The Role of Culture and Education

[Schills] Professor Andriessen, we are at an educational institution, I'm a student of Philosophy, so I would like to ask you an idealist question. When we are talking about the identity of Europe, aren't we often forgetting the education and cultural component? It seems to me that this is one of the legs that has been weak. If you have a stool standing on three legs, we have monetary union, economic union, political union. We also have the social pact, which is rather weak. But where is culture and education? Don't they have a fundamental role to contribute in avoiding a crisis?

They certainly have. Perhaps it's tragic, but anyhow it's due to a historical situation. The integration process in Europe is fundamentally based on its historic, traditional, cultural feeling of belonging together. You go back in history to the Renaissance and the time of the Humanists, there was a European unity, not on the basis of political decision, but scientifically, culturally, it was there, from Portugal to Prague University. [But] historically, the process starts in a divided Europe, after two world wars. Europe played a tragic but major role. It started economically. It started, in fact, by bringing together the basic industries, coal and steel, to make it impossible for the old enemies to start war again. When you look at the treaty, you will see that all the means to integrate are means to create a common market, an economic integration process, and it is slow that other factors come. Even if they come in, there is a strong feeling that the European Community should not do more than is strictly needed for this integration process.

Now it comes as conceived by the majority, and culture and education are still not basic or fundamental objectives for the process. [In] the Treaty of Maastricht, for the first time in the process, you find all these elements. Culture is there, European citizenship is there, but it's again related to national citizenship. You cannot be a European citizen if you are not a citizen of one of the twelve member states. European citizenship should be more. It isn't at the moment.

In these new chapters, with these new cultural and education elements, it's very clearly set that legislation of the Community never, never ever is authorized to bring about an approximation of legislation. This means that member states want to withhold their own cultural and educational autonomy. It means that the process of integration in Europe, from this point of view, has to come through the national channels of recognizing cultural identity, giving it possibilities to express itself, having what we have in education -- exchange programs have all kinds of students. I have, in my own lectures in Utrecht 120 to 130 students; 25 percent of them are foreign students. They come from all over the place in Europe, even from Central and Eastern Europe.

So that, of course, we can do. But that is, again, basing itself on an exchange of national identities. So, here is a lack in the process and it will be extremely difficult to fill, that given the accent nowadays on what should be done on the Community level, what should be done on the national level, this famous new principle they have introduced in the Treaty of Maastricht which will not make it easy to give real form and real substance to a European cultural policy. Symbols are not enough, of course.

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