Kommentar von Sibylle Birrer
Kommentar von Sibylle Birrer
The Swiss approach to financing culture in the European context, or: what kind of impact, if any, does the Swiss method of culture financing have on the cultural life of Central and Southeast Europe?
A commentary by Sibylle Birrer.
Switzerland is an island. Depending on the standpoint and viewpoint it is either cut off or independent, self-sufficient or isolated. In the European context it still functions in many areas at its own pace and in its own special way. On the road to the "splendid isolation" not only multilingualism and federalism, but also a tradition of independence and a deep sense of fundamental democracy are the driving forces – in the midst of an expanding European Union.
Switzerland too has been affected by the chilly climate of the world economy in recent years. Nevertheless, the local financing of culture is still on a (relatively) secure basis. Incisive and painful cutbacks have been made by both public and private sources of funding – but always against the background of a relatively satiated situation.
Could the functional mechanisms of the Swiss system of financing culture in some way provide a model for or stimulate the development of the financial wastelands in the new EU countries? Or, to put it differently, does Swiss culture financing have any impact or influence on cultural life in Central and Southeast Europe? These questions must be answered in an exhaustive and differentiated way, here the space available allows us only to sketch the tendencies and to outline Switzerland's historic context as a special case of in the field of culture financing.
To deal first of all with the precise, concrete aspects: in the context of Swiss cultural foreign policy and development aid foreign offices of Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council, were established in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and in Hungary from 1992 onwards. The discourse that developed between Eastern and Western Europe was celebrated with a major series of events in the first half of 2004 – but was subsequently followed by the closure of the offices, one after the other. The reason? The fact that these countries had joined the EU meant that responsibilities were delegated to Brussels. No doubt about it: the island, confident of its ability to define its position, saves money where it can.
What, however, is the situation of the eight Swiss cultural foreign offices that were set up in 1996 in the southeast European capitals? So long as the emphasis lies on development policy they are financed by the Foreign Ministry – concretely by the Direktion für Entwicklung und Zusammenarbeit (DEZA) / Office for Development and Collaboration. Pro Helvetia runs these offices by mandate, the duration of this mandate depends in turn on economic and political developments –countries that manage the leap into the EU will be dismissed from Swiss consideration...
There are certainly in Switzerland a number of private foundations, which, if they still have sufficient capital resources despite the weakness of the stock market, are involved in exchange between east and west. But involvement by the business world in sponsoring culture in the Eastern Europe countries is unknown – after all, the struggle about the economic radius of distance to Brussels is an ongoing one.
Therefore the means available for culture sponsoring are concentrated on communication within the boundaries of Switzerland. Here it is shown once more that Switzerland tends to match European developments, albeit at a slower pace, and to follow current trends, both the positive and negative ones: whereas the professionalisation of culture management and of diversified culture financing only developed in Switzerland in the nineties, that is a number of years later than in many neighbouring countries, at present the dominant trends in Swiss culture sponsoring are those that have since been abandoned elsewhere: concentration on individual involvement, on own events, on accepted highlights of the popular kind, exclusive concentration on particular sectors – all of which is far removed from an ambitious project with an innovative approach such as "tranzit", as described to me by Vladan Šír. The enthusiasm for the founding of museums by art patrons, which suddenly became fashionable, is slowly cooling off the more so as it is becoming clear that, sooner or later, the running costs will have to met by the public purse. Similarly, the idea of "public-private partnership" is still primarily a source of confusion, most likely not only because of the dearth of convincing examples in Switzerland but also because the power of decision-making by public bodies does not lie at the national but at the federal level, that is with the cantons and communities and is accordingly structured differently from place to place.
Thus there is in Switzerland very little that provides ideas or indicates new directions in the area of culture financing that might offer an example for Eastern Europe. But what about the Migros-Kulturprozent (culture percentage), whose reputation has spread beyond the Swiss island to the European surroundings?
It is certainly true that the Migros-Kulturprozent is an established, valuable and worldwide unique concept active within the borders of the country. As the Swiss retailer Migros (one of the 500 largest businesses in the world) administers up to one per cent of its turnover as a culture percentage and directs these funds towards the company's own social and cultural facilities, as well as (on application) distributing them to individual projects, it makes an important contribution to Swiss culture financing. In 2003 for example the Migros-Kulturprozent amounted to almost one hundred million euro. 20 per cent of this flowed into the company's own culture projects in diverse areas, more than forty per cent finances the company Klubschulen (club schools), in which people can take various training and adult education courses e.g. crochet, informatics, and language courses etc., to suit their different circumstances. Further sums are directed towards social projects and involvement in sport and recreation.
This distribution pattern reveals that the Migros-Kulturprozent is not, in fact, sponsoring. "Classic" sponsoring as a focussed kind of company communication is something that Migros carries out additionally, above all in the areas of sport and leisure. In contrast the Migros-Kulturprozent is the sustainable expression of a world view, of the profound ideology of its inventor and founder, Gottlieb Duttweiler (1888-1962). The Kulturprozent is an expression of recent history, crystallised in the person of Duttweiler. Gottlieb Duttweiler was a kind of "social capitalist". In business terms his success was based on being able to offer the man on the street everyday products at a better price than his competitors by eliminating middlemen as far as possible. With the growing success of his idea he was able to finance his strong social and humanistic sense of responsibility. In 1941 he "gave" Migros to the people by converting it into a cooperative while at the same time anchoring his ideological principles in the statutes. This structure and these guiding principles, which in historical terms were clearly influenced by the 1940s and 1950s, are still applied today, without significant alteration. In 1944 the first Klubschule was founded for the purpose of adult education, the Kulturprozent has been anchored in the statutes of the cooperative since 1957.
The question arises whether this kind of socio-ideological concept can be newly invented or implanted in a present-day context, especially on the broken edges of a socialist world view?