How do we deal with each other?

2008 has been proclaimed the ‘Year of Intercultural Dialogue’ by the European Union. ‘Intercultural dialogue’ presupposes ‘cultural diversity’. Both concepts sound very abstract and very complex at the same time. Intercultural dialogue is considered a tool for bridging the ‘diverse cultures’ in the wider Europe and beyond, officially endorsed as being able ‘to foster European identity and citizenship’. This abstract goal does not really clarify matters. What does ‘culturally diverse’ imply? How does the Commission envisage intercultural dialogue actually taking place? And what is meant by European ‘identity’?

Cultural diversity

This begins with individual, personal experiences – and these are not abstract. Take me as a living example. My first name, Kathinka, derives from Polish ancestors – my grandfather’s surname was Mackowsky. My maiden surname was Weiß, a Jewish name. My first surname, Dittrich, reminds me of my first husband, whose family had come from Bohemia at the end of the Second World War. I added my second surname, van Weringh, after I married a Dutchman. He still exists. I was supposed to be born at the estate of my godmother in Pomerania. However, the Russians were said to be approaching. So I first saw the light in the summerhouse of my Berlin grandparents in a tiny Bavarian village that was too uninteresting to be bombed.

 

You see, my migratory career started even before my birth and has continued ever since. I moved house 28 times and lived and worked in very different cultures. I experienced the totalitarian regime of Franco in Spain and the end of a very different but equally totalitarian system in the Soviet Union. I was amazed by the wild capitalism of the United States and the liberalism of the Netherlands, a traders’ country. I know: I was and am privileged. I am white, a woman – which never proved to be a disadvantage, not even in Spain; I am well-educated and know a few languages; I like the opera but also detective films; I am a liberal with no allegiance to any church, perhaps because I was baptised twice, first Catholic and then Protestant; I have no serious money problems and am socially accepted. But, wherever I lived, I was never ‘one of them’, because I could not share their children’s songs.

 

Only once did it dawn on me what it might mean in practice, not in theory, to be black, poor, uneducated, without language and other skills. That was during a week-long conference in Ghana. The government there had decided to develop the first-ever written cultural policy for this multi-ethnic, multi-lingual country, and had invited me to be an advisor. I was well prepared and was treated very kindly and with all respect. And I moved among the top people. Still, I felt very white, very ugly, very ignorant, very isolated and very much out of place. Just imagine how an unskilled Ghanaian worker would feel in the UK or elsewhere in Europe.

 

You may object that my story of physical and mental migration is exceptional, almost exotic. But I do not think so. Many people from Central and Eastern Europe may never have moved from their home places, but ancient and recent upheavals have forced them to accept new nationalities, new languages, new neighbours, new cultures, new working conditions, new social laws, etc. You can be a migrant without going anywhere.

 

European citizens have always been culturally diverse and have always felt multiple ‘senses of belonging’ (avoiding the much-abused term ‘multiple identities’). I still find it difficult to grasp that some European nations in the past, above all Hitler’s Germany, as well as some re‑emerging European nations or movements within them, try to avoid or neglect or do away with cultural diversity by defining themselves in terms of ‘one’ territory, ‘one’ people, ‘one’ language, ‘one’ culture, ‘one’ history. This is a nationalist, populist dream that is unrealistic, to say the least.

 

Yes, it is true that today’s open-borders Europe is becoming more culturally diverse at a much quicker rate than before. EU enlargement, globalisation, the deregulation of employment laws, the technological advances in communication, have, indeed, rapidly increased the multicultural character of many countries, adding to the number of languages and religious, ethnic and cultural backgrounds found on the continent. This new non-transparent world is a source of fear and anxiety for many, but we have to face it as a fact and deal with it positively.

 

To sum up, then. Cultural diversity is a multifaceted concept based on individual, personal experiences within a social framework. Individuals have multiple ‘senses of belonging’ (identities). ‘Mental’ or ‘psychological’ migration can be just as decisive as ‘physical’ migration. It should be honestly admitted – and featured in the statistical evidence of the rapidly increasing migration into and within Europe – that well-educated, multilingual, white‑skinned migrants are preferred and privileged.

