What is, after all, Europe, if not an assembly of peoples who share the same specific heritage, whose mission is to bear forth fruit, in the interest of the whole world? The "Eurocentrism" of the citizens of different countries and their institutes has often been criticized; it has been claimed for some time that we are witnessing now the danger of a real "fortress Europe," being constructed through the European Union, a region of prosperity closed on itself. Such criticisms are the more vivid since there is, almost everywhere in the world, as I could state during my numerous journeys, no less than the director general of UNESCO himself, an expectation, a desire to have a Europe other than a strictly economic entity. Europe, then, does not have to be made uniquely for the reasons of egoist interest, but also to respond to such an expectation.

What Europe do we mean here? It is not so much the first economic power as the continent of liberty, diversity, pluralism, reconciliation of the ancient "hereditary enemies", of dialogue, openness to the world and peace, of the culture of peace. Its contribution to the latter, as it is deemed necessary and distinguished everywhere, stands out. We must "think out a Europe", as Edgar Morin invites us to it, not as a model, but as a particular laboratory of multicultural democracy, of lasting development of the culture of peace. Indeed, let us not forget, if we want it to be realized and to last, that the Europe which is being constructed today, so slowly and imperfectly, has for its ultimate objective neither economic power, nor material well-being, but the definite no to war and dictatorship. In any case, this was what the "fathers founders" had in their heart. Europe joins today a planetary assembly which is no longer dominated by it, nor by the antagonism of the "blocks," but is "globalized". In order to reconcile the global with the local, to promote its common objectives and preserve its diversities, mankind needs a Europe whose cultural tradition is the most swarming, polycentric and contesting, a "culture medium" within which the opposites confront, giving birth to new realities. In the face of the threat to global uniformity, it depends entirely on us to become aware of the need to oppose any centralistic vision; the actual technological development in fact permits the diverse and the multiple. Such is also the message of the report of the Commission of Culture and Development, presided over by Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, which is entitled Our Creative Diversity.

On the basis of Europe one finds therefore the common culture of Europeans, a culture rich with the multiplicity of its expressions and its national, but also - and I would insist on this point - regional and local identities. It is the irony of history that the most celebrated phrase, attributed to Jean Monnet which he in fact never wrote or said ("if I were to start again I would start from culture") has become the commonplace of any discussion on the European civilisation or on the integration deemed to be purely economic. Another irony is that this unauthentic declaration now makes J. Monnet - whose immense merits are evidently not called into question - the first visionary of a Europe of culture, which he certainly was not, casting into shadow those intellectuals, educators and politicians of all the horizons of Europe who, with courage and obstinacy, are truly tempted to "commence" from culture. I am happy I can pay tribute to them now.

Indeed, culture is far from being an obstacle to the union of Europe; it is what unifies the Europeans most profoundly through the diverse expressions of the same values and their artistic, literary, architectural or technological "products". Therefore what we mean these days is not to give to Europe a cultural dimension which it has had for centuries, but to make Europeans aware of that common treasure which until now has presented them in a too exclusive spirit, so in a fragmented manner. Nothing of that which has counted in the cultural European heritage is ever confined to the borders of one single State. There is nothing purely national, so in the European creations, but as a natural continental extension of new issues of the local hearth and home. Thus there is in it Roman art and Baroque, opera and sonnet, Romanticism just as surrealism, cubism just as liberalism or socialism. In short, almost everything that has made what we are. The Europe of culture is also one, made up of the ties incessantly woven between nations, cities and regions. Mozart is at home in London and in Paris, Chopin in Nohant, Liszt in Tivoli. And who would forget that miraculous radiation, at the turn of the centuries, of the "golden triangle" Vienna-Prague-Budapest, wherein music, literature and plastic arts were born and at once radiated, to say nothing of, excuse me a bit, psychoanalysis?

UNESCO has been - and this is one of my numerous reasons to be proud - one of the first institutions to proclaim that transnational pan-European dimension in the very heart of the Cold War, the period during which UNESCO remained the only intergovernmental place of encounter and dialogue between creators and sages of the East and the West. We do not intend either to create, or to discover some kind of European cultural identity, "evident and unobtainable" by definition, according to the just formula of Pierre Nora, for that which characterizes it is its infinite diversity.

