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".
Read more about this topic: European Year Of Intercultural Dialogue
Famous quotes containing the words purpose, european, year and/or dialogue:
“Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.”
—Richard Dawkins (b. 1941)
“The Indian is one of Nature’s gentlemen—he never says or does a rude or vulgar thing. The vicious, uneducated barbarians, who form the surplus of overpopulous European countries, are far behind the wild man in delicacy of feeling or natural courtesy.”
—Susanna Moodie (1803–1885)
“You can feel it, in a hundred little ways year after year. It is so certain and inevitable, that the next century will be a time in which it is not simply safe, but commonplace, to be openly gay.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one’s own growing inner self.... The mind’s dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.”
—Harold Bloom (b. 1930)