The world scenario that unfolds at the start of the XX1 century is fraught with turbulence, violence, anxiety and fear. The attack on the Twin Towers of the 11^th September 2001 has triggered the escalation of hatred and violence. The removal by military means of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the Hussein dictatorship in Iraq has produced a complex and blood soaked aftermath, read by many observers as the epitome of an ideological and cultural conflict, widespread and far-reaching.

The signs for an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the root of much of the tension prevailing in the Middle East and other Muslim regions have been blurred. Hatred and violence hit both Arabs and Jews and seem to have escalated beyond control.

Moreover, the planet is facing other major challenges, including poverty, massive displacement of people running for their lives from war-torn regions and religious rifts that continue to fuel the global conflagration. The obscene gap between the rich and the poor compounds the problems: at the turn of the XX1 century 1.3 million people live in absolute poverty. According to the United Nations, 20% of the poorest people on earth live on the miserable fraction of 1.1% of global revenue, while the richest 20% gobble up 85%. More than 800 million persons worldwide suffer from hunger or malnutrition; 1000 million have no access to health services; 880 million are illiterate and 4000 million do not have any access to basic means of telecommunications. According to statistics published by UNESCO (2000) at the start of the XXI century there were at least 72 countries living below the international poverty line, where more than half the population lives below the line of US$2 a day.

But the culture of poverty should not be perceived only in terms of a lack of material goods or financial revenue. Poverty is harnessed to different forms of marginality, discrimination and social exclusion. There is a cultural injustice rooted in paradigms of representation that includes cultural and gender domination, inequality, access and distribution of resources. Such cultural injustice, therefore, should be adjusted by conceiving of culture as a sphere for relevant, political action, implying the moral value of justice, democracy and the search for the resolution of conflict, in all its shades and manifestations.

It is evident that such bleak realities require visions of solidarity, peace and stability, the same visions that inspired the founding fathers of the European Union after the devastating wars that had reduced European to rubble. As Albert Einstein would have put it, in moments of dire crisis, “only imagination is stronger than knowledge.” Inertia and inaction at such a moment the world is currently sustaining would hold further disaster for the future.

On the other hand, post-modern thought has been confronting the cultural tenets emanating from the Enlightenment in Europe, where human reason replaced theocentric forms of enquiry. Common rationality and the laws of reason are now challenged by the post-structural position against any metaphysical comfort. We live in what Ulrick Beck has termed “the risk society”, where everything is in a state of flux and impermanence.

We live in an age where the very notion of culture is threatened by the neoliberal demands of the market, sustaining the need for bread and circus according to an agenda constructed by the media and other agents. Indeed, what we should be looking at is a re-invention of culture as a critical, political discourse, focusing on the creation of “utopias”.

The utopias introduced at this juncture are not meant to be understood as detached, imaginary cities, but those grounded in hard reality, utopias that are given momentum by introducing a cultural policy that is also meant as cultural politics. This appears to have become imperative. Cultural membership to the public sphere should be related to an authentic social movement with national, regional and global dimensions, looking at concrete fields of action. There is an immediate need for artists, writers and intellectuals to assume an organic role, to review their responsibilities towards respective societies and ensure that cultural action emanates from the life-world itself. Such cultural action should move the pluralist idea and affect moral enquiry. There is a dire need for cultural and intellectual action to be lived as a total vision of the world. In an evolving world where everything is changing (and everything seems vulnerable) intellectuals and creators should not abrogate their inventive power, but should move into the community, fomenting provocative thought and action, challenging the “iron cage” that had been identified by Max Weber. They should re-invent the poetical and the spiritual and give them “political” significance and currency.

A European Proclamation

The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (December 2000) makes a “solemn proclamation” addressed to the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union and the European Commission. The preamble to the Charter commits the EU to a new contract for the peoples of Europe, based on the continent’s “spiritual and moral heritage.” Furthermore, the Charter proclaims “indivisible, universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality and solidarity” and places at the heart of its activities “an area of freedom, security and justice.” There is no equivocal strain in the Charter’s commitment to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, expression, information, education, assembly, academic pursuits and artistic creation. The ethos of such cultural commitment therefore, is informed by moral considerations, harnessed to a clear, spiritual vision informing the proclamation.

