Platform for Intercultural Europe

Poiein kai Prattein as member of the Platform for Intercultural Europe is committed to promote dialogue, in order to facilitate integration of migrants / immigrants while upholding cultural diversity in Europe. This can be done best by informing citizens about European policies and programs while promoting open forms of participation. Civil society is based on the Right of Access to Community.

As Michael D. Higgins would stress, culture is afterall a search for truth and thus in need of such spaces which do promote participation in society. This has to be done in respect of every individual with human dignity having different meanings in a diverse world. Crucial is the realization that the central figure of the 21st century is the migrant!

The migrant by Michael D. Higgins

„The twentieth century will end, and the twenty-first emerge, with the figure of the migrant at the centre of things. Continued in the essence of the migratory experience are relationships to time and space that have, up to now, been seen as the experience of the minority which, for most policy purposes, could be neglected without cost.

The neglect of the migratory experience has meant that the nature of intellectual life has become distorted in its assumption of the sedentary, of the systematic, of the power and possibility of tradition.

At the heart of migration lies the transience of things. It is that transience that explains both the risks and the neglected benefits of having chosen, or of having been condemned to break the inherited links to space, time and cultural certainties.

The migratory experience is one of pain. The fact has been documented again and again. If migrants are to possess rights as both human persons and collectives, their rights attach less to place, nation, race or, indeed, property, than they do to persons, individually and collectively. The appalling destruction of the phrase 'human rights' as a term of abuse, hurled by one state at another, is made possible in part by the distortion of locating rights conditionally in space, culture or property.

The migrant's experience cannot be reduced to the learned assumptions of the point of origin or the point of destination. It is an experience born of the flux of things, not only precariously balanced between the learned past and the anticipated future, but creative in itself of something new and different. Migrants are at once the carriers of fear, wonderment and hope.

From that flux is created a unique capacity for tolerance. It is of the nature of transience that absolutes are left behind, that truths are varied and tenuous, all to be tested against the requirements of the human group and persons on the move.

The importance of today's displaced people and migrants is, in part, that they represent all our future possibilities for renewing and reshaping the human composition, the human contribution to the planet.

From an observation of the migrant's world of transience, a problem observed can become an empowerment. For the migrant also gains from the letting go of boundaries, barriers to seeing, cognition, understanding, action and historicity. The migrant regularly reinvests the world within the flux of time and space, as we all must learn to do now. This means letting go, and renewing and replacing institutional certainties, system of logic, patterns of thoughts and cultural security blankets. It is not accidental that the artist often foresees what the politician will labour to learn. It is very understandable when one recognises how often exile is chosen, even if only symbolically, by the artist as a necessary condition for creativity and celebration of the humanistic impulse.

If we are to learn tolerance and establish it as a general rule, it must include then the commitment to hear a multitude of stories, to share a panoply of dreams – as migrants have always been called upon to do – stories of the home left behind, dreams of the destination, food for disappointment perhaps, only to be replaced by a dream held in indomitable hope of the return home.

I have often felt the experience of migration in my own life in another sense of not belonging. As a participant in the intellectual and political world, I have been made conscious of how little sharing there is of insights, what little companionship in struggle, what little celebration of creativity – or what the authoritarians call madness. It is rather a matter of intellectual property being traded, becoming the stuff of joint ventures in derived and dead theoretical flourishes and conceits.

The migrant in the academy has to forget his or her own story. Like all migrants, he quickly comes to know that imitation from close observation is the most important tool in the possession of those who would belong, and would put an end to the alienating terror of transience."

Taken from Michael D. Higgins, “The challenge of building the mind of peace” in: Cause for Concern (2006/2007), Dublin: Liberties Press, p. 62 - 64

Platform for Intercultural Europe

During the founding stages of this Platform, a crucial question was raised, namely whether or not there can be discussion about culture in general without a specific link to the arts? Unfortunately much of the discourse about culture in Europe has become devoid of any reference as to what is happening in the fields of the arts. Ilona Kish from Culture Action Europe stated a discussion about culture without the arts is inconceivable, but how to bring contents of the arts into the realm of work in Brussels having much more to do with strictly lobby work?

