Matera: Among the ancient cave dwellings of this southern Italian city, which spent a year as a European Capital of Culture and has lived off the reputation ever since, the calculations facing Europe’s cultural sector are unusually concrete. Creative Europe, the bloc’s dedicated funding programme for the arts, heritage and media, will carry a budget of around 380 million euros in 2026, the Commission has confirmed, holding the line at a moment when many other parts of the EU budget are being squeezed to make room for defence and security.
The headline instrument is the call for European Cooperation Projects, worth roughly 60 million euros, expected to support about 150 cross-border ventures spanning theatre, dance, music, architecture, literature, design, fashion and heritage. These are not glamorous mega-grants but the connective tissue of the European cultural economy: a Portuguese theatre company touring with a Polish one, a literary translation network that would never survive on national funding alone. The premise, repeated in every Commission document on the subject, is that culture is both an expression of European diversity and, increasingly, an industry whose competitiveness has to be defended like any other.
The more durable decision concerns the European Heritage Label, the scheme that designates sites judged to embody the shared history and integration of the continent. The Commission has confirmed the label will continue through to 2029, giving the existing network of recognised places the certainty to plan beyond the immediate budget cycle. The label carries no large cheque, but it confers a status that draws visitors and lends weight to applications for other funds, and its extension answers a long-standing complaint from site managers that short horizons made it impossible to build lasting programmes.
A third edition of Perform Europe, which helps performing-arts works travel across borders more sustainably, will also get under way, and culture ministers met informally at the start of June to take stock, a meeting that carried no binding decisions but signalled the sector retains a seat, however modest, at the EU table.
For all the continuity, the underlying anxiety has not gone away. Cultural and creative industries employ millions across the Union and contribute a substantial share of economic output, yet remain chronically underfunded relative to their footprint, and the sector spent much of the past year warning that the next long-term budget could see culture folded into broader, less visible funding pots. Holding the 2026 figure steady is, in that light, less a triumph than a reprieve.
In Matera, where the cave churches and stone alleys are themselves a working argument for why heritage deserves protection, the message of the year’s funding is quietly reassuring rather than transformative. The money is there, the heritage label endures, and the projects will go ahead. Whether that proves enough to keep European culture competitive, rather than merely alive, is the question the next budget will have to answer.
