Address by Ms Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, Deputy Secretary General

Ladies and gentlemen,

I am happy to be meeting you here at the Council of Europe and in Strasbourg, in this meaningful setting, a forum for dialogue which has been the scene of so many discussions and decisions at key moments in the process of building Europe.

Of course I am bound to mention the crucial role that culture plays in the building of Europe and the lives of more than 800 million Europeans. Culture is a valuable aid to mutual awareness and understanding, a vehicle and a goal for co-operation and an opportunity for expression and creative activity: in short, it is proof of a humanist approach and a means of asserting the values we share.

This colloquy will no doubt highlight the possibilities afforded by a cultural approach to political governance and, more topically still, to governance reflecting the increasingly multicultural nature of our societies.

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The Culture Committee, galvanised by the Secretary General’s commitment to interreligious and intercultural dialogue, took a very enlightened step in deciding to launch the project on “intercultural dialogue and conflict prevention”. The project is part of our Organisation’s general policy in favour of consolidating peace and ensuring democratic stability.

It was high time to urge Europeans to make the diversity of their cultures and traditions a key factor for getting on together. That is our aim and one of the reasons for the Council of Europe’s existence. To achieve this aim, we need to answer three questions:

1. How can we move on from a multicultural process to an intercultural process? In other words, how can we progress from an empathetic awareness of others to an enriching dialogue?

2. How can we make sure that the difficulties and problems involved - their causes, roots and complexities - will be understood?

3. How can we secure a firm and informed commitment to resolving and preventing them?

I think one thing is clear: there can be neither understanding, nor prevention, nor conflict resolution without a consistent policy capable of guiding people’s choices and helping them deal with the situations that arise. We need a policy that makes itself felt at all levels of the decision-making process and enables the parties concerned to devise and carry out conclusive projects.

Responsibility for framing and implementing this policy lies with you (with us). Identifying the roles and new responsibilities of culture ministers in initiating intercultural dialogue is a welcome and long-awaited aggiornamento at European level, which will be a milestone in the history of European benchmarking.

Ladies and gentlemen,

This colloquy is an important step along the path we have chosen. You contributions to the discussions will chart the course we are to follow. Firstly, with a joint pronouncement on a conceptual framework for this policy for our time. The advantage will be that you, Ministers, will have worked out together, on behalf of this Europe you represent, a declaration which is bound to be historic, given the historic passage from one millennium to the next that we are now experiencing.

You will have drawn up this declaration in Strasbourg and you will have an opportunity to put the finishing touches to it and finalise it at the Opatija Colloquy, to which you are invited next October by the Republic of Croatia for the second phase of this meeting.

Your discussions will also address some ambitious proposals which will mark a turning point in culture ministers’ traditional role at national and European level: setting up a ministerial round table to follow up the declaration, organising an annual intercultural colloquy and designating “intercultural European cities”.

The discussions will also provide valuable guidelines - which can be incorporated into the Council of Europe’s work programme - on the strategy and operational tools to be applied in the coming years: pooling information, learning about one another on the basis of “cases” that are exemplary in every sense of the word, adopting and assessing policies geared to different situations and mounting travelling exhibitions to illustrate best practices.

Continuous liaison between policy, strategic action and policy is a highly original and I would say an essential method for tackling the issues and opportunities to be discussed at this colloquy. It will certainly result in the adoption of successive recommendations punctuated by the Action Plan and the Declaration.

This exercise in itself - an informal meeting in the midst of work on a topic - needs to become an exemplary method and be repeated.

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Ladies and gentlemen,

In discussing and working out your “new role and new responsibilities in initiating intercultural dialogue”, you are fully involving yourselves in the dynamic process demanded by the complexity of modern times. You are taking a pro-active role and your discussions will probably contribute to the planning and development of the new governance that everyone is entitled to expect of Europe’s leaders as integration progresses.

As you will have seen from the varied programme of this two-day meeting, your discussions will be accompanied by eloquent illustrations of some very fine messages. The Council of Europe has the honour to host three exhibitions: “World cultural heritage in Slovakia”, “Ottoman archives: examples of a positive admissions policy” and “Bosnia and Herzegovina: dialogue and future”. This evening, as an exceptional token of its participation in the colloquy, the City of Strasbourg will show you round the exhibition “Les dieux comme les hommes” at the Museum of Fine Arts. I hope these works of art and messages will inspire your discussions and give you pleasure as men and women of culture.

So everything points to the success of this colloquy. I have great pleasure in wishing you an excellent meeting and assuring you that the Secretary General and I, on behalf of the Organisation, will remain firmly committed to this undertaking.

Thank you for your attention.