Performing within a network of symbolic soft power, the European Capitals of Culture (ECoC) represent cities whose core strength lies in their ability to offer models of social inclusion and solidarity. They are often regarded as pillars of Europe’s cultural rebirth. Through their programs, these cities articulate competitive narratives of Europeanness and success in consolidating a shared sense of belonging that transcends the mere geopolitical or continental framework. The ECoC initiative prescribes models of European diversity envisioned as unity—overcoming marginality, moral peripheries, colonial legacies, and competing narratives of martyrdom.

It is not my purpose here to delve into the utilitarian turn of ECoCs towards social welfare, stability, and the equitable representation of Europe’s diverse identities – identities deeply entangled with specific systems of values and beliefs. Rather, I wish to foreground a question that opens a political and social deconstruction of this cultural competition: are the European Capitals of Culture truly designed to overcome social inequalities, or, on the contrary, by enacting forms of cultural capital that mobilize symbolic power, scarce cultural resources, and innate or exceptional talents, do they risk reproducing these inequalities?

This question becomes particularly relevant when considering the growing dissatisfaction expressed by residents during the year their city holds the title. Many report increased pressure on local industries, disruptions to urban routines caused by massive waves of tourism, and inflation driven by the demand to accommodate visitors whose consumption extends far beyond public goods. Indeed, an interesting avenue of inquiry concerns the very nature of the goods being consumed. Visitors to ECoCs engage with more than “culture“ understood as a public good – since cultural consumption, by definition, rarely meets the condition of maximizing shared benefit while preserving equal access for others.

My intention here, however, is to advance a left-oriented reading: to explore whether the ECoC framework can be understood – and potentially reclaimed – as a means to combat, rather than reproduce, social inequality.

I. The Quarrel between the Leftist and the Rightist Approach

The European Commission defends the ECoC initiative as a mechanism capable of generating “lasting and positive impacts on social inclusion, engaging populations that do not always engage with culture.“^[1] Embracing this perspective implies acknowledging the European Capital of Culture as a key instrument in democratizing access to culture for communities not inherently oriented toward the liberalization of cultural consumption.

However, there remains considerable debate about whether consumption, in and of itself, enhances cultural reflexivity, solidarity, or critical thinking. The ontology of culture traditionally distinguishes between high culture – exceptional, irreproducible, and unique cultural activities or products – and low culture – repetitive or mass-produced practices that seek minimal satisfaction at affordable costs. Depending on how one interprets this distinction, the arguments diverge.

On the one hand, if we accept Rousseau’s thesis that natural inequalities are reproduced as social inequalities^[2], then culture cannot be expected to serve as a means to overcome such disparities. Quite the contrary: those who can afford high cultural consumption will continue to access elite cultural products or activities, while those excluded from this sphere will remain confined to low culture or popular entertainment.

On the other hand, if we accept that the cultural contradictions^[3] between social classes can be dissolved through shared aesthetic values and tastes – acknowledging, of course, that this convergence may lead to the proliferation of kitsch as a means by which lower classes emulate upper-class values through simplified aesthetic objects and condensed, sometimes inauthentic, aesthetic experiences – then the ECoCs might not reproduce social disparities but rather help to minimize them.

Steiner et al. argue that cities hosting the most prestigious ECoCs have indeed experienced economic growth, albeit at the cost of residents’ well-being:

“Concerning the economic impact, we show that European Capitals are hosted in regions with above-average GDP per capita, but do not causally affect economic development in a significant way. Even a positive impact on GDP per capita would not imply a positive impact on individual utility or social welfare of the regional population. Surprisingly, using difference-in-difference estimations, a negative effect on the well-being of the regional population is found during the event. Since no effect is found before the event, reverse causality and positive anticipation can be ruled out. The negative effect during the event might result from dissatisfaction with the high levels of public expenditure, transport disruptions, general overcrowding or an increase in housing prices.“^[4]

Moreover, ECoCs rely almost exclusively on local resources, which are often already scarce. When an ECoC title is awarded, residents frequently experience the displacement of cultural resources and unequal access to services, as visitors are prioritized over locals. This is precisely why some scholars advocate for models of participatory governance in cultural development^[5]. Based on empirical analyses of ECoC dynamics, Campagna argues that residents must be able to trust local governance actors not to generate or exacerbate social inequalities. Case studies of good practice – such as Marseille and Košice, both title-holders in 2013 – illustrate that, “by combining different strands of Democratic Theory and applying process-tracing methodology“^[6] local authorities successfully strengthened participatory governance in cultural development by fostering trust. This trust was built on two pillars: cultivating social capital and reinforcing social networks between public and private actors involved in cultural activities. Campagna also cautions that “in the absence of fully-fledged trust, participation can generate contestation movements or isolated cultural production.“^[7]

Admittedly, there is no consistent body of literature demonstrating that ECoCs effectively reduce social inequalities. Yet there is substantial empirical evidence suggesting that they have the potential to reproduce them. Several factors contribute to this tendency.

