By enabling not only products, services and people but also information and data to circulate more quickly, globalisation has turned reciprocal image-building into a multi-layered phenomenon: "images of the other" are formed at every level from the local community to the state, the continent and the world.

These images are also changing more rapidly as a result of both globalisation and the development of information technology.
 

While our perceptions of one another may never have been static, they evolve today at a steady pace that has no precedent.
 

Activities in this area will therefore explore the implications for history teaching of the following:
 

• recent changes in the way that Europeans see themselves, particularly since the end of the Cold War and the internal re-opening of Europe;
  
   
• reciprocal images of Europe and other parts of the world.
  
  Activities here will form part of the "new dialogue between Europe and its neighbouring regions – the southern Mediterranean, the Middle East and Central Asia" which both the Warsaw Action Plan (paragraph III, 6) and the Faro Declaration seek to promote.