From Soft Power to Smart Power:
The strategic value of art and artists to an entire continent
Walk through almost any major European city and it is easy to believe that culture is something solid and unshakeable. Cathedrals and concert halls, galleries and libraries, street festivals and film schools – they all seem to say: this is who we are, this will always be here. That confidence can be dangerously misleading.
For most of history, access to culture was neither easy nor guaranteed. Books were scarce, then expensive, travel was impossible, then difficult, theatres were frequently closed by plague or politics, and learning was a privilege requiring wealth, and effort. What feels normal to us - the ability to instantly summon almost any piece of music, film or theatre onto a screen - is historically bizarre, or at least atypical. This can trick us into thinking that because culture just is “there”, it will continue whether or not we actively invest in it.
It may not, and needs to be maintained, regardless of circumstances.
C. S. Lewis understood this clearly. In his famous sermon on Learning in War-Time, delivered shortly after the break out of World War II in 1939, he asked a blunt question: what is the point of pursuing knowledge and beauty when the world appears to be falling apart? His answer was simple, and equally blunt. If humanity always waited to seek knowledge and beauty until life was safe and secure for everyone, we would never have begun at all. There would not be any culture as there has never been a time without crises, alarms, difficulties and emergencies.
Lewis was a deeply religious man, so his lens has a particular shape, but his wisdom is real, regardless of what we may think of that shaping. Lewis’s true subject was not learning in wartime but learning at any time. War simply makes visible the fragility that is always there. The temptation is to postpone culture “until things calm down.” His argument is that they never truly do, and it would be lazy and irresponsible to affect such postponement. The decision is always whether we will continue to think, to create, to build on what earlier generations have handed to us. Some of the time the circumstances will be conducive. At other times they will not.
Europe today is not in the same situation as 1939, but it would be naïve to call this a calm period. We face vicious war of conquest and genocide on our territory, democratic backsliding in the heart of Europe, information warfare by an empire that refuses to correct its mistakes. A mounting climate crisis surrounds us, and all of this is swimming in a rich sauce of rapid technological change. Our attention is pulled in a dozen directions at once. This is precisely the moment - Lewis would say there has never been any other kind - when the work of culture must not stop.
Language, as usual, is both an asset and a hindrance. So let’s strip the word “culture” of its associated baggage of sentimentality, and we will realise that what remains is something very practical. Culture is the ongoing conversation through which we decide what matters, whom we trust, what kind of future we are willing to work for. As I have written elsewhere, culture workers have a job bigger than just “doing culture.” Culture workers shape narratives that define identities, communities, and nations; safeguard heritage, memory, and collective meaning across generations; interpret complexity through critical thought, art, and storytelling.
This conversation has been going on for centuries, and it has always been layered. In Europe, Medieval liturgy sits under Enlightenment pamphlets; nineteenth-century novels sit under post-war cinema; folk tales and protest songs sit under contemporary graphic zines and video essays. Each generation adds new layers, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in discord, often in argument, with those that have come before.
The artist’s job – in the widest sense, including writers, composers, choreographers, designers, film-makers and many others – is to work on those layers. To listen back, answer forward, and refuse to let the conversation be shut down by fear or diluted by convenience.
This is not an ornament on top of “real life.” It is one of the main ways in which a society knows itself. Without it, we lose the ability to recognise what is distinctively good about our ways of living together: the pluralism, the frictions, the stubborn insistence on human dignity, the habit of arguing in public and then going for coffee. When we take culture for granted, we are really taking our own identity for granted, and that has a way of dissolving sooner than we may think.
Over the last few years, something interesting has happened in European policy circles. Culture and the creative industries are no longer being spoken about only in terms of heritage, gallery openings, and the flows of tourism. They are being recognised, usually cautiously, though sometimes very explicitly, as strategic assets. Yay, verily I say, about bloody time.
The recent white paper Empowering Creative Sectors for Innovation, Sustainability and Global Influence, published by CreativeFED - formerly the European Creative Business Network, is a good example of this shift. It argues that Europe’s cultural and creative sectors are not only economic contributors but also “foresight agents, narrative builders and innovation leaders,” and that they should be treated as part of Europe’s strategic toolkit rather than an afterthought.
A central idea of the white paper is “cultural strategic imagination”: the capacity of creative actors to imagine and prototype alternative futures, and the need to connect that imagination to economic, technological and political decision-making. The authors point out that if Europe neglects this capacity, it risks becoming a consumer of other people’s futures rather than a shaper of its own.
In other words, culture is slowly being understood as a form of smart power. Not simply the soft power of attraction and influence, but a deeper ability to shape how societies think and act - in their economies, their technologies, their institutions. Or rather, our economies, technologies, and institutions.
This is especially visible in the way Europe now talks about autonomy and sovereignty. It is not enough to have local factories, data centres and satellites if the stories, symbols and everyday experiences that shape people’s lives are designed elsewhere and driven by platforms over which we have little say.
