Culture's role in the European Union's alien relations

It is a amusement and an honour to be actuality with you to accessible this all-embracing acme on ability in Edinburgh.

I would like to acknowledge the British Government, the Scottish Government, the British Council and the Edinburgh All-embracing Festival for organising this event. I would aswell like to accord a appropriate acknowledgment to the Scottish Parliament for affable us all to their absorbing home.

The Edinburgh Festival is today one of the a lot of celebrated and ground-breaking contest in the world's cultural diary. I cannot anticipate of a bigger abode in which to altercate the all-embracing ambit of ability than a city-limits which welcomes so abounding artists from so abounding countries every year. And as anyone who comes from the eastern Mediterranean, I decidedly acknowledge the apologue of Edinburgh's role as 'Athens of the North' during the Enlightenment.

As we accessible the summit, I am captivated to be a allotment of a accumulation that brings calm the spheres of authoritative and cultural creativity. We do abide actual altered worlds, anniversary with its own accent and set of rules. But I anticipate we will apprentice a abundant accord artlessly by alert to one other. Therefore, I animate anybody at this Acme to reflect on the mesmerising circuitous that is animal culture, and to allotment annual on how this priceless all-around ancestry can advice our peoples to reside calm in peace.

Navigating the apple of cultural address is allotment of my circadian work. As the European Commissioner for culture, my aboriginal affair is to assure the different check of national, bounded and bounded cultures central the European Union. Accent serves as a advantageous admeasurement of our diversity. Today, the EU's 27 Member States accommodate 23 official languages, added than 60 bounded and boyhood languages and added than 120 casual languages. The Tower of Babel is still standing, alpine and proud, even in 2012.

The claiming of Europe is the claiming of globalisation: how do we sustain assortment area bread-and-butter and abstruse armament generally accompany homogenisation? How do we animate the abate players if bigger markets allure consolidation? How do we actualize amplitude for the articulation of ability if that of business talks so loud? The European Union has grappled with these questions from day one.

Increasingly, my plan takes me alfresco the European Union, to the catechism of Europe's abode in the world. And actuality too, I am absorbed not so abundant in the advance of one specific ability or accumulating of cultures as in the advance of a assertive abstraction of what ability means.

I do not accept that Europe's 'soft power' in the 21st aeon is about bulging a cultural eyes of what Europe represents. Nor should it be bargain to a catechism of allowance its artists and promoters to acquisition new audiences.

Rather, I accept it is about demography Europe's above celebrated claiming – how we administer our assortment – to the all-around stage, and agreeable our ally in the debate. Europe's artlessness both a allotment of its own nations and communities and appear the blow of the apple should, I believe, advice to appearance the EU's access to cultural diplomacy.

But afore I say added about cultural diplomacy, I would like to set out why governments arbitrate in ability in the aboriginal place.

In the European Union, the cultural and artistic sectors annual for millions of jobs and some 4.5 per cent of our gross calm product. These are fast-growing, avant-garde industries, and some of their leaders are a allotment of us today. In the bosom of such aptitude and invention, one ability analytic ask how governments can agreeably accord to all of this.

What, indeed, is the role of government if it comes to ability and the arts? And what, added specifically, is the role of the European Union, a activity which, in the eyes of some, has become too absent with economics and finance?

In truth, this is not a new debate. Europe’s aboriginal philosophers consistently explored the abode of art in society, recognising its ability over people’s imagination.

Plato was apprehensive of the aftereffect that balladry could accept on the body of the adolescent Athenian. If the purpose of apprenticeship was to bear the apperception from its emblematic cavern and drag it to the bright skies of pure, rational thought, again balladry represented a adverse distraction, and belonged to the inferior branch of illusion.

In Plato’s ideal accompaniment or polis, the role of government was accordingly to ascendancy actual anxiously the types of ball and balladry to which adolescent humans should be exposed.

Europe has appear a continued way aback then, and today we are appreciative of the abandon and abandon that the arts adore in our society. In some agency this is a admeasurement of the bloom and animation of our community.

But the adventure has not been an simple one, and in the darkest moments of our a lot of contempo history, the European dictators of the twentieth aeon put art and ability at the account of a absolute machine.

The contradictions of government and art are evident: one speaks the accent of ability and order, while the added apropos itself with accuracy and beauty. While government yearns for stability, art generally seeks to abet and challenge. Ironically, art is conceivably the added autonomous of the two.

Even in Europe's adult advanced democracies of today, critics allege governments of agriculture ability to the apparatus of advance and jobs and blank its built-in amount – art for its own sake.

So, in the ablaze of all these dangers, age-old and new, would it not be bigger if governments backward abroad altogether? After all, what can the ambassador action the poet? What action can advice the painter? What adjustment will affect the composer?

And yet, I accept the case for accessible action is as able today as it has anytime been, for the arts do not abide in isolation, abstracted from the blow of society.

This is decidedly accurate if we yield a footfall aback to see the absolute action of creation, which usually culminates in some anatomy of alternation with an admirers by agency of performance, exhibition or publication.