Cultural rights and professional postures
Cultural rights, stemming from the Fribourg Declaration (2007), represent a major advancement for cultural democracy. However, their practical implementation remains a challenge, as they are often perceived as too theoretical. This text explores how emotions, human relationships, and methods such as nonviolent communication can bring these rights to life. Let’s discover how a human-centered professional ethic is essential for the successful application of cultural rights.
From Concept to Practice
Cultural rights, particularly through the Fribourg Declaration of 2007, are, in my view, a major breakthrough and an extremely valuable tool for understanding and evaluating cultural projects. They offer constructive pathways for implementation in the spirit of cultural democracy. However, cultural rights are often seen as highly theoretical, specialized, and disconnected from the realities of cultural action. Yet, their very purpose is the concrete application of rights. Law is not a purely theoretical science; it is a legal framework represented by texts whose goal is to be applied within human communities as a legal basis for action.
In his text “Clarifying the Cultural Meaning of Human Rights: Lessons Learned from the Deployment of Cultural Rights” (Nectart Journal #20, January 2025), philosopher Patrice Meyer-Bisch, who is almost the founder of cultural rights having spearheaded the drafting of the Fribourg Declaration, addresses cultural rights in their essence and their political and anthropological dimensions. However, the subject of their practical implementation is not discussed. This is not a criticism on my part. The purpose of my contribution is precisely to provide this complement. I propose focusing on the application of cultural rights in the context of human relationships, a topic that is too often overlooked in the philosophical and legal approach to cultural rights.
Reason and Emotion
Indeed, cultural rights are often approached from the perspective of social meaning and reason. Yet, what primarily underpins the social effects of human relationships are emotions, far more than reason. Therefore, it seems essential, for the effective application of cultural rights, to shed light on the modalities of human relationships carried out by agents. Humans cannot be reduced to rational social agents who, based on the information they receive, make sensible decisions. Humans receive information, experience emotions themselves, and evoke emotions in others. In my view, it is primarily at the emotional level that the implementation of cultural rights succeeds or fails, whether in cooperative cultural relationships among professionals or in interactions with beneficiaries in the context of cultural participation.
Thus, to prevent cultural rights from remaining “detached from reality,” as they are often criticized for being, they must, in my opinion, be enriched by scientific methods such as pedagogy, nonviolent communication, therapeutic work, etc. If we want cultural rights to be applied in a truly humanistic way, we must focus on their practical implementation, which goes beyond the framework of cultural rights themselves. These rights define objectives and directions, but their application requires methods from other fields, such as art, popular education, liberated enterprises, new pedagogies, or nonviolent communication, for example.
A remarkable initiative in this regard is that of the Réseau Culture 21, where Christelle Blouët has integrated techniques from popular education to support the values of cultural rights in relational modalities. This is a demanding and coherent dynamic, to which I propose adding other dimensions.
The Link, Instrument of Dignity
Cultural rights aim to cultivate and defend human dignity. At their core lies the link, the relationship. Imagine a cultural space designed and co-constructed with input from all levels of agents, but which, over time and with staff changes, ends up being operated by individuals who, for example, cannot tolerate visitors making noise or not following rules. These rules, often subjective, vary from person to person. Each individual interprets the criteria of decorum differently, depending on their sensitivity. Some may be more sensitive to noise, others to the presence of people in spaces, and still others to disorder. These agents, often hired by external contractors, may feel pushed to their limits when faced with cultures different from their own. How could they implement cultural rights as defined at the institutional level if these values have never been conveyed to them in a way that resonates with their sensitivity?
In his text, Patrice Meyer-Bisch refers to humans as a “resource,” an unfortunate term as it evokes a dehumanizing conception, inherited from the history of the concept of “human resources,” well-documented by Johann Chapoutot in Libres d’obéir (2020). The concepts of human resources and management, developed after World War II in all major global corporations by consultants who were later revealed to be former Nazis, treat humans as a resource akin to coal or electricity—a deeply dehumanizing vision rooted in the logic of concentration camps. For a genuine implementation of cultural rights, we must move away from this logic and place humans back at the center. Cultural rights, which advocate for the respect of others’ dignity, must empower agents in their roles. These agents, funded by the common good (taxes), must be able to maintain their humanity and prioritize people over processes. Otherwise, despite their good intentions, their actions risk being tainted by a lack of respect for humanity.
