Gottfried Wagner

talks to Anthony Gardner

'Whenever I hear the word "culture",' runs the famous line from Hanns Johst's play Schlageter, '…I release the safety catch of my Browning.' One would hardly expect Gottfried Wagner, head of the European Cultural Foundation, to take a similar view - but he does believe that culture can be dangerous, and was rightly omitted as a component of the fledgling European Union.

'Both Communism and Fascism had the misuse of culture at the core of their political engineering,' he observes. 'I think after the collapse of the first totalitarian system in 1945, the leaders of the Western European states couldn't but start a unification system based on a very rational economic intertwining of interests, and keep the cultural ideology side as far to one side as possible.' Culture has to be considered 'both as a unifying and as a very, very powerful destructive force. We have had so many examples even in the Nineties: the wars in the Western Balkans were waged by not only engineers like Milosovic, but also by writers and theatre-makers.'

Nevertheless, he adds, the EU's founding fathers were aware that 'in the long run you cannot just build a community on coal and steel', and it was one of them, Robert Schuman, who became the first president of the European Cultural Foundation in 1954. Since then the ECF has developed in tandem with the EU, supporting the process of integration but also watching it with a detached eye. 'It's really important that we are very independent,' says Wagner, 'and often very critical.'

A tall, avuncular man of 56, soft-spoken but eloquent, Wagner has been director of the ECF for five years. He explains that the purpose of the foundation, which is based in Amsterdam, is primarily to bring people together, though it also provides grants and runs a variety of projects to promote cultural co-operation between states: 'It's a facilitator, a meeting platform. Its strength is probably its excellent network of governors and advisers.' Among its achievements has been the creation of the EC's Erasmus programme, funding exchanges of students and teachers between universities in different EU countries; it now hopes to create a similar scheme for artists. Other current projects include One Minutes Junior, which encourages young people to express themselves in 60-second videos, and ALMOSTREAL, which looks at how art can bridge cultural differences.

One advantage of being independent is that the foundation is able to test the waters in matters which the EC is not officially ready to address. 'For example, we recently had the first ever conference on European foreign policy and its possible cultural components. Everyone thought that this came very early - we don't even have a Minister of Foreign Affairs, and it's not sure whether there will be one - but it was a very fruitful conference, and some cautious recommendations have been drawn up, and now we are planning to develop it under the Slovenian presidency.'

He has been encouraged by the support given to the foundation's work by José Manuel Barroso, who declared at the start of his term of office in 2004 that 'reflection about what the EU can be, and what it will be, cannot succeed without a proper look at Europe's cultural dimension'.

'Barroso,' says Wagner, 'is the first president to make very, very clear statements on the importance of culture in the European construction process. What he said in 2004 at the Soul for Europe conference in Berlin was a splendid statement, and though we had doubts about the practical application of such good intentions, I have to admit that there is now a very, very strong team dealing with education and culture.'

Does he himself believe that Europe is close to discovering its soul? 'I personally have great difficulty with these metaphors. All these discourses on identity are very tricky, and in the past have sometimes been shallow or even dangerous, because they're closely related to exclusionist strategies. What we need is internationalisation and cosmopolitanism.'

He was, he admits, a Eurosceptic up until the 1990s. 'What really worried me, being an Austrian, was having the Balkan wars in the immediate neighbourhood: all those hundreds and thousands of people having to flee, and the inability of the member states to find a solution. It was a catastrophe - so deep and so destructive that I came to the conclusion that we had to develop joint instruments to prevent that from happening again. One of the main motives of my work is to contribute to the concept of a strong Europe based on our experiences of the tragedies of the twentieth century.' But, he adds, Europe should not become an empire: rather, it should be a lighthouse, showing how mutual respect can be fostered between people of different origins.

He is keen, therefore, that the concept of 2008 as the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue should have real meaning for the EU's citizens: 'I think the name describes one of the key challenges for the next ten or fifteen years. What has changed after '89 and 9/11 and globalisation is that people are becoming more and more aware that a unity of more than 450 million people has to ask certain fundamental questions about how it deals with questions of diversity and identity. We have to grasp this opportunity.'

To this end the ECF is working with 80 organisations in different communities to provide a 'civil society platform' for discussions, as well as a series of artistic events, including a video festival in June showing the fruits of the One Minutes Junior project.

Working with young people is now one of Wagner's principal interests. 'I want to see if I can connect my own experience with that of the generation which is now between 15 and 25 - to try to understand how they see things. Because among them you can find allies with an interest in building a stronger Europe, not as a goal in itself, but as a means to a fairer world.'

© Anthony Gardner. All views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to the European Commission.