European Year of Intercultural Dialogue - The Purpose of The European Year of Intercultural Dialogue

The Purpose of The European Year of Intercultural Dialogue

The purpose of European Years generally has become similar to that of EYID:

• "to contribute to giving expression and a high profile to a sustained process of intercultural dialogue which will continue beyond that year" (Article 1 of the Decision establishing the Year)

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 (such as the Lifelong Learning programme cited above, whose Call for projects includes this priority at different points: see for example sections 1.1.3 and 4.2.4). 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 (preparatory) year.

For this particular European Year, Commissioner Ján Figeľ has suggested three specific objectives:

• "raising the awareness of European citizens and of those living in the Union;
• developing social and personal habits that will equip us for a more open and complex cultural environment;
• finally, intercultural dialogue is linked to a more political goal: creating a sense of European citizenship".