Institutions: Negotiating European Television Spaces

When you look at the television landscape across Europe you find a pattern of nationally diverse institutions, regulations and degrees of state control that confirm the idea of Europe as a collection of highly fragmented television spaces. Historically, the introduction and spread of public service broadcasting systems across Europe sought to establish common experiences for viewers at a national level. Yet the early spread of such public service systems suggests a common European experience. As national television services have also become increasingly sensitive to global industrial and economic trends, European media policy (such as the development of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and the MEDIA programmes of the EU) has sought to define a European television space and provide both cultural promotion and protection. The historical development of television across Europe, therefore, has been an ambivalent process that has seen national cultural policy in negotiation and conflict with broader homogenising tendencies. So the history of television here has involved the interplay between national, European and global forces.

Public Service Television

Public service broadcasting is the common denominator in the history of television in Europe. Broadcasting itself had become the dominant model or radio as mass communications technology in Europe after the First World War, and this was later true of television (see Technology). Institutional approaches to television (and radio) varied, however, in different European states and were affected by the national cultures and history. Broadcasting in Great Britain was seen as to serve public interest (paternalistic approach), while in France and Italy television was conceived as an instrument of social state control. An in-between position was taken in Scandinavia where television was institutionalised in such a way that it would serve social democratic interests. In other states access and dialogue were considered important features in establishing an extended democratic society, which led to a pluralist concept of broadcasting in the Netherlands, and a federal one in Germany and in Belgium. In dictatorial regimes, such as in Greece and Spain until into the 1970s, and also in communist states such as Hungary, television was a state medium, raised on governmental control and state power. Typical in European countries is the start of television with a single public service, which was then followed by a second and sometimes even a third public channel.

The changing landscape

From the late 1980s onwards in many European countries the arrival of commercial channels meant that public broadcasting lost its monopoly of national television. The television landscape changed and more so-called dual broadcasting systems appeared, one that the UK had already adopted in 1955. In the 1990s commercial television also arrived in former communist states. So while public service television across Europe retained close ties with state power in many instances it started to face heavy competition. This competition was both local and increasingly international. In the 1980s in Spain, for example, autonomous regional channels challenged national public broadcasting, each promoting their own regional culture. The advent across Europe of non-terrestrial broadcasting such as satellite marks an ever-expanding and increasingly fragmented European television landscape.

Operational frameworks

Just as the notion of public service was different across Europe so too was its operational form. The BBC was the first public broadcaster and, being a national service and an independent body of government, it was widely considered the ideal model of broadcasting. Yet nowhere else in Europe was the BBC model copied. This shows how much the operational forms of broadcasting were rooted in national politics. Legislation in each European state varied on issues of ownership, financing and control. State funding in non-democratic states was the precondition for exercising direct political control over television and for using the medium as an instrument for nationalistic propaganda. Funding of television in democratic states is far more varied, with resources coming from the state in combination with licence fees and/or advertisers. There is, in general, no advertising on public television in those countries where television is strongest used as a nation builder through education, information and entertainment (such as Scandinavian countries and Austria). Other public services do allow advertising, without giving away their independent status. At an operational level we find transnational players only among commercial broadcasters that own and control commercial television spaces across borders.

European cultural integration

Despite the variety of television spaces in Europe, broadcast media were seen as fundamental to the ideal of European cultural integration. One such attempt was the establishment of the EBU in 1950 with the purpose of encouraging co-operation between its members and working towards a common European cultural identity. Yet a common European culturally identity was problematic as the EBU was a West European organisation that was established as a response to the East European Organisation Internationale de Radiodiffusion et de Télévision (OIRT). The East European organisation had been established in 1946 to stimulate exchange of programmes between its members and as a tool of communist propaganda. Each of the two organisations had their own television networks. The EBU had Eurovision and OIRT had Intervision (OIRT), and this had the effect of dividing the European television landscape into two cultural spaces. Although OIRT was merged into the EBU in 1993, at a pan-European level the struggle over television as a cultural space has not abated. European Council reports (such as Television without Frontiers), initiatives such as ARTE (France and Germany) and the controversy over television sports on the Eurosport channel all illustrate the ongoing tensions between national and European television policies (see Watching and Events).

Sonja de Leeuw