Within a national context, the social impact of the arts remains an implicit, however fundamental, legitimating component of cultural policy. The belief that the arts have this capacity has stayed central to the relatively strong position of cultural policy among political parties and in the public. But how does this relationship come to show in an international context? There, the legitimating function is not that evident, or is it? The support for Norwegian art and artists entering international domains could potentially stand out as a somewhat irrelevant or even competing effort to a domestic Norwegian context, but in this paper, I will try to show that this is not the case. By using empirical data from participant observations at central sites of foreign cultural policy and multiple interviews with key actors, I argue that on the contrary, foreign cultural policy, supporting Norwegian art and artists abroad, most definitely is negotiated into a national discourse, with national social development profits like an improved international image as a central premise. The argument is sustained by the use of White’s theory of inversed country-of-origin effect (2012) and Bhabha’s notion of nations as narratives (1990).
