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Departing from reflections on the terrorist attack in Oslo 22 July 2011 as an attack on democracy as a political system, the author discusses the premise for the special issue on 'Cultural Policy and Democracy' of the International Journal of Cultural Policy. Then follows a short presentation of the transition from autocracy to liberal democracy and different models of cultural policy within the frames of liberal democracies. Four principal democratic dimensions of cultural policy are defined and discussed, and the article ends with a short editorial comment to all other articles published in this issue.Oslo 22 July 2011: a terrorist attack on democracy On 22 July 2011, Norway was struck by a terrorist attack on the government quarters in Oslo. A huge bomb caused damage to many buildings in the centre of Oslo and seven civil servants at work in the government buildings were killed. Shortly after the explosion, the terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik, went directly to a summer camp outside Oslo where hundreds of young people from the youth organisation of the Norwegian Labour Party were gathered. The mass murderer killed 70 young people with a gun in the camp before he was stopped by the police.In a manifest he had published on the internet, the terrorist revealed that he was strongly influenced by right-wing nationalism and by right-wing anti-Islamic quarters in several European countries. He argued that for political and ideological reasons it was necessary to massacre all these people and he said that what he wanted was to strike the political system and the party that was responsible for multicultural Norway, which he said was a catastrophe for the country and Europe. In the trial that followed in spring 2012, he repeated these arguments, and the only thing he regretted was that he did not kill more young people. The bombing of the government quarters and the shooting of young political activists were meant to be symbolic actions because the victims represented a political system that the terrorist hated. This tragic event was evidently an attack on democracy as a political system. The terrorist wanted to create and spread fear among Norwegian citizens and also among citizens of other western countries with Islamic immigrants.After the attack the Norwegian Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, declared that this was an attack on the open, democratic society. He also said that this terrible *

The article describes, analyses and discusses how cultural policy in democratic societies takes place on a socially constructed arena or 'space' which I call an overlapping zone between culture, politics and money. The concept is inspired by Bourdieu's theory about social fields (champs) but adapted to the research focus of this article, which is the making of cultural policies. The point of departure is an analysis of which kind of approach to culture and the arts the activities in the overlapping zone rests on, and concludes that for many countries it is an elitist approach, even in Nordic countries with egalitarian traditions. I proceed with a presentation of the overlapping zone as a theoretical model, then follows an analysis of four groups of agents who negotiate cultural policies in the zone: politicians, civil servants/bureaucrats, professional leaders of cultural institutions and organisations and professional artists. The article ends with a discussion whether the overlapping zone is a democratic arena and whether it will survive in the future. The conclusion is that a vivid overlapping zone is dependent on an active state in the cultural field, and that the agents working in the zone represent collective interests, not only themselves as individuals. IntroductionThe point of departure of this article is the following hypothesis: for a long timeand especially after the Second World War -cultural policy-making in western European democracies and democracies elsewhere has taken place in a meeting place which I will call an overlapping zone between culture and politics. This overlapping zone is a socially constructed arena or 'space' where agents from different social fields meet, discuss and decide about matters in which they are all interested. The different agents of the field are bearers of ideas, values, interests and arguments about the matter they negotiate. In our case, the matter at stake is culture and cultural policies.The principal issue that will be analysed and discussed in this article is how and on what grounds cultural policy-making takes place in an overlapping zone between agents and rationalities of the two mentioned social fields -the cultural field on one hand and the field of politics, public administration and economy on the other.

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