André Wilkens, the director of the European Cultural foundation, says Europe has forgotten how to speak with pride about what it has built
There was a time when Europe spoke about itself with urgency and vision.
Not with the flat vocabulary of strategic agendas but with imagination and a certain defiant optimism, André Wilkens, director of the European Cultural Foundation, told Euractiv.
“The way we used to speak of Europe at its birth had an urgency, creativity and courage that is largely absent from today’s speeches,” he said.
That is precisely why the European Cultural Foundation, Europe’s oldest foundation with a pan-European purpose, has decided to open its historical archives to the public, revealing 70 years of records that helped engineer EU integration and scale cross-border programmes such as Erasmus.