First, well-being is temporarily reshaped or deferred. Residents experience diminished autonomy, reduced to actors performing an unfinished hospitality toward visitors who may be intrusive, noisy, and largely unpredictable. Second, cultural services often become displaced, redirected toward short-term, tourism-oriented activities rather than sustained engagement with high or critical culture. Third, structural inequalities (spatial, material and symbolic) tend to be mirrored by social ones: cultural infrastructure is selectively updated during the competition, with certain sectors privileged over others for their perceived uniqueness or representational value. Consequently, only a select range of cultural resources are mobilized to articulate a narrative of European belonging, while others remain underused or untouched.

In my view, the quarrel between the optimistic stance – that ECoCs enhance social cohesion, prestige, and local cultural capital – and the pessimistic one – that ECoCs exacerbate social disparities and inequalities among residents – constitutes an aporia that can be overcome only by embedding a robust model of social justice within the strategic framework of the ECoC programme.

II. A Model of Social Justice for ECoCs

The aporia sketched above, in fact, unfolds into a critical theory of social justice in cultural policy. One of the foremost authors in this field, capable of providing the conceptual tools to articulate a theory of social justice for ECoCs, is Pierre Bourdieu. In Distinction^[8] he argued that cultural capital reproduces class hierarchies by generating symbolic power, which tends to be monopolized by those with greater economic influence. Yet, if one incorporates Nancy Fraser’s framework of redistribution and recognition^[9], ECoCs could, in theory, be reoriented toward parity of participation, wherein culture functions both as a field of representation and as a material resource for inclusion.

Bourdieu^[10] grounds his theory in an Aristotelian framework: individuals invest time and discretionary resources to cultivate innate and local talents, converting them into cultural capital that, under certain conditions – often requiring sacrifices and compromises – can be transformed into economic capital. Bourdieu would argue that cultural consumption^[11] is inherently unequal, and that depending on the degree of education and cultural exposure, social inequalities may be amplified, as knowledge can be converted into economic advantage. Therefore, one could argue, cultural production and consumption should be structured to ensure parity of participation – providing specific conditions for each social class to acquire experience and knowledge during the year a city holds the title, thereby facilitating engagement across different layers of cultural consumption.

However, parity alone is necessary but not sufficient. Chantal Mouffe’s concept of agonistic pluralism^[12] offers a complementary perspective. Although challenging to implement in practice, Mouffe would argue that ECoCs should not seek to resolve cultural contradictions between classes but rather to channel conflict productively. Each class of producers and consumers could shift from antagonism to agonism, investing in participatory engagement^[13] that legitimizes difference rather than masking it. The risk in this approach is that ECoCs may fetishize social tensions while simultaneously contributing to the reproduction of social inequalities.

Consequently, one must navigate between a rightist approach, which interprets cultural contestation as a democratic value rather than a failure of unity, and a leftist approach, which emphasizes that democracy involves not merely access to cultural consumption but also the equitable conditions for sustained participation. Examining the quarrele between Left and Right in the cultural field reveals that both protectionist and liberal perspectives share a core concern: fostering participation in cultural life. Yet, the former achieves this through redistribution, while the latter relies on competition. The pressing question becomes: do residents compete with visitors over scarce local resources, and is it feasible to implement redistribution within this framework?

Several arguments merit consideration. On one hand, the framework of neoliberal urbanism, as theorized by David Harvey, underscores the “right to the city,“^[14] which residents should exercise as a means of resisting the logics of spectacle and commodification. In this context, ECoCs play a decisive role in mobilizing culture as a vehicle for collective agency, a process that parallels the symbolic accumulation of prestige, values, belonging, and European awareness. Consequently, ECoCs are not merely instruments for the competitive branding of European cities or platforms for conveying narratives of resilience, inclusion, or solidarity – they are also arenas for cultivating and educating emancipatory urban citizenship.

