ABSTRACT
Governments long have intervened in culture, creating collections and libraries, commissioning artworks and monuments, building cultural venues, preserving heritage sites, developing and exporting distinctive cultural products, supporting or enforcing censorship and language regulations. However, the notion that these sundry actions could be framed together and recognized as a coherent policy arena only developed as late as the 1960s. Government actions affecting culture were disparate, spread widely across multiple agencies. Some relevant agencies, such as Departments of Education and museums and libraries originally built as royal collections, had obvious ties to culture. Others, such as Ministries of Information and diplomatic corps, less so. The whole series of cultural actions governments around the world had embarked on over the postwar period required an organizing and comparative framework. To understand this wide and expanding array of government actions affecting culture as cultural policy meant building out that framework with: a foundation in fundamental policy norms, the identification of a critical challenge to be addressed and a rationale for addressing that challenge, and the articulation of a set of initial policy goals.
