In line with its policy calling for a cultural debate and the protection and promotion of cultural diversity, Valletta 2018 identifies the opportunity for discussion and serves as a European platform for discussion on cultural identity.
Through the process of a European convention on cultural identity, the foundation can serve as a catalyst generating research and debate on the fears tied to cultural exchange and in turn address tensions and conflicting positions.
Over the past days, I, as executive director of the Valletta 2018 Foundation, was invited to participate in this year’s 21st edition of the annual Mediterranean forum Les Rencontres d’ Averroes held in Marseilles.
Together with an audience of more than a thousand people from Europe, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, Valletta’s engagement in a wide exchange of views on social topics linked to the Mediterranean maintained its international dimension in the run up to 2018.
The debate in Marseilles – featuring important figures like medievalist Patrick Boucheron from Paris, poet Daniel Maximin from Guadalupe and historian Mostafa Hassani-Idrissi from Rabat, Morocco, who last year presented a paper on a Mediterranean history to share at the first annual Euromed conference held by Valletta 2018 at the University of Malta campus in Valletta, was not alone in addressing thorny issues of identity politics in the Mare Nostrum.
Rather than claiming to celebrate local identities without exploring the diversity within, the European Capital of Culture is the opportunity for different views to be expressed and acknowledged. The aim of such a process, as can be witnessed in various debates across Europe, including the Marseilles annual gathering which Valletta aims to host in the near future, is not to resolve differences through clear-cut policies, but rather to encourage the recognition of the diversity which lies within our families, our communities and our very selves and explore ways of doing so together within the framework of a European project such as Valletta 2018.
While the foundation can boast that it is promoting a unique city, our cultural challenges are a heritage we have inherited in common with the rest of Europe, albeit in various degrees.
While finding ways of healing colonial wounds is still problematic in Franco-Algerian relations, immigration front-line countries like Greece and Malta have other issues of great concern.
As pointed out by Greek journalist Theodora Oikonomides during a lively debate on the Radio France International weekly programme Carrefour d’Europe, including a discussion on Valletta 2018, citizens of Europe need to take stock of the uncertain realities they face by being given the political space to do so, rather than to be made to feel like trespassers on their own future.
And as stressed by Valletta 2018 in discussion with Boucheron in relation to the imposing degree of politics of fear citizens feel trapped by, a cultural commitment to dialogue and civic empowerment needs to be based on a politics of hope.