Matera: When the Commission adopted the Culture Compass for Europe last November, it published the first Union-wide culture strategy in almost a decade and attached four concrete deliverables to it. An artists charter. A cultural data hub. An annual state of culture report. An artificial intelligence strategy for the cultural and creative sectors. Nine months later, none of the four exists as a document a working artist can read.

That is not unusual for a strategic framework, and it is not evidence of bad faith. It does matter, because the Compass was sold to a sector in visible financial distress as the answer to a specific complaint. Cultural professionals across the Union work through short contracts, cross borders constantly and fall between national social security systems designed for permanent employment. The charter is the instrument meant to address that, and until it has text, the Compass reads as a statement of priorities rather than a change in anyone’s conditions.

The strategy’s four priorities are broad by design. It commits the Union to defending cultural rights and European values, to supporting artists and widening access, and to treating heritage and creativity as inputs to competitiveness and resilience. Glenn Micallef launched it alongside Roxana Mînzatu, which signalled that the social rights portfolio would carry the parts touching employment. Splitting the file across two commissioners gave it weight and also gave it two timetables.

Money is the sharper constraint. Creative Europe runs on 380 million euro for the current programme year, and the cooperation projects call that closed in May offered 60 million euro to fund roughly 150 projects across theatre, dance, music, heritage, architecture, literature, design and fashion. Applicants routinely outnumber winners by wide margins. A strategy that promises broader access without new appropriations is asking national ministries to find the difference, and most of them are cutting.

The next long-term budget decides whether culture keeps a dedicated programme at all. Draft architectures circulating in Council would fold several small programmes into larger national plans, which would leave cultural operators applying to their own governments rather than to Brussels. Sector organisations regard that as an existential question and have said so repeatedly since the Compass was adopted.

Regions have moved faster than the Union has. Several have begun mapping local cultural assets against the Compass priorities in anticipation of the data hub, on the reasonable assumption that whoever holds evidence first will shape how the money follows. The Commission’s announcement encouraged exactly that.

The strategy will be judged on the charter. Everything else in it restates ambitions the sector has heard before, in slightly warmer language.