Equally, there are no indicators yet about a possible drop in the audience volume of specific cultural programs, if any, caused by consumers' nervousness and altered spending patterns. In the absence of firm data and clear future prospects, only some hypotheses could be put forward. Many public cultural institutions have not so far seen much of their subsidies cut because the budget lines for 2009 were more or less fixed at the time when the crisis exploded, in September 2008. The general orientation of national governments to boost the economy with increased public spending might not however exclude further subsidy reductions in 2010, especially on the regional and local level, making public cultural institutions less efficient, with a worsened ratio between the overhead and their programming expenditure. This scenario is already playing out in the weaker non-euro economies of Central and Eastern Europe, where governments have been forced to curb their budgetary deficits in order to qualify for International Monetary Fund emergency loans and that resulted in sharp reduction of public spending, including culture, with most radical measures undertaken in Latvia (up to 40% cuts).

Sharp drops in public finances will affect cultural organisations in this region, and perhaps elsewhere, throughout 2010 and perhaps even later. The most vulnerable seem to be cultural NGOs in Central and Eastern Europe, established in the last 20 years, since the end of communism. They have created a diverse, innovative, critical, internationally oriented segment of cultural production and survived thanks to foreign partnerships, foundation grants, Western embassies and cultural agencies budgets and only later obtained a limited access to public incidental grants for specific projects. Only a handful of them secured a 3-year subsidy promise from public authorities that are now being wiped out, together with the most of project subsidy funds. If these organizations could count in the past on some sponsorship, mostly in kind, this option has been practically eliminated by the economic downturn. Foreign partners, themselves experiencing financial difficulties, are now tending to invest less in partnerships and gestures of solidarity. The real danger is that a great part of this vibrant cultural infrastructure will not survive the current recession. What is missing in these difficult times are broad advocacy platforms – national, regional and local, articulating common strategic interests of cultural organisations, affirming the specific function within the non-commercial culture and acting as engaged and qualified interlocutors of public authorities in renewing and modernizing the existing cultural systems. In Central and Eastern Europe, ministries of culture are now paying a high price for the steady opportunism of the last 2 decades and their avoidance of a radical reform of the cultural infrastructure and cultural policies, inherited from communism, Now, they have not much at hand than budgetary cuts and more cuts.

NGO advocacy platforms are needed in order to articulate survival strategies, especially through partnership, consortia and alliance formation, trans-sectorial connectivity and other moves that will further transversal notions of culture instead of isolated, weak islands. In this perspective, the Emergency Fund, announced by the US philanthropist George Soros, offers new opportunities. Soros made US$ 100 million available for 2009 and 2010 to his Open Society Institute network of foundations and thematic programs, primarily for the alleviation of recession which caused social exclusion and poverty in 20 countries, but also included NGOs in culture as possible recipients. OSI national foundations are expected to allocate grants of up to $25.000 and a committee of the OSI Board is in charge via OSI Budapest office of grants between $ 25.000 and 100.000. This money is not intended for business as usual and for another nice little project here and there, but for the new initiatives, interconnecting cultural players among themselves and reinforcing their ties with other forces of civil society, furthering participation in culture, cultural decentralization, and arts and culture links. Hopefully, cultural players who will gather in Brussels at the end of September for the European Culture Forum will convey to the European Commission and the new European Parliament the vulnerability of the cultural infrastructure across the continent, and especially in Central and Eastern Europe under the assault of the recession and pitch the urgency of special EU actions to match what lonely private philanthropists such as Soros are doing, especially since other major European players – such as private foundations or EUNIC – have not undertaken any significant initiatives to respond to the crisis and its dire consequences. Autonomous cultural organisations and initiatives have a chance to come out of this recession stronger and more resilient if they grasp that survival lies in connectivity, interaction, synergy and alliances, not in lonely struggles of isolated desperate operators. Dragan Klaic, an Amsterdam based theater scholar and cultural analyst, is a former president of the European Forum for the Arts and Heritage, now known as Culture Action Europe. (www.draganklaic.eu)