Within such a context, the present writers would wish to draw attention to the Toledo Conference (November 1995) organized by the European Commission. To counter the prediction of a clash of cultures, religions and civilizations, the Commission summoned the colloquium in order to have the three monotheistic cultures bordering the Mediterranean namely Christianity, Islam and Judaism, meet and reflect on values and witnessing they can bring together.

According to Jacques Santer, President of the EC, the Toledo Conference was called “to know more about the message that the Mediterranean religious and humanist cultures wanted to communicate to a wider public concerning the great challenges facing our societies.” Not only was the Toledo meeting convened on the basis of the Euro-Mediterranean cultural heritage, but it was also expected to declare in what way the three monotheistic faiths can “contribute to reconciliation”, by way of intensifying inter-religious dialogue and extending it to the whole Mediterranean region.

A Trans-Mediterranean Network

One of the concrete ideas to emerge from Toledo was to create and structure a Trans-Mediterranean network between existing or future autonomous research centres. The network would be characterized by the intellectual transparency between cultural analysts, intellectuals, artists, believers, academics and students of religious-cultural science from around the Mediterranean basin.

Participants stressed that such networking was extremely vital not only in attempting to defuse tension in the area/s interesting the Middle East conflict (described at the Toledo Conference as “flares of distress”), but also to translate in practical terms the declarations of the European Commission in view of justice, democracy, marginilisation and exclusion, the fight against poverty, the promotion of civil society and not least, the floods of immigrants reaching Euro-Mediterranean shores.

The Toledo colloquium also insisted on “the duty of political authorities, in particular European ones, to accommodate such a network and to ensure its financial independence.” It was therefore recommended that the European Union give financial support to a scholarly, cultural centre about religions in Europe, their international connections and the positive contributions that such connections would make to respective cultural and social contexts.

The Case for Malta

In spite of physical and material limitations Malta has a long history of Euro-Mediterranean protagonism, both politically and culturally. The island was at the centre of long struggles for power between rival warmongers, sustained centuries of colonization but nevertheless, was elected as a seat for learning, with a university that was established 410 years ago. The bridging of cultures is no innovation for Malta and the concept of Euro-Mediterranean Partnership is consonant with this facet of Malta’s foreign policy.

Within the dimension of a wider Europe and a neighbourhood policy, Malta is in an ideal position to contribute culturally and intellectually towards a deeper understanding of the nature of dividing walls between North and South but above all in the Middle East. Malta’s state of political neutrality should be perceived as a valuable and active one in this respect.

Malta has had its share of the problem related to displaced immigrants, pouring in from Africa, Eastern Europe and the Middle East and therefore the country can understand the plight of asylum seekers, running for their lives and looking for compassion. Malta can empathize morally, politically and culturally and in effect, the Education Authorities, in association with the Ministry of Social Services and the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts have recognized the rights of displaced persons for culture. A series of creative workshops using art, music and theatrical techniques for therapeutic reasons were launched, engaging children of asylum seekers and unaccompanied adolescents landing from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Malawi, Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Moldavia, Palestine and Iraq. At this point it is relevant to point out that Malta’s cultural policy is also committed to the creation of empowering schemes for the disabled, drug addicts undergoing rehabilitation programmes, victims of domestic violence and other groups on the margin.

The Clash of Cultures & Spiritual Unity

Malta is in a position to activate the bid for Euro-Mediterranean solidarity that might well lead to the creation of effective forms of common structures. The small island-state is also aware that the clash of cultures, symbolized not only by the Arab-Israeli conflict but also by Islamic elements resisting latter day occupation and hegemony, has reached a particularly critical stage and that there is a pressing moral and spiritual obligation to look for effective resolutions.

This points back to the Toledo proposal to bring creative minds from the cultural and religious spheres together in order to research terms of peace and harmony in a structured project, financed by the European Union. Malta would be ideally suited to host the documentation centre about religious cultures in the Euro-Mediterranean region. Such a centre would indeed mean “more Europe, more culture” and would function as a key laboratory of ideas, investigating questions of socio-political and ethical relevance objectively and constructively. It would present itself as a new empowering tool in overcoming the strictures that often bog down the concept of culture as effective transversality, especially in addressing conflict situations.