The white paper calls for European-owned cultural infrastructures, ethical and locally grounded AI models, and tools to measure the “cultural footprint” of European works in global systems. European autonomy is not only about pipelines and supply chains; it is also about who tells the stories, writes the code, designs the interfaces, sets the metaphors. That work belongs, in large part, to the cultural and creative sectors.
There is a risk, though, that even when we talk about “creative industries,” we picture them somewhere apart: in studios and rehearsal rooms, on sound stages and at festivals. We imagine culture happening in distinct spaces, loosely connected to the real economy where goods are manufactured, logistics are planned, services are delivered, and supermarket shelves are restocked.
But anyone who has spent time in a factory, an office or a logistics hub knows that these places have cultures of their own. They have stories staff tell rookies, rituals of coffee breaks and night shifts, unofficial memorials to old machines or colleagues, shared jokes that only make sense if you work there.
These local cultures are not minor details. They shape how people behave, how they respond to risk, how they imagine their future within the organisation. They influence whether a company can adapt, whether it can attract and keep talent, whether it can respond creatively when the outside world shifts. In that sense, the “places of work” are key cultural spaces - yet they are rarely treated that way.
When the white paper calls for creative ecosystems that link artists, businesses, research and public authorities, this is exactly the gap it is trying to address: the missing bridges between the official “cultural sector” and the everyday cultures where most Europeans live their working lives.
Art in a Place of Work: a bridge, not a decoration
Art in a Place of Work emerged from a simple question: what happens if we stop thinking of art and commerce as two separate planets that occasionally send each other postcards, and start treating them as parts of the same ecosystem? As a wise friend of mine has been known to mention frequently - “culture is not a part of business, business is a part of culture.”
Our conviction is that the worlds of business and the arts need each other far more than they realise. Businesses operate in increasingly complex environments: supply chains are fragile, regulation thickens, technology changes habits overnight. They need new ways of seeing, new metaphors, new forms of strategic imagination. Artists live and work in precisely that realm of open questions and experimental thinking, but often with little access to the places where decisions about infrastructure, investment and employment are actually made.
The CreativeFED white paper calls for exactly this kind of cross-sector collaboration: innovation hubs where creative industries work alongside manufacturing, healthcare and other “hard” sectors; a European Creative R&D fund to support such collaborations; and public procurement rules that make it easier for small cultural actors to work with large institutions and companies. Art in a Place of Work is our attempt to enact these ideas on the ground, at a human scale; to build a bridge between these worlds.
As an outreach programme of an arts organisation, we place artists directly inside companies – particularly in sectors that might not instinctively think of themselves as cultural actors: manufacturing, engineering, food production, logistics. We do not ask these artists to design campaigns or paint more attractive walls, though of course they may end up doing so. Instead, we ask them to just work, and observe, listen, to collaborate with staff if both so wish, and to respond in their own artistic language to what they find.
Sometimes the result is a performance or an installation on the factory floor. Sometimes it is a series of photographs, a sound piece, a set of speculative drawings. Behind this work there is something less tangible: a shift in how people talk to each other, a different perspective on what the company is doing in the world, and maybe how to make that better.
The point is not to beautify the workplace but to thicken its cultural layer: to make visible the stories, habits and assumptions that are already there, and to add new ones that open up different possibilities.
Seen from the outside, a residency inside a packaging plant in Lublin might look like a local curiosity. Seen from the perspective we have been sketching, it is part of a much larger argument. Our four-year programme of artist residencies is a practical contribution to the building of a large, important conversation.
If culture is central to European identity and autonomy, then it cannot be confined to museums, festivals, high-brow salons and funky cafés. It has to be present where people spend most of their waking hours: in workplaces, in municipal offices, in hospitals and schools, in transport hubs and data centres.
If artists are the people who work on the layers of culture - who listen back and answer forward, remember? - then they need access to those environments. Not to judge them from a distance, but to be in the room when questions of purpose, value and future are being asked, even if those questions surface first as production schedules or HR policies.
If Europe truly wants to move from soft power to smart power, it cannot treat cultural and creative workers as an afterthought once the “serious” economic and technological plans have been made. It must involve them early and structurally, as partners in thinking about the systems and narratives through which we will respond to the crises Lewis warned us never to use as an excuse.
Art in a Place of Work operates at a modest scale. We are not drafting treaties or setting national budgets, but in our residencies, workshops and conversations, we are practising the kind of bridge-building that larger systems will need if they are to hold. We are trying to answer, in our own corner, the question Lewis posed in another age: how will we continue to pursue knowledge and beauty – to add to the cultural layers we have inherited – even when the world feels unstable?
For us, the answer has to be yes, because if we postpone attending to culture until everything is secure and settled, Europe will have lost the very capacity that made its identity worth defending in the first place.