Gibt es ein Menschenrecht auf Kultur?

Crisis-like shocks to a political community have a determining influence on the role of culture in political integration and community building processes. Scenarios of (actual or only supposed) existential threats tempt on the one hand to marginalization, on the other hand to essentialization of culture. Art becomes a secondary matter, culture a luxury for better times, where a political community sees itself shaken to its foundations and shapes its new narratives from rather apocalyptic dystopias. At the same time, the need for identity- forming cultural self-assertion, based on traditional grand narratives that draw from the depths of culture, grows with such a shake-up. Where there is a threat of loss of certainty, there is a growing longing for cultural roots and possibilities of cultural identification. Crises act as cultural catalysts – to a certain extent at least. They can accelerate development processes where a return to the status quo ante no longer seems sensible or even possible. In view of this, it is hardly surprising that in constitutional, European and international law, a human right to culture has been discussed and its dogmatic contours struggled over for a long time already. This article aims to explore the possibilities of new conceptualizations of such a »right to culture« or, to put it the other way around, of »culture as a human right«. The guiding thesis is that a right to culture means nothing other than a right to have rights to cultural participation. A right to culture stands for the cultural- anthropological conditionality of freedom, for the cultural foundation of all rights to freedom – freedom based on culture and therefore no freedom without culture – and thus for the necessity of (individual) legal protection of cultural participation. Culture is understood as the first and last resource for peoples and states.