What is then our challenge? It is not to form petty European nationalists, but men and women aware of sharing, at the level of the continent, a complex heritage, rich and fertile. The obstacles to the unity of Europe, as Robert Schuman had already said in 1950 - but have we considerably developed since then? - are not in the facts but in the spirit.

I have been waiting for a long time, to take up this challenge, for the Central-Eastern Europe, the true "vital centre of gravity" of the continent according to Milan Kundera from the afterward to his Book of the Smile and the Forgotten. As Jacques Rupnik has also rightly written, "economically speaking, the East needs the West, but culturally speaking, it is the West that needs the East, precisely because it is there where 'the soul of Europe' has been preserved, the idea of Europe inasmuch as culture". The Europeans of the East have indeed a pluralistic historical tradition which is profoundly anchored, an acute sensibility to the complexity and relativity: "To belong to the Europe of the middle", Gyorgy Konrad wrote soon after the fall of the communist regimes, "is to consider plurality as one value". This is perhaps a "romantic" vision of Europe, more centered on the values, and in particular on the key value of the culture of the Europeans which remains the best possible rampart against totalitarianisms: the person... The person is not synonymous with the individual, even though we sometimes employ the two terms indifferently. The individual, a simple example of the species, is - on the social level - an abstract element, lost in the mass, made indifferent, interchangeable, predictable and encoded in statistics, separated from its fellow creatures - isolated, we could say. Although it is attached with an identity, it is lacking in personality, and this is all the difference.

The person is autonomous - in other words, etymologically speaking, "sovereign" - but tied with the society by the role it plays. The person is, above all, a potential actor within a group, the very essence of the free and responsible citizen. The term alone of the "person" comes from the Latin persona, and it is the term of the theatre denoting the mask connected with the role of the actor who was wearing it while playing. Is a person she or he who participates, in other words who takes part and therefore shares. It is when he or she shares, therefore in peace, that the individual becomes a person. The soldier sent to the front, wearing a uniform, subjected to orders and destined for massacre, is only an individual, sublimated after the modern national wars into an anonymity of the "unknown soldier". The person, who comes from the foundations of the ages and ripened in the course of the 28-century long history of Europe, born in Greek cities, accommodated in Rome and enriched by the contributions of Christians, Celts, Arabs, the Germans and Slavs, it can and must today, more than anytime before, realize, on the scale of the whole world, all the potentialities which are in it. These are, undoubtedly, the main contributions of the European culture to the world of today and tomorrow. This is why I have decided to engage UNESCO on this way, in the perspective of the extension of a culture of peace.

Participation and citizenship presuppose education, in the most concrete sense of the word. But how can we form persons in the world under constant mutation? The blossoming of the person must start from prime childhood and be continued throughout the whole life. It is the permanent education that will found the person of the 21st century and will provide the means of growth in the process of adaptation. The social organization of participants, democracy must become the political system of the students of life. In any case, this is one of the principal conclusions of the report for UNESCO, a report made by the international Commission on education in the 21st century, presided over by Jacques Delors.

Education signifies neither passive apprenticeship, nor submission to a propaganda. The person makes its voice heard and understood when it says "no." Contrary to the individual drowned in the mass the person exists by itself, engaged in the disputes of the city, unruly, insubordinate when it should. The education I have in mind will voluntarily form rebels. For that which the European culture teaches us, more than any other in the positive and negative myths which found it and reveal it, from Prometheus to Ulysses, from Antigone to Faust, is to be rebels who believe in one cause, and not just passive witnesses of a destiny. According to the beautiful definition of Hendrik Brugmans, the founder of the College d'Europe de Bruges, Europe is "the continent of nonconformists".

"The decline of society starts", as wrote Denis de Rougement - rebel and European par excellence - "when man says: what will happen? instead of asking himself: what can I do?" As a European myself I am convinced that there are no insoluble problems for those who confront the reality with the weapons of their dreams and refuse the fatality of the status quo. Just as I have written in a recent poem:
 Only the rebels
 Are on the look-out
 For the change
 which the human condition requires