Rather than exploring culture-led urban transformations, media representations or city-image building, this article tackles the way in which the European capitals of culture (ECOC) has been a local, regional, national or European task. The responsibility for the event and the possibility to use it to articulate political identities is transferred from one level to another. This article discusses the ECOC as multi-level policy on European, national, regional and local levels. It works on the macro-level drawing from many of the recent ECOCs and hopes to inspire more in-depth analysis of case studies. Moreover, the article recognises the difference between explicit and implicit policies. The European Union, having been legally deprived of the chance to run explicit official policies until the Maastricht treaty in 1992, has still provided support for culture through implicit cultural policies and cultural policies of display, such as the ECOC. The cases considered in this paper vary, as the main emphasis is the exploration of the role of the ECOCs and the multiple levels in the process. However, quite often references would be made to recent Capitals of Culture, such as Sibiu and Luxembourg in 2007, Vilnius in 2009, Ruhr 2010 and Turku 2011. They highlight particularly well the conflicts between the levels, especially local and national, as well as the role of the region in the construction of a common reference point in the ECC process.