"The European Union and Culture" explains how and why the European Union has started to intervene in the cultural policy sector - understood here as the public policies aimed at supporting and regulating the arts and cultural industries. It is the first comprehensive and theoretically informed account of the Communitarisation process of the cultural policy sector. Understanding this process fills a crucial gap in the European studies literature, shedding light on uncovered dynamics of European integration and EU policy formation. Before 1992, no legal basis for EU intervention in the field of culture appeared in the Treaties. Member states were, in any case, reluctant to share their competences in a policy sector considered to be an area of national sovereignty. In such circumstances, how was the Communitarisation of the policy sector ever possible? Who were the policy actors that played a role in this process? What were their motives? And why were certain actors more influential than others? "The European Union and Culture" answers these questions by offering a fresh theoretical line in the field of European studies, pointing to the necessity of developing a dynamic multi-level approach, able to capture the continuous interaction over time between EU level developments, national-level policies and the desire of all policy actors to further their interests and maximise their policy competencies. This book will be of great use to all researchers and students of European integration and European public policy and anyone interested in what happens 'behind the scene' of EU intervention in the field of cultural policy.