The European Union and culture explains why and how 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. 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