Starting with culture to stabilise the Middle East. It is a political proposal put to the European Union by several Syrian intellectuals, mainly those now living in Europe, such as the Syrian linguist and musicologist Nabil Al Lao, former director of the Damascus Conservatory, later founder and superintendent of the opera house in the Syrian capital between 2003 and 2010.
“The EU countries, especially France, Germany, Italy and Spain, have the tools to launch a cultural policy in the Levant with an initial, visible impact that could evolve into a concrete, broader political process,” Professor Al Lao tells Euronews.
This would be a strategy that goes beyond traditional cultural policies. Its aim is to turn the theatre of war into an archaeological landscape, combining the recovery of cultural heritage with civil infrastructure projects to involve populations exhausted by years of war and heal mutual mistrust.
It is not simple cultural diplomacy but a realistic strategy designed to create new civil and political balances in a country struggling to emerge from a bloody inter‑communal war that began in 2011 and officially ended in late 2025 with the fall of the Assad dynasty regime, whose deep‑rooted causes, however, remain unresolved.
