Governing a commodified culture in the 1980s. Jack Lang, the US and the European exception

This project investigates the Franco-American conflict over the definition of culture and its governance in historical perspective, focusing on a key transitional and transformational period: the 1980s and early 1990s. Through its emphasis on the competing visions of cultural order of the two countries under investigation, the research has a twofold objective: to examine if, and to what extent, this dispute on and over “culture” has influenced the progressive Europeanization/Communitarization of cultural policy; and to explore the impact this antagonism had on US-European relations more broadly, between 1981 and 1994. Moving beyond existing scholarship, this work fills major historiographical gaps in the study of transatlantic relations, French cultural history, U.S. political and intellectual history and European integration. In so doing, it also contributes to historicize central problems for the contemporary governance of culture.