Special Eurobarometer 562: Europeans' Attitudes Towards Culture
- May 3
- 4 min read
Special Eurobarometer 562: Europeans' Attitudes Towards Culture is publicly available via the European Commission's Eurobarometer portal. Fieldwork was conducted February–March 2025 across all 27 EU member states.
A Note on Comparative Data
One thing the Eurobarometer 562 highlights, almost by implication, is the value of sustained, longitudinal public attitude research on culture. The EU has conducted comparable surveys since 2007, making trend analysis possible across almost two decades. Equivalent regional data infrastructure for Southeast Asia remains limited — which itself represents an opportunity for cultural policy development within ASEAN frameworks.
It is worth understanding how this particular survey came to exist, and what it is designed to do. The Eurobarometer culture series began in 2007 under the EU's first comprehensive cultural agenda, and has been repeated at irregular intervals — in 2013, 2017, and 2019 — each wave building a comparative record of how European attitudes shift over time. The 2025 edition is the most expansive yet, commissioned specifically by the Directorate-General for Education and Culture (DG EAC) to provide a citizen evidence base for the incoming Culture Compass for Europe. The Compass is intended to function as an overarching policy framework, integrating culture across EU governance areas — from cohesion and trade policy to AI regulation and foreign affairs. In practical terms, the survey data informs budget allocations under the Creative Europe programme, shapes the EU's cultural diplomacy priorities, and provides member states with comparative benchmarks for their own national cultural strategies. What makes the model instructive is not simply that the research was conducted, but that it was designed from the outset to produce actionable policy input — with a clear institutional home, a defined use case, and a commitment to longitudinal continuity. That combination of public legitimacy and policy utility is what gives the findings their weight in Brussels, and what makes the absence of an equivalent regional mechanism in ASEAN a genuinely practical gap, not merely a methodological one.
The Artist Remuneration Problem
One of the report's most pointed findings concerns how artists are compensated: only 51% of Europeans believe that artists in their country receive fair and appropriate remuneration for their work. In Cyprus, that figure drops to 23%. In Latvia, 29%. In Luxembourg, 31%.
Critically, those closest to the cultural sector — practitioners themselves, or those who know them personally — are less likely to agree that remuneration is fair. The proximity effect runs in the direction of scepticism, not satisfaction.
This is a structural story that resonates across the ASEAN creative economy landscape. The regional discourse has been largely shaped by growth metrics, platform opportunities, and export potential. Considerably less attention has gone to the basic labour conditions of the artists and practitioners generating that value. The European data suggests this gap is not unique to any particular stage of development; it reflects how cultural economies tend to be governed, regardless of income level. For ASEAN's evolving creative industry frameworks, artist welfare deserves more consistent treatment as a policy priority in its own right.
Geographic Equity in Access
Despite the generally positive picture on cultural engagement, the survey reveals a durable fault line: a majority of Europeans (52%) disagree that people across all regions of their country have equal access to cultural activities. Geographic inequality in cultural access is perceived as an unresolved problem — even within the EU, with its Creative Europe programme, its infrastructure investment, and decades of regional cohesion policy.
The most commonly cited barriers are lack of time (45%), cost of admission (38%), and physical distance to venues (34%). These are structural barriers, not preference gaps.
In Southeast Asia, where the concentration of cultural infrastructure in capital cities and major urban centres is considerably more pronounced, this finding provides useful comparative grounding. The centralisation question — in Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, and beyond — is not only an equity concern. It has direct consequences for the sustainability of local creative ecosystems, regional identity, and the social returns on cultural investment.
AI and Culture: The Public Position
The survey's most immediately policy-relevant section addresses artificial intelligence. The numbers are clear: 81% of Europeans prefer human-made content over AI-generated content. This is not a narrow majority — 54% "totally agree." 73% express concern that generative AI threatens the employment or earnings of artists and creatives.
At the same time, fewer than half (48%) believe they can reliably distinguish AI-generated from human-made work — a gap that complicates both the optimism and the alarm in this debate.
For ASEAN, where AI and cultural industries policy is still largely framed around investment, infrastructure, and opportunity, these figures suggest that public sentiment is developing ahead of the formal policy conversation. Southeast Asian audiences — consuming webtoon, independent film, live performance, music, and digital content in enormous volumes — are already encountering AI-generated material at scale. The question for regional cultural frameworks is how proactively the governance architecture will respond to concerns about creative labour, attribution, and the value of human authorship.
The European data offers a useful data point: a human-centred approach to AI in the cultural sector is not a minority or specialist position. It commands broad public support across diverse national contexts.
Cultural Exchange as Shared Value
The survey closes with a strong reaffirmation of cultural exchange as a recognised public good: 87% of Europeans agree that cultural exchange should have an important place in the EU, and the same proportion believe it can foster greater understanding and tolerance internationally — both figures increasing from the previous survey wave.
This aligns with what ASEAN has long articulated as part of its people-centred integration agenda. Cultural exchange, artist mobility, co-production, and shared heritage initiatives are consistently among the most publicly supported instruments when citizens are asked directly. The European survey adds empirical weight to arguments that tend to be made on principled rather than evidence-based grounds.
