20 years ago …

When the Berlin Wall fell, my sense of elation was mixed with surprise and insecurity about the future. I had been living in Europe already 14 years, 12 of them in Sweden. I had toured with performances in East Germany, Poland, the Baltic States and Czechoslovakia, during some difficult years. I had come to know people on “the other side of the Wall” as colleagues, spectators and concerned citizens.

For many Western Europeans the confusion was intense. Europe had changed radically after World War II. Dark shadows had fallen across large areas of our common cultural and intellectual map. I remember a close friend saying, as we watched the TV newscasts from Berlin: “It feels as if someone is returning stolen parts of my body - Budapest my arm, Kraków my leg, Praha one of my lungs. I can write, walk and breathe again.” Our common cultural heritage was re-weaved - or at least the possibility suddenly existed.

But is that really what happened? Did a new free exchange of ideas and initiatives erupt? Did the great encounter between writers, philosophers, political activists and poets take place? Is Europe unified?

The obvious answer is negative. In fact, Europe has never have been so fragmented as it is today. The domination of the West, politically and economically, is still status quo. And to make things worse, there are second and third class Eastern nations, outside the EU, outside major investment schemes of global capitalism, outside Fortress Europe.

What are the cultural opportunities in this fragmented reality?

Before the Fall of the Berlin Wall, many active exchanges took place between artists and audiences. A political freeze was on and the West had blocked economic development in Communist countries. But people kept contact with one another. Books were exchanged. Theatre performances were shown on both sides of the Wall. Movies were passed along with scripts and poems. On my visits 1980-1989, I carried with me coffee, oranges and printing machinery.

Today, the barriers are less invisible. Globalization rules and regionalism is weakened. The nations around the Black Sea have limited cultural exchange. The separation of languages, political history and blocked mobility makes relations difficult.

We have so much to learn. Avoiding neo-colonialism and cultivating mutual transformation. The experiences and competence in Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and even the new EU countries Bulgaria and Romania are not yet incorporated into the European picture. Let’s start with culture!

Re-creating our originality …

Watching my neighbors in the southern Italian village where I spend my free time. Fiorenzo, his sister and her husband, three daughters and a son, are gathering olives. They shake the trees one after one to get the earliest and greenest olives to fall. Several days of work plus hours at the olive press: the result is about 50 liters of olio extra virgine. You can’t pay a just price for this olive oil.

Another neighbor - who works in the nearby city of Salerno and commutes 3 hours everyday - told me over a coffee why he chooses to remain in this small village with his family. He mentions security, nature, food, the intimacy (sometimes painful) of a village. And at the same time he likes working in Salerno, with pulse and diversity.

He says suddenly and calmly: “We need to re-create our originality. We can’t return to something but we can re-invent it. Only then will our village have a function in a future world. Everyone will want to live here.”

After visiting a number of resort areas in Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Norway, Sweden and England during the last few years with Black/North SEAS, I understand his point. There seems to be two ways of responding to the challenges of coastal towns. Either romaticizing the past, desperately clinging to heritage. Or throwing it all out and chasing desperately after what people might want.

For a moment my neighbor had a new grip on the challenge: to re-create originality. To maintain the integrity of the community and offer it as a place for recreation, culture and exchange. Re-imagining the idea of civilization. Everyone will want to live there.

Together with Fiorenzo and his family, three other men from Poland and Romania will help with the olives the next few weeks. It is not a profitable business on this scale. But it is a community exercise in originality. Not folklore. Practical and tasteful.

Raising the stakes …

I was pleasantly surprised to see a wink towards culture in the latest series of budgets and counter-budgets at this early stage  in the campaign towards Swedish national elections 2010. A special focus was given to international and intercultural investment. The media missed it.

It began with the recently launched Proposition on Culture, presented by the current government as a political reaction to an earlier commissioned national survey on culture. The more radical and confused elements of the national survey have been put aside. The Minister for Culture Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth offers a clear position on intercultural action, without proposing any extra resources. Instead, her budget refers to the present experiment - about 1 (one) million Euros annually for three years - and underlines the need for further analysis. This money runs out in 2010. Intercult is one of the organisations following defined international missions in return for this fragile subsidy.

The opposition - composed of social democrats, left democrats and the green party - offer a shadow budget including 2 (two) million Euros a year for three years, earmarked for intercultural action. A 100% increase. Maybe we should be content that the issue is even on the table. Maybe we should applaud and vote.

I am hoping - probably in vain - that increased investment in international exchange, as proposed by the opposition, might raise the stakes. Can Lena Liljeroth and her team offer other solutions? Which political narrative best incorporates a modern and progressive approach to interculture? Which alliance is willing to see cultural initiatives that cross borders as primary research and development for the European project? Which political alternative opens our perspectives internationally?

It seems like a good litmus test for the sustainability of any future Swedish government, living as we do in an immensely transnational environment.

Nobel Peace Prize: Why Obama?

Many were surprised and some even shocked when Barack Obama was honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009. Apart from the wish by the Nobel Committee in Norway to play a role in world politics (it seems often that the prize has been decided by what we HOPE someone meant and not by what he/she actually did ...), there may be a cultural rationale for the choice.