 

Intercultural dialogue

This is, above all (and taking into account the multi-layered notion of cultural diversity described above), about people-to-people contact. Though the basic necessities of ‘physical’ migrants come first –  housing, employment, social and health facilities, education – their ‘mental migration’ is equally important. Because of my own process of migration I have learned the importance of looking behind the mental and emotional screen that surrounds those we call ‘strangers’. Doing so represents an attempt to understand and respect their many individual ‘senses of belonging’ and also their possibly collective ones: language, traditions, historical memories and scars, artistic expressions. But remaining an observer, even a well‑meaning one, is not enough. What is required is a proactive cultural curiosity that leads to action.

 

When speaking about ‘cultural’ curiosity I am referring, first of all, to culture in a broad sense: how people deal with each other; how they shop, cook, celebrate, handle bureaucratic formalities, pay taxes or not, let their children go to swimming lessons or not, and, eventually, how they express themselves artistically. These are all unwritten laws, self-understood in migrant communities but not understood by the majority of ‘the others’ within the host countries, and not because the latter are necessarily ill-disposed towards migrants, but simply because they learned (so to speak) different children’s songs. If intercultural dialogue is to bridge these diverging views of various cultures, then intercultural dialogue must be informative, proactive and cooperative.

 

As far as information goes, public libraries can play a very important intermediary role. Not only because most of them are located in large and small cities where most migrants live, but also because they are ‘low-key’ cultural institutions, easily and universally accessible. A good example can be found in the mid-sized Dutch town of Breda, where the public library has changed from a book-lending factory into an information centre for all citizens. Everything can be asked and will be answered, such as: ‘How should I fill in these incomprehensible Dutch employment/welfare/housing/insurance papers?’ ‘Where can I find cheap language courses?’ ‘What is the City Council’s latest decision on migrant housing?’ ‘Do I have a voice in municipal elections?’ (Anyone, irrespective of origin, who has resided in the Netherlands for at least five years is entitled to vote in municipal elections there.) ‘How can I get in touch with my compatriots?’ ‘Do you have books, films, CDs in my language?’ – which they do, of course. ‘How can I make contact with Dutch people?’ And the native Dutch – ‘the others’ – can pose similar questions from their perspective.

 

Mutual information is the basis of active cooperation. Joint working processes can deepen understanding of ‘the other’ and soften prejudices. Just think of joint waste collection teams, or shared responsibility for the security of certain districts; imagine the joint discovery of cultural landscapes that have been forgotten (and there are, for example, quite a few in Poland); envisage cross-border European history books being jointly developed for schools, with past and present migration taken into account, or joint debates about the new role of former colonial or ethnological or historical museums in our immigrant countries; conceive of a theatre play being developed jointly, or a photo series on one topic seen from different points of view….

 

The arts play a vital role in this cooperative endeavour, since they appeal not to reason only but to all the senses. They are not immediately ‘useful’ in the struggle for survival, but they touch hearts and nourish the soul. The arts are independent, reflective, curious and critical. They can be provocative but also healing. It has often been said that the arts have become globalised today. I do not believe that. Some formats, such as performance, video, photography, may be similar everywhere, but the meanings behind these formats derive from very different cultural roots. It is a fascinating challenge to discover these very different meanings and try to come to terms with them, respect them, be enriched by them.

 

A unique tool for facilitating cultural cooperation between artists, cultural operators, researchers and cultural politicians in the broader Europe is LabforCulture (www.labforculture.org). It was initiated by the independent European Cultural Foundation  (www.eurocult.org) and now operates through a public-private partnership, with the European Commission one of its many funding partners. LabforCulture currently offers information in English, French, Polish, German and Spanish – soon, also, Italian – about funding sources for projects that are border-crossing physically and psychologically, about possible project partners, about legal and social conditions prevailing in specific regions. It also continually maps the artistic landscape of all countries and regions in this wider Europe. LabforCulture stems from an acknowledgement of Europe’s ever-increasing cultural diversity and the consequent need for intercultural dialogue if we want to live together peacefully and face a rapidly changing world.

 

In summary: serious intercultural dialogue presupposes an exchange of intercultural information and a willingness for proactive cultural and artistic cooperation among people and peoples at local, national and European levels – always bearing in mind that people have complex personal ‘senses of belongings’ (identities).

 

Official European strategies and measures

The measures that can be taken as part of the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue have to be regarded in the light of ‘the possible’. The European Commission is not an autonomous body. Without the consent of all Member States and the approval of the European Parliament, the Commission could neither have proclaimed such a year nor spent money on it. This is often forgotten. ‘Brussels’ tends to be blamed for decisions taken unanimously by the Member States. Once the national representatives are back home, they often distance themselves from their joint commitments due to internal, sometimes nationalistic reasons. Poland is certainly no exception. Especially in the cultural and educational fields, the Commission has very restricted powers. It can support relevant local, national cross-border projects and complement them.