In many ways, ECoCs stimulate a more inclusive social contract while redefining the models of cultural justice embedded within European communities. On the other hand, expecting culture alone to overcome social inequalities is overly ambitious. Social inequalities are frequently reproduced through cultural inequalities, and thus ECoCs must aim to generate progress across multiple dimensions of residents’ lives – material, symbolic, and political. The material dimension involves a renewed perspective on redistribution; the symbolic dimension fosters European awareness; and the cultural dimension enhances the capacity of cities to represent themselves in relation to other European cities or to function as core pillars within European cultural clusters.

I argue that a model of social justice embedded in ECoCs should address all three domains, with a clear understanding that redistribution entails the fair – not necessarily equal – allocation of cultural resources and opportunities for engagement; recognition emphasizes the legitimacy and awareness of cultural identities and initiatives; while representation ensures equitable participation in European cultural life.

Quantifying the impact of ECoCs through statistics – such as investment rates, completed infrastructure projects, tourist numbers, or GDP impact – provides useful material indicators. Yet, many intangible outcomes, often overlooked, significantly shape the title’s potential to mitigate cultural and social inequalities: civic trust, social consciousness, and participatory governance.

Inequalities, however, do not exist solely between residents or between locals and visitors; they are also embedded within local cultural forms, some of which are better positioned to generate profit, while others evolve more disinterestedly. Increasing a community’s cultural self-awareness through the ECoC title therefore entails fostering symbolic capital and deploying it to address disparities between dominant, vernacular cultures and peripheral or marginal ones.

In this sense, I posit that a social justice model operationalized by ECoCs should seek to reshape cultural prestige – decoupling it from elitist and exclusionary terms – while democratizing mechanisms of distinction, as Bourdieu would suggest, for cultural fields that co-participate rather than compete in symbolic production. Extending this perspective, ECoCs can also engage culture to illuminate the essence of democracy, framing resilience and well-being not as the absence of contradictions but as the coexistence of differences. Festivals, exhibitions, and performances serve not only as platforms for expressing individual cultural differences but also as clusters for dialogue and critique, reinforcing European consciousness and countering narratives that distort or falsify Europeanness.

Class asymmetries in cultural consumption reveal that even the concept of social justice must be carefully curated. Should we focus on recognizing plural identities with diverse cultural tastes and capacities for engagement, or should we prioritize mechanisms ensuring the equitable representation of all social classes in cultural planning and in evaluating the legacy of ECoCs? Choosing the former implies that only certain classes are capable of producing, exhibiting, and consuming culture – contradicting the democratic access to culture that ECoCs inherently promote. Opting for the latter requires aligning cultural and social policies to ensure that cultural labor is both impactful and potentially profitable, enabling residents across social classes to convert symbolic capital into economic capital.

III. Unequal Belonging and Reframed Europeanness. Instead of Conclusions

One of the aims of this final section is to explore how a more inclusive model of social justice could be embedded in the economic and cultural strategies of ECoCs – without amplifying local inequalities, disparities between residents and tourists as differentiated forms of cultural agency, or tensions among communities that hold the title yet compete over their Europeanness through rival narratives.

I argue that, at least from moral and social perspectives, ECoCs provide a powerful lens for understanding European belonging, while consolidating cultural capital distributed among those who produce, curate, perform, and represent it. In short, ECoCs generate regimes of social visibility on cultural grounds and tend to foster participatory – rather than merely representative – governance of cultural resources, giving voice to social groups previously marginalized within the cultural sphere.

Yet an unavoidable incommensurability must be managed with prudence: all mechanisms that render diversity more visible and celebrate it can, at times, inadvertently reproduce social hierarchies as cultural disparities. The real challenge lies in leveraging culture as a platform for emancipation, even though ontologically it remains a field of distinctions.

When adapting a social justice framework for ECoCs, we must consider potential risks. Low-income residents, for example, may shift from passive cultural consumption to passive cultural European awareness. In parallel, the gentrification of heritage spaces – despite their potential to rejuvenate and reconfigure social dynamics – can result in bourgeois urban clusters. A second risk concerns the commodification of tangible and intangible traditions, which over time may lose spiritual and identity-forming significance, becoming increasingly spectacularized. ECoCs can thus consolidate a European neoliberal cosmopolitanism, but the danger lies in curating cultural differences primarily as marketable spectacles.

