It was during their practical implementation, and especially as urgent questions came from an increasingly broader Europe, that the cultural routes discovered what constituted their force and political relevance: the implementation of a practical repair work on Europe. But what are these geopolitical diagonals along which the cultural routes are registered? They are varied. We chose to present subjects that touch on the history of North-South relationships as well as on the present of artistic creation, the co-operation of professionals from the west and the east and the quality of everyday life.

restoring continuities

"If Europeans today have the feeling of being at a turning point of their history, where the weight of their continent and the future of their civilisation are being played at the same time, this represents concomitantly a force and a weakness. A force: its humanism enables it to pose and try to solve the problems that Europe is currently confronting, just like the rest of the world: environmental protection, fight against all forms of alienation and exclusion, quality of the life and cultural blooming. A weakness: its desire for unification and the efforts it makes in this direction exceed in effect the awareness of its diversities." (Mikhail Narinski and Alexandre Tchoubarian)

While working on the transborder continuity of actions, it is necessary to come up with definitions of the border (material, communal, historical, linguistic...) in order to understand them better and prepare the ground for reconciliation.

By choosing places of gathering, symbolic cities of European routes, even of territories that knew the suffering of confrontations, they also illustrate a posteriori the complexity of confluences.

By gathering - quite simply - actors of different natures, cultures and geographical origins, they try to lead them to tell mutually rich and partial stories and to gather fragments to make a common memory.

While following the voyage of the explorers, the methods of conquest, the consequences of colonisation, the characteristics of settlement or migration, they enable the interference of layers whose purely synchronic reading would give only one aspect of sedimentation.

from west to east, from north to south

Claude Karnoouh affirms that "If we look at it more closely, the foundation of modern Europe could be summarised as a permanent fractioning of empires or multinational multicultural states. Today, it is only in the West of Europe, after the hecatombs and the incommensurable destruction of World War II, that the idea of a regrouping of countries slowly takes shape. To the East, it looks like we are still in a process of division, as if the historical cycle had not yet completed its course".

If we adhere to this analysis, we also wish to cheat it, or at the very least try to accompany the continuing historical cycles of fragmentation, by not leaving any part of Europe outside the processes of co-operation. Working to recreate bonds between the West and the East, but also between the North and the South, so much separated, but for other historical reasons, is a founding mission of the Council of Europe. But working with Europeans of all cultures to choose what makes a community or a continuity is, in fact, the only manner of dealing with the question of the other and at the same time of asking practical questions. Is there still a Balkan heritage community? In what respect can Sicily of the Normans learn something about its own identity as heir to the Vikings in the Baltic zone? How can professional architects treat together the questions of conservation and innovation of buildings and European landscape? And is there a European landscape? How do artists experience together a common European identity in places of production tempted by globalisation?

political prospects

If the cultural routes were founded on the idea that Europeans were "to meet" and no longer only "to visit", it is not only to improve the quality of their leisure time or to make them understand that they share the responsibility of protecting their heritage and of interpreting their history; it is also so that they can work in a better democratic security, founded on tolerance, recognition of minorities or inter-religious dialogue. Andrei Plesu states that: "Communal experience is an experience of imposed resemblances. Heritage experience is one of accepted differences."

It is also so because they seek their origins "in the opposition to others (Asia or Islam), in the differences between the Greek world and the Roman world, in the relationships among Empires and the Nations and in the course of the great fissures where a Europe of the inside and a Europe of the outside were structured, in the relations among Religions and Revolutions, in the exodus or in capitalism..." (Denis Guenoun).

This field thus tries to make a detailed assessment of the processes implemented by the Institute to try to raise in a practical manner some of these challenges by establishing European diagonals. These communities of interest, which experts or operators find together, are based on a search for past realities and try to steer them in a current direction. This field thus insists on stages, processes and reflections, methods of meeting, even intentions of work, as well as on concrete achievements, because the layout of these diagonals constitutes a long-term enterprise.