 

All Member States felt politically and morally compelled to agree on the Year of Intercultural Dialogue because they all have to deal with migration issues, past and present, and they are all bound by jointly agreed political values. These values include the unrestricted rule of law, respect for human rights (of natives and ‘strangers’), and a preference for dialogue rather than suppression or war.

 

When the 2008 Year of Intercultural Dialogue was proclaimed in 2006, many of us were sceptical. Was this just another emblematic slogan fit for vacuous Sunday sermons? Did not the very small budget allocated by the Commission justify our scepticism? And how, anyway, was intercultural dialogue understood by the Commission, given that it would be interpreted variously by the Member States according to their own perspectives? We critics were proved wrong. We began to realise that the Year was one promising element within a long‑term, overarching strategy for the wider Europe and the world at large.

 

The Commission overcame its own interdepartmental rivalries as well as the diverging interests of the Member States, and (eventually) took the lead in successfully negotiating the UNESCO ‘Convention on Cultural Diversity’, ratified today by all Members and the EU itself. The 27 EU countries and those neighbours that also ratified the Convention are, therefore, under pressure to implement it. So is the Commission, which now, for instance, includes a ‘cultural clause’ for protecting cultural diversity in all new and renewable treaties with third countries. That is a justified but difficult task if you are under pressure from the World Trade Organisation. (I refrain from going deeper into this matter: it is a topic in itself.)

 

And furthermore, in a joint ‘Communication’ ratified by the EU Members in November 2007, the formally competing Commissioners of cultural and educational, social, media, economic, legal, financial and external affairs (all interconnected issues), announced the first‑ever cultural agenda (www.ec.europa.eu/culture/our-policy-development/doc397_en.htm). This places the various aspects of cultural diversity at the core of their joint policies: an amazing, unprecedented move – even more so since it was followed by practical steps.

 

The new cultural agenda allows for an ‘open method of coordination’ between the Member States – voluntary, involving regular joint debates and evaluations of the agreed intercultural aims. And this was by no means intended as a wholly ‘top-down’, intergovernmental exercise. On the contrary: it is strongly complemented by a ‘bottom-up’ approach that involves civil society players, NGOs and their pan-European networks as well as foundations.

 

In this promising climate, the European Cultural Foundation and the European Forum for the Arts and Heritage (www.efah.org) initiated a pan-European alliance called the Civil Society Platform for Intercultural Dialogue (http://civilsocietyplatform.eurocult.org). This consists of roughly 200 civl society organisations  from Europe’s cultural, educational, environmental, social and human rights sectors. The Platform not only collects best practice examples of intercultural dialogue but is also preparing a set of recommendations to be presented in a so-called Rainbow Paper. The Commission has strongly welcomed the Platform as a dialogue partner in its regularly held ‘Cultural Fora’, that is joint debate sessions. All this was unimaginable five years ago.

 

And there is more news. The Commission is setting up three new intergovernmental platforms: one on ‘mobilty’ (vital if people are to gain insight into the lives of ‘the others’), one on ‘access to culture’, and one on ‘cultural industries’.

 

The 2008 Year of Intercultural Dialogue (www.interculturaldialogue2008.eu/339.0.html) has to be seen in this broader European political context, as an initiative to be shared by all public and private players. The year will be marked by a broad range of local, national and European activities that should have a long-term impact. The Commission will hold seven debates in Brussels, covering a range of intercultural dialogue issues from inter-faith dialogue to the impact of migration, multilingualism and the role of the media. Grants were awarded to a few flagship projects, among them the ‘Stranger’ youth-and-video festival (www.strangerfestival.com) organised by the European Cultural Foundation. In addition, one project in each Member State and in some neighbouring countries will receive European co‑funding.

 

It is clear from the nature of these projects and the various partners involved that the Commission is taking the world at large into account, aiming at social and cultural cohesion in a wider Europe, not just the European Union. The Commission is trying to achieve this goal by stimulating information-sharing, communication and cooperation, with arts and culture at the heart of the matter. It is attempting to make us all aware of our many cultural differences (or multiple identities, as some prefer to call them), and deal with them proactively and with respect. If that is the definition of ‘European identity’, then I agree with it. Being a psychological and physical migrant myself, though a privileged one, I welcome these new, joint cultural policies. They offer a great opportunity.