If the Platform aims to use intercultural dialogue as tool to bring Europe closer to being an intercultural society, then the criticism of this concept has to be taken into consideration. Studies done by the Platform underline the fact that many projects funded by the EU do not know really what this criterion stands for or whether it is being fulfilled by what they are aiming for in practice.

At best use of the term 'intercultural dialogue' risks being solely an operation based on neutral terms, lest to upset the political sensitivities prevailing at all times in Brussels and in the territories of the member states. With the arts this has little or nothing to do. That discussion during the founding phase has to be kept in mind to assess into what the Platform has evolved into in the meantime.

Rainbow Paper

Departure point for the Platform for Intercultural Europe is the well known Rainbow Paper. It contains some crucial discussion points and surprisingly first policy recommendations not so much to the European Commission, but to Civic Society and its organisations. The Rainbow Paper reflects attempts by some leading members, including Gottfried Wagner (then still director of the European Foundation for Culture) and Ilona Kisch, Coordinator of Action Culture Europe, to define intercultural dialogue as follows:

“Intercultural Dialogue is essentially the activity of individuals. Yet individuals largely live in and through organisations, predominantly in their places of work. Be they public institutions, enterprises or civil society organisations – their structures, and the rules by which they function, determine how much they help foster and valorise cultural diversity in society. They define their capacity to enable Intercultural Dialogue. Capacity building for Intercultural Dialogue in and between organisations and institution must be supported.”

The Rainbow Paper. Intercultural Dialogue: From Practice to Policy and Back (2008), Ch. II

This paper was an outcome of the European Commission having designated 2008 as the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue.

Several organisations obained funds for specific projects which should underline this concept of intercultural dialogue. Outcomes were presented in Brussels at the end of 2008. For instance, the Menuhin Foundation picked up an old idea of testing the receptivity of stories once told in another cultural context. Most interesting was the presentation of a theatre whose actors were deaf and therefore relied on hand signals; applause would have to be shown by holding up both hands and waving them and even if it was thought this could be an universal language, the deaf actors realized very quickly in another cultural context different signs had another significance for the deaf people living there.

Unfortunately the matter of failed cultural policy in view as to what happened in Greece after Alexandros, a fifteen year old boy was shot supposingly by a policeman and which resulted in an eruption of the youth, was not taken up on the spot. Two years later that cultural failure had extended itself to manifest itself as a huge economic crisis affecting prospects of EU integration for the future. The economic crisis was very much on the mind of the participants of the meeting.

2010

The Platform for Intercultural Europe met on the 8th of June 2010 in Brussels and devoted itself in a broad sense to 'Capacity-Building for Intercultural Dialogue'. At the same time, it was designed to reflect upon experiences made by the Platform with regards to 'Practice Exchanges' in three specific locations: Malmö, Vienna and Rom. It was as well an opportunity to measure what progress had been made within one year. Sabine Frank, General Secretary of the Platform, emphasized in her concluding remarks that the discussions and contributions showed that everyone had gained in the meantime a bit more competence.

The Platform had held its last General Assembly precisely one year ago, that is again in June and in Brussels. Those members who needed it were given again travel subsidies by the European Commission to come to Brussels.

2011

This time the Platform met for two days, 24th and 25th of May, in order to give members a chance to present their own projects and to interact with one another. It gave a broader scope to the practice of exchange of experiences as envisioned by the Platform as a way to further intercultural Europe more tolerant towards migrants and therefore reflected in how member states deal progressively with this issue.

Organisation of the Platform for Intercultural Europe

Sabine Frank
Secretary-General

Platform for Intercultural Europe (AISBL),
c/o Culture Action Europe, 10, rue de la Science; B-1000 Brussels
T +32-(0)2 534 40 02; F +32-(0)2 534 11 50,

E sabine.frank@intercultural-europe.org
http://www.intercultural-europe.org

Members of the Platform Intercultural Europe

Poiein kai Prattein is a member of this platform on Intercultural Dialogue since June 2009

Note about documents:

The discussion paper by Francois Matarasso and the call for the campaign to establish an agenda for InterCulture can be found on the following website pages.

Also the first two Practice Exchanges can be found at following links:

http://www.intercultural-europe.org/template.php?page=pa-vienna

http://www.intercultural-europe.org/template.php?page=pa-malmoe

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