In November 2003, at the end of an in-depth re-evaluation of the social and cultural function of the Church, Malta was called to contribute to “the spiritual unity of the old continent.” Following a lengthy Diocesan Synod, Malta’s Archbishop reminded the population that as from May 2004, it will be part of “a common European home” of four hundred million people and that it is “imperative for the nation’s conscience” to make a moral contribution in the construction of the European common home. Declaring its active participation as a general interest member of the Malta-EU Steering and Action Committee, the Maltese Church, a key contributor to the island’s rich cultural and social heritage, will seek to respond to the challenges and opportunities of EU membership and is therefore calling for the Maltese to participate actively in the concept of “unity through diversity.”

The Maltese Church also recalled Pope John Paul’s message to the Meeting of Pontifical Academies (November 2003), soliciting Europeans not to “yield uncritically to a consumerist continent indifferent to spiritual values.”

Over the past decade, as the XX century made way for the new millennium the appeal for “spirituality” has been gaining more currency in European cultural circles. In 1993, the European Round Table on Human Rights and Cultural Policies, convened in Helsinki, heard Rod Fisher from the Arts Council of Britain and Julia Hausermann from the Rights and Community Centre of Switzerland quote from the poetry of John Donne, describing every man as “a piece of mankind”. Both speakers implored the “European ideal” to be activated for the sake of all “multi-faith communities”, a submission endorsed by several other speakers, including Spanish artist Antoni Tapies, who told the Summit that the most ambitious artistic project intellectuals can undertake is to “help citizens achieve deep, contemplative spiritual experiences.”

A centre for multi-faith, cultural-spiritual dialogue in a Euro-Mediterranean context would bring newness, uniqueness and hope for a troubled region and would invest much vision in the European Union.

Other Prospects

Besides the proposal for the creation of a catalytic, multi-faith centre that is being submitted by the present writer, Malta has also made vital proposals and declarations of support in terms of its policy framework for the Mediterranean. The following issues, informed by the “Wider Europe – Neighbourhood Policy” programme, launched in 2003 by the European Commission and later endorsed by the European Commission, are

essential keys to Malta’s foreign cultural policy:

· the proposal to set up an agency to manage the Mediterranean resources that lie outside national jurisdiction;

· the full support for the setting up of a Euro-Mediterranean Parliamentary Forum which may be turned into an Assembly generating co-operation between neighbouring legislators;

· the setting up of a Euro-Mediterranean investment structure that would address the needs of SMSs, given the proliferation in Malta and neighbouring countries of such industries, notably those catering for crafts and other traditional domestic industries;

· the setting up and the hosting of a Euro-Mediterranean Foundation of the Dialogues on Culture;

· the establishment of a Mediterranean Common Sea Heritage Management System that would entail also the co-operation of non-EU countries as partners: the system would not only undertake to safeguard underwater heritage issues and the Mediterranean’s delicate health from an environmental standpoint, but would also deal with such human concerns as the mobility of asylum seekers, where millions line up in North African countries, waiting for an opportunity to seek refuge in Europe.

Malta subscribes to the European Declaration of Cultural Objectives, ratified by Ministers responsible for Cultural Affairs in all the states party to the European Cultural Convention (1984). The Declaration affirms that governments should promote policies:

(i) “to enable everyone to contribute to the shaping of ideas and to participate in choices which determine the future”;

(ii) “to promote recognition of cultures of regions”, in such a way that diversity “will allow the emergence of new forms of social cohesion.”

Malta’s proposals can go a long way in formulating Euro-Mediterranean policies that neutralize increasing fragmentation and tension. Allied to this cause one would hope to find artists, intellectuals and cultural operators moving away from the stereotyped perception of art and directing themselves to the heart of the dialectics linking culture and development. To quote Javier Perez de Cuellar, President of the UNESCO World Commission on Culture and Development, there is an urgent need for artists “to reinvent the world and determine their new role and responsibilities towards it.”

Professor Joe Friggieri is an established author and head of the Department of Philosophy at the University Malta. Mario Azzopardi is a poet and head of the Malta Drama Centre, a state institution attached to the Division of Education. This paper was written jointly and presented in November, 2003 at a symposium in Poland on the theme of European Integration. Both writers are convinced campaigners for the need to bring the Mediterranean closer to the concept of unity in diversity in Europe.