Cultural policy is playing an increasingly decisive role in the re-thinking and re-shaping of Europe. In this field, arts and culture not only promise political capital but also respond to questions and problems in an environment, where international politics - fixed primarily upon the economy - has reached the limit of political acceptance. It was one of the goals of this study to focus on the changing basic conditions of cultural policies and cultural politics. The study tries in two parts to outline recent developments in cultural politics along national lines as well as at the transnational level. The first part deals with the changing functions and/or continuity of different concepts of cultural politics at the level of the nation-state(s): concepts which all together - facing a radically changing political and economic environment - are more and more converging, albeit on the basis of very divergant historical traditions. The approach of contextualizing "Politics, Economy and Culture" in the second part of the study analyzes the activities of the European Communities/European Union in the cultural sector. It aims to make visible the specific historic development as well as the current policy of the EU in the contrast to the cultural politics of the nation-states.