believe the performing arts must be fully represented in AgoraEU. The sector provides more than 1.2 million jobs across the EU, suffered the steepest losses of any creative sector during COVID-19, and depends fundamentally on the transnational partnerships, touring, and co-production that Creative Europe was built to support. As members of the PAC - Performing Arts Coalition, we have recently issued a joint policy paper on cross-border collaboration in the performing arts, which makes the case directly to MEPs and Member State negotiators.

Political commitments without budgets are intentions. The AgoraEU negotiations, now underway, will determine what the declaration is actually worth for culture, for performing arts and for dance.