EUROPE, MEMORY AND CULTURAL HERITAGE, by Guilherme d'Oliveira Martins National Coordinator of the European Year of Cultural Heritage.
The European Commissioner for Education and Culture, Tibor Navracsics, on officially opening the European Year of Cultural Heritage recalled on the 6th, at the European Forum for Culture, that we are not just talking about «literature, art , objects, but also skills learned, stories told, food we consume and movies we see. In fact, we need to preserve and appreciate our heritage as a dynamic reality for future generations. Understanding the past, cultivating it, allows us to prepare the future. We are entering a very important moment in the life of the European Union. Despite the signs of crisis (and it is very curious that we have many representatives of civil society and the scientific community in the UK and many young people from all European Union countries but also the Council of Europe) there is a clear awareness of that a culture of peace begins with worship and care for cultural heritage. How can we move forward without departing from our roots? How can we prepare, in an informed and knowledgeable way, future progress without taking care of continuity and change - according to a process of metamorphosis, as Edgar Morin has defended? We seek to sensitize society and citizens to the social and economic importance of culture - with the aim of reaching as wide a public as possible, not in a logic of propaganda or superficiality, but linking the learning of History and the rigor in communication and the defense of languages, articulating education and science, in an open and demanding humanist perspective.
Following the European leaders' debate in Gothenburg on 17 November on education and culture, the long-term Plan of Action for Culture and Heritage should be put into practice. The culture represents the bet on the human factor, so that sustainability is no longer just financial - it must be social, environmental, energetic, technical, or educational, in a word, human. After all, the economic importance of culture is far greater than at first sight (let us remember mobility, training, languages, scientific capacity, efficacy of learning or attention to and care for tangible and intangible heritage, in connection with contemporary creation). If it is true that, according to the Euro-Barometer, 8 out of 10 Europeans consider the cultural heritage important for each one, but also for the community, for the country and for the Union as a whole, it is important to understand that we are talking about a crucial factor in overcoming selfishness, closure, and insurmountable conflict. More than 7 in 10 Europeans agree that the link between heritage and quality of life is relevant in the name of sustainable human development. And 9 out of 10 consider that teaching in schools plays a key role in this area. After all, cultural policies must increasingly focus on the effective attention given to cultural heritage. Hence in Portugal, the connection to schools of this European initiative is fundamental - for its multiplier effectiveness and for the refusal of a commemorative logic, momentary and without social consequences. And if this is the perspective we care about, we can not forget the economic value of the cultural heritage as a source of development - 7.8 million jobs in the European Union are indirectly linked to this issue, such as tourism and many services related to mobility and knowledge. 300 thousand people are directly linked to heritage in the European Union and we
of half of the classified sites (more than 450) in the UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is thus understood that the decision of the Council and the European Parliament of 17 May 2017 to declare 2018 as the Year of Cultural Heritage corresponds to the assertion of an ambitious design: based on the need to enshrine the wills around a European ideal of mutual respect, quality and humanism, certain that we can not leave behind what the generations before us have left us, nor accommodate us to irrelevance and mediocrity.
In Milan this year, the European Culture Forum reflected on the role of culture and creativity for human development. The financial crisis, which we hope to get out in the best of conditions, has been based on illusion, fragmentation and refusal of the medium and long term and complexity ... It is now important to define common vital interests and the common cultural good that can only avenge if there is diversity, mutual collaboration and linkage between social cohesion and the innovative capacity of society. The modern concept of cultural heritage, as defined in the Faro Convention of the Council of Europe of 2005, values memory and considers it a factor of citizenship, dignity and democracy - that is what is at stake.