Ultimately, we must consider whether a synthesis of leftist and rightist approaches can inform a robust model of social justice for ECoCs. I contend that the leftist approach is particularly suited to combat cultural hegemony^[15] in both production and consumption. It also addresses divergent narratives of European belonging that extend beyond centers and peripheries, as Wallerstein notes^[16], encompassing postcolonial identities, the traumatic experiences of migrants, and the perseverant contributions of the working class to an imagined European homeland.

Conversely, the rightist approach carries a distinct ideological orientation: it links heritage to meritocracy and emphasizes civilizational prestige, manifested through cultural property, legacy, and institutional efficiency. A closer examination of these two approaches reveals that the leftist agenda promotes distributive justice, aiming to correct inequalities, whereas the rightist agenda reinforces a competitive European framework, highlighting clusters of accumulated excellence. The leftist approach fosters collective taste and social virtues through democratic cultural consumption, while the rightist approach emphasizes authenticity, efficiency, and differentiated individual talents.

Consequently, the rightist approach can stimulate the so-called heritage economy^[17], focused on national pride, competition, and effective cultural production. However, it cannot fully democratize culture, a task the leftist approach addresses more successfully. The merit of the rightist perspective lies in protecting culture from populist attacks. Finally, we must consider the emergent dynamics of power consolidated by these approaches. The left excels at soft inclusion, though primarily mapped regionally rather than universally. The right excels at recognizing cultural merit and supporting symbolic hierarchies—which any competition, including that for the ECoC title, depends upon—but it risks soft exclusion, accelerating social privileges linked to excellence as an elitist outcome. We cannot simply arbitrate between these two approaches; rather, we must seek a way to intertwine them.

References:

Bell, Daniel. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 1976.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Campagna, Desirée, Participatory Governance and Cultural Development An Empirical Analysis of European Capitals of Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Fraser, Nancy. Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso, 2012.

Mouffe, Chantal. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London: Verso, 2013.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men. Trad. Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992.

Steiner, Lasse, Bruno S. Frey, și Simone Hotz. „European Capitals of Culture and Life Satisfaction,“ Urban Studies, nr. 2 (2015): 374–390.

Throsby, David. Economics and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society: 1780–1950. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

NOTE

^[1] European Commission, “European Commission evaluates impact of European Capitals of Culture“, published on October 9, 2025, available online at https://culture.ec.europa.eu/news/european-commission-evaluates-impact-of-european-capitals-of-culture?, last time accessed on November 8, 2025.

^[2] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, translated by Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), Part I, 37.

^[3] Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 33.

^[4] Lasse Steiner, Bruno S. Frey, Simone Hotz, “European Capitals of Culture and Life Satisfaction,“ Urban Studies 52, nr. 2 (2015): 380.

^[5] Desirée Campagna, Participatory Governance and Cultural Development. An Empirical Analysis of European Capitals of Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

^[6] Campagna, Participatory Governance, 105.

^[7] See the book blurb available at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-81648-3, last time accessed on November 11, 2025.

^[8] Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 62.

^[9] Nancy Fraser, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 163, 165.

^[10] Bourdieu, Distinction, 258.

^[11] Bourdieu, Distinction, 176.

^[12] Chantal Mouffe. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013), 48. For references to the European project, see Mouffe, “An Agonistic Approach to the Future of Europe“, Agonistics, 43-54, especially the section about “Europe of Nations or Europe of Regions?“.

^[13] Mouffee coins the “citizen awakening“ in Europe, that I adapted to the framework of ECoCs. See Mouffee, Agonistics, 124.

^[14] David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012).

In fact, Harvey states that “the actually existing right to the city, as it is now constituted, is far too narrowly confined, in most cases in the hands of a small political and economic elite who are in a position to shape the city more and more after their own particular needs and he arts’ desire“; see Harvey, Rebel Cities, 124.

^[15] On the neo-liberal hegemony in culture and politics, see Mouffe, Agonistics, 124.

^[16] See Immanuel, Wallerstein. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

^[17] A concept coined by Throsby, in a very different framework that updates the critique on the classical undertakings of cultural capital; see David Throsby. Economics and Culture. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). “It opens up the question of defining popular culture, an area seen in contemporary cultural studies as being oppositional to the hegemonic and restrictive practices of high culture“; see Throsby, Economics and Culture, 7.