Working on the Ground of Humanity
This is why, in my view, we should adopt a more minimalist approach to the institutional implementation of cultural rights at the macro level and focus efforts on supporting agents. It is essential that they internalize the concepts of cultural rights and apply them through effective and compassionate methods, such as nonviolent communication, which postulates an almost therapeutic approach to representing the other, or new pedagogical techniques that give everyone a voice. These techniques, without exception, rely on the acceptance of relinquishing power over the other, which corresponds to stepping away from processes and returning to the humanity of the other. This requires sufficient self-confidence to welcome what the other brings and transforms within us, rather than perceiving it as a threat.
To work is to set oneself in motion, to transform internally. The etymology of the word “work” does not come from “tripalium,” an instrument of torture, but from an older root, that of the word “travel” in English, meaning journey, transformation. To work, therefore, is to move, to transform, to create new neural connections. For this to be possible, there must be a climate of emotional trust within the group. If we are in a state of fear or apprehension, our nervous system goes into protection mode, preventing any new connections or learning. Thus, the prerequisite for any work is the absence of fear in relationships.
The modalities of relationships and professional postures are therefore central to the psychological and neural implementation of cultural rights. I speak here of professional postures because it is the professionals who, within the framework of their work ethic, have the responsibility to recognize and apply these rights. Professionals, whether public or private agents, are funded by taxes or citizens’ purchases and therefore have a responsibility toward them. In Patrice Meyer-Bisch’s texts, cultural rights are often associated with the individual action of each person, who should grant these rights to themselves. I understand and share this theoretical perspective, but in practice, it is the professionals who carry these rights and have the mission to offer others a framework in which their rights are respected.
For Democracy, Cultivate Ethics Rather Than Morality
For cultural rights to be implemented, professional work must be guided by ethics, that is, by a sense of the “good” rather than the “right” in a moral sense. This sense of the “good” is based on openness in relationships with others, respect for their dignity at every moment, and awareness of each person’s social position. It is not about hypocritical egalitarianism but about genuine openness to one another.
Implementing ethics in professional postures is an essential endeavor, complementary to political efforts for cultural rights, and perhaps even more fundamental for the democratic mission.
The “cultural rights”, which derive from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are a concept developed and defended by researchers, sociologists, philosophers, political leaders and actors of the cultural world. Present in a certain number of articles of law since 2001, the cultural rights aim at highlighting and formalizing, in order to be able to make them operative, the principles of a “cultural democracy”. To summarize it quickly, it is a question of each person being able to give value to his or her personal culture, in order to be able to exercise his or her citizenship: to express himself or herself, to defend his or her point of view, to create, to develop his or her practices, to have access to a cultural diversity, etc. Cultural rights operate in a much wider field than that of the strict cultural sector.
The notion of “cultural rights” is present in France in the laws NOTRe (2015) and LCAP (2016). It is carried by a delegation of the Ministry of Culture (General Delegation for transmission, territories, since January 1, 2021).
Paradoxically, cultural rights are difficult to implement in the cultural sector, which is traditionally rather attached to “cultural democratization”: one often defends the idea of the transmission to the public of works of art of the best possible quality, according to a principle of hierarchy of “cultural values”. Thus, the cultural rights can be lived by certain professionals of the culture as a dangerous dynamics for the Art, a tendency towards the amateur practices, which is not the case.
In my point of view, which is that of a practitioner/researcher in the cultural field, cultural rights are above all a practice, an exercise of democracy in the very methods of organization of the work, of the relation to the other and of the place of each one, the choices of programming, the methods of mediation and animation of workshops, the mode of territorial inscription of the cultural policy, etc.
I propose in this section concrete working methods for good practices of implementation of cultural rights, based on my field experiences, as well as a sharing of more theoretical reflections, in the framework of my own research on cultural rights.
I place myself in the filiation of thinkers like John Dewey. But cultural rights cannot be presented without mentioning Patrice Meyer-Bisch, Jean-Michel Lucas, Christelle Blouët, the “Fribourg Declaration”, etc.
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