This paper presents a general overview of the process of the democratisation of cultural policy in Lithuania by exploring explicit arguments about democratisation in debates and policy documents in Lithuania (1988Lithuania ( -2011. At the early stage of transformation (1988)(1989)(1990)(1991)(1992), democratisation was envisaged as the administrative decentralisation of political institutions, particularly the Ministry of Culture, and as the introduction of democratic principles, such as freedom of speech and cultural self-regulation. More substantial meanings of democratisation were articulated in debates about ethnic diversity and social equality. The study reveals tensions between the values of high culture and pop culture and the unitary notion of Lithuanian national ethnic culture and the cultures of national minorities. At a later stage, the salience of the ethnic dimension decreased when the democratisation of cultural policy was conceptualised in relation to the knowledge economy, which required revision of the early postSoviet confrontation between culture and its economic use.