Barack Obama is the first major world leader with a clearly mixed cultural/ethnic background to take the stage. It is not his "blackness" which incites our imagination - rather the mixed signals that his roots and upbringing send. For the first time in modern history an American president underlines, both rhetorically and symbolically, the necessity of intercultural competence. He continues to tread sensitive territory, both when it comes to American self-image and the imagination that other peoples have about the USA.

Giving the Peace Prize to Obama is potentially a kiss of death, archiving him already into the history books simply by his election. Endowing greatness is also a way of marginalizing and disarming a leader. Icons are seldom effective implementors of change.

But one can also see it - as someone expressed it in the evening papers - as a "start package" for peace. Maybe it is a reflection on our growing sensation, throughout at least the Western world, that a combination of mixed background, dialogue skills and sincere curiosity about the Other is far preferable to demonization.

At the root of the debate is a cultural/political question. How do we speak with our opponents? How do we share responsibility for global issues like migration, climate change and human rights? What alternatives are there to military action? An essential change from confrontation to consensus seems to be taking place.

Barack Obama has awakened hope among many - apparently even in the Nobel Committee. The Litterature prize this year also reflects the intercultural question, with Herta Müller's German language against a relief of Romanian communism.

Have we begun to understand that hybridity arising from cross-cultural experience is in fact our future strength and not a reason for introversion and drawing hard and populist lines?

EU Culture Forum/Brussels, 29-30 sept

A week ago some 950 people representing the cultural sector gathered in Brussels for the second EU Culture Forum, called by the DG Education and Culture. It was a huge event, taking place at Flagey, the newly launched European House of Culture. A great place for such gatherings, with a number of meeting rooms, screening rooms and a huge concert/plenary room with space for everyone.

The objective was to carry forward the EU Agenda for Culture which was launched already 2007. A kind of station along the way to evaluate how things move forward. As a political event it surely filled its purpose. Member States sent delegations, cultural operators and advocacy organisations mobilized (like Culture Action Europe, the primary network for European cultural policy in the civil sector) and the discussions were lively during the coffee breaks, lunches Flash Info sessions organised as a kind of Agora in the framework of the Forum.

I was present as "grand rapporteur" for one of three themes: intercultural dialogue.

Unfortunately the messages sent by our political leaders were rather weak. Commissioner Jan Figel - who practically the same day left his position while the new Commissioner for Culture and Education has not yet been decided - was present. He said the obligatory words and referred to developments during his period as Commissioner. European Parliamentary leaders Hans-Gert Pöttering and Doris Pack underlined Culture as a necessary area for EU engagement and focused mostly on the instrumental aspects: intercultural dialogue, security, external relations etc. But the words seemed pretty much like fast flying birds - they flew past us with too little substance and no promises of increased resources. Business as usual.

What is most frustrating is that there doesn't seem to be any sincerely engaged EU parliamentarians who see themselves as cultural politicians. The same is true in most EU Member States, Sweden included. Where is that combination of competence and engagement that can make the cultural factor a serious pat of any political vision?

I did not once hear a reference to migration as a major factor in the transformation of our cultural landscape. The diversity of the European urban centers was not dealt with directly. This is either naïve or an intentional avoidance of a potentially uncomfortable theme. Europe is enriched by the diversity of its citizens, including those who were not born here. Concrete preventative action must be taken to reduce the tensions caused by the flow of peoples. Cultural action is essential in this work.

As a colleague from Culture Action Europe put it: “It is time to put our money where our hearts are …”.

The European project, as imagined in its most complementary and constructive form, has been stumbling for far too long. Without serious engagement in cultural action - as a sustainable alternative to introversion, populism and even military action – there will be no European project.

Less than ½ of one percent of the total EU budget towards Culture is not enough to do this job.

In 2009 and far beyond, we need to incite the innovative capacity of an entire continent, facing challenges we don’t even know yet exist and can hardly imagine. It is, in fact, time to put our money where our hearts are. And our hearts back into our work.

starting a blog ...

So they finally convinced me to start blogging.

I guess I'll keep myself to the subject at hand: reflecting on international cultural policy, from a swedish perspective. I've been following the development of European cultural policy through the last few years, as vice president of Culture Action Europe and as a member of the Steering Group for the Platform for Intercultural Europe. Together with IETM - the network for European performing arts - these organisations have been my schools. The broad and inspiring competence that exists in the cultural sector throughout Europe (and not just EU member states!) needs to be distilled and returned to our local, regional and national levels.

So - my blog will NOT be about what I ate for dinner or what famous people I met. I won't touch upon fashion or private scandals or personal attacks.

I will re-flect as honestly as I can about changes in the mood and matter of cultural politics, both nationally and trans-nationally. I will certainly expose idiocy and praise courage when it comes to putting the cultural factor into any future vision of our society.

I will write a couple of times a week and I welcome reactions from anyone.

I hope that in this way I can make a bit more vibrant the assumed gray image of European cultural policymaking and at the same time clarify in simple language the major issues we are facing when transforming Eurocracy into a European Cultural Project.

Join me when you can.

Chris