Sweden/ 1. Historical perspective: cultural policies and instruments  

Many important public cultural institutions of contemporary Sweden date back to royal initiatives in the 17th and 18th century, like the Royal Opera, The Royal Dramatic Theatre, The Royal Library, The National Archives, The National Heritage Board, The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, The Swedish Academy, The Royal Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities and the two royal universities of Uppsala and Lund. The single most important public cultural institution in pre-modern Sweden was The Swedish Church, responsible for basic popular education and for regional Gymnasiums. In the 19th century, these institutions and functions were reluctantly taken over by the civil nation-state. In the latter half of the century "the modern condition" of cultural policy emerged through the rise of commercial mass-markets in printing, media and exhibitions, eventually followed by the film and gramophone industries. The modern state, taking over old royal cultural institutions, the secularisation of basic popular education through a compulsory public elementary school system and the various spiritual challenges of mass popular culture, including radical popular movements in civic education, were the main levers of modern cultural policy in Sweden.

Popular education, public museums, concert halls and public libraries were favoured areas of cultural policy in the early 20th century, typically with substantial contributions from private patrons. A modern key cultural policy institution - a monopoly public broadcasting company ("Sveriges Radio") - started in 1925. In the 1930s, the democratic welfare-state model for cultural policy, stressing equal access to quality culture, started to emerge. One innovative result was the state touring theatre company ("Riksteatern") in 1934. In the 1950s and 1960s, established cultural institutions were modernised and many new ones were created, such as state touring institutions for exhibitions and music, the Film Institute, municipal music schools, and state art and drama schools. The Author's Fund, supporting literary artists, was created in 1954. It was based on the innovative institutionalisation of lending rights to Swedish authors, whereby the government paid for loans in public libraries.

In the 1960s, political engagement in the cultural policy issue rose dramatically, resulting in a very ambitious ideological and institutional renewal of the whole cultural policy field presented in the Bill on Culture in 1974. The democratic welfare-state model of cultural policy triumphed. A new central authority, the National Council for Cultural Affairs (later called the Swedish Arts Council) was created. Perhaps the most noteworthy result was a very substantial strengthening of regional and municipal resources for the distribution and production of quality culture. In fixed prices, public cultural expenditure rose from about SEK 8 billion in 1973 to about 16 billion in 2000.

In the last decades of the 20th century, the most significant changes in the general conditions for cultural policy concerned, on the one hand, the revolutionary changes in media technologies and, on the other, the repaid increase of cultural and ethnic diversity through immigration and global mediation. The long overdue divorce between State and Church, in the year 2000, marked a symbolic end to Sweden's self-conception as a mono-cultural nation.