Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, access to culture is a sine qua non for the all-round development of any human being. It is, additionally, an essential requirement of any Western European-style representative democracy, a factor in eliminating inequality and an increasingly important factor for progress and development. Culture must, therefore, constitute one of the most solid platforms supporting a Europe of the citizens. It is no longer possible, as Jean Monnet would have wished, to make culture the starting point, which could be a contentious notion at a time when we are concerned primarily with the priorities of economic intervention. We must instead pick up the baton of culture and meet the challenges set by European integration by celebrating the variety of cultures and the cultural dimension of Europe. We live in a globalised society, in an enlarged Europe, in a time of various crises, faced with the new, streamlined and stimulating presence of the national identities and traditional cultures of almost 400 million citizens. In this context, politicians must give serious attention to issues of access to culture and of constructing a European worldview, an image capable of incorporating differences into its procedures, whilst ensuring that these differences are respected and valued, in a pluralistic, tolerant and dynamic way. We therefore call on the Members of this House to rethink and revive the role of the school in access to culture, not only in terms of the basic skills that schools can teach and of the key components in each national identity that each Member State feels should be a part of its programmes, but also in terms of Europe’s enormous cultural heritage, in its almost infinite variety of language, literature, fine art, music, theatre, tradition; in other words, everything that provides each of us with our essential mechanisms for relating to and identifying with the world. Schools cannot, of course, be encyclopaedias, nor should they conform to stereotypical international standards, or merely churn out hackneyed clichés. They must offer citizens a major opportunity for access to culture and must inculcate, in everyone who attends school, from the earliest ages onwards, respect, enthusiasm and a taste for cultural expression that can help citizens to reflect on what it means to be part of Europe’s rich panoply of civilisation and culture. The steps that can be taken towards this end are many and varied and, as far as we are concerned, must begin with specific elements of school life. This report, in which many suggestions from members of the Committee on Culture, Youth, Education, the Media and Sport of every political hue were taken on board, has this very aim: to express the desire, on behalf of Parliament, that we should meet this challenge, because if we do not, European integration will make little sense and will not be worthy of the name. If citizens are armed with a knowledge of European culture, it will surely be impossible for them to remain indifferent towards the values that characterise it. It would be a contradiction in terms to comply with the Lisbon Strategy and at the same to pursue the aims of a knowledge-based economy, if culture were limited to the status of poor relative in this area.

Political group: PPE-DE