European Year of Intercultural Dialogue


Intercultural dialogue has long been a principle supported by the European Union and its Institutions. The year 2008 was designated "European Year of Intercultural Dialogue" by the European Parliament and the Member States of the European Union. It aimed to draw the attention of people in Europe to the importance of dialogue within diversity and between diverse cultures.

Definitions

There is no single and universally accepted meaning of "Intercultural Dialogue". Indeed when the European Commission launched EYID by asking 27,000 EU citizens what they thought the phrase meant, by far the most common response was total puzzlement. However, a forum organised by the Council of Europe in November 2006 suggested the following:
Other definitions or usages have been closer to concepts such as inter-religious dialogue and often to active citizenship learning. In a number of countries the phrase refers to dialogue between indigenous people and immigrant peoples, and it can also be used as a metaphor for forms of contact between countries which are not based on military power.
The text adopted by the European Union on EYID does not use any specific definition, but it underlines the role of intercultural dialogue in:

European years

EYID has a number of antecedents in the European Union's policies.
There have been a number of "European Years", beginning in 1983 with the European Year of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises and the Craft Industry. Recent and planned European Years include:
No further European Years have yet been announced, although Commissioner Ján Figeľ, who originally proposed EYID, has reflected publicly about the possibility of designating 2009 as a European Year linking Education, Culture, and Creativity. A full list of European Years is maintained by the European Parliament . It will be seen that many of these years, particularly the more recent ones, are in the educational and social fields. In general they have been designated and run directly by the European Union and its Member States; however, some have been designated and run by the Council of Europe and others were joint operations between the two bodies.

European Activities

Many of the activities of the European Union both contribute to the development of intercultural dialogue and, conversely, require it.
Activities such as the promotion of educational and training exchanges enable young people and academics/teachers/trainers to move around the European Union and require them to operate in cultures and living circumstances different from those they know best. They thus require an openness to learn from another culture, and they help people develop the capacities that encourage this. Similarly, the fundamental freedoms of the European Union are built on the idea that people, goods, services and capital should be able to move around the Union freely; their realisation by individuals and companies both requires and encourages intercultural dialogue.

The purpose of the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue

The purpose of European Years generally has become similar to that of EYID:
European Years generally respond to a perceived need to promote an issue in the public eye; to support relevant public organisations and NGOs in their work; and to provide limited resources for some trans-national work at European level. Recent Years have concentrated more on raising the profile of the issue concerned, less on funding projects through dedicated budgets; they have rather sought to make their issue a funding priority in existing programmes. This system avoids the need to dedicate specific budgets to the European year, or enables them to be spent on projects with higher visibility. Dedicated budgets for recent European Years have been around €12 million between the Year itself and the preceding year.
For this particular European Year, Commissioner Ján Figeľ has suggested three specific objectives:
The legislation designating the year calls for the following types of activity:
In response to this mandate, the European Commission held a three-month consultation about what the Year should entail. This was followed by a Conference and Exhibition on the European Year and on the future of Intercultural Dialogue to help identify good practice. It is now considering how these outcomes should be put into practice.

... at National level

The legislation requires the EU Member States to nominate a national coordination body "responsible for organising that Member State's participation in the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue". This should have been done within one month of the adoption of the legal decision at European level ; but not all Member States have so far done so and the European Commission has not yet published the list of those bodies so far nominated.

Ambassadors

The European Commission appointed fifteen "Ambassadors of the Year" in the run-up to EYID. Like "intercultural dialogue" itself, the role of these ambassadors is somewhat vague, though they are expected to be "committed to, and share, the aims of the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue 2008" and "lend their support to making the Year a success." This vagueness has landed at least one of the ambassadors in hot water with the Commission. When Marija Šerifović appeared to lend her support to the Serbian Radical Party, which favours closer cooperation with Russia rather than the EU, the Commission threatened to remove her from the unpaid ambassadorial post. A spokesman justified the threat by stating that Ms Šerifovic's "political affiliation and activities in no way express the political position of the EU in the context of the Serbian presidential elections which are a matter for the people of Serbia". The threat has not been carried out, perhaps because the Commission listened to its spokesman and decided that Serbian elections are indeed "a matter for the people of Serbia".
The fifteen international intercultural Ambassadors of the Year of Intercultural Dialogue come from all over the world and include intercultural luminaries of the calibre of Charles Aznavour, Abd al Malik, the Dardenne brothers and Marjane Satrapi. These internationally renowned figures are supported by a hundred or so nationally famous national intercultural Ambassadors of the Year of Intercultural Dialogue, who have been appointed by twenty of the twenty-seven member states according to varied and somewhat opaque criteria. Their role is, if possible, even more vague than that of the international Ambassadors of the Year.