Topic: Is Globalisation a Threat to Arts?

Afternoon session, Oct. 18

Jacques Rupnik
The organisers have posed the question ”Is globalisation a threat to the arts?” It is a very loaded one and deserves to be questioned, so to speak. There are those such as the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa who argue that the global market goes hand in hand with spread of universal values and of cultural interchange. Others, particularly in the country I live in, have a less rosy view of the effects of globalisation on culture and the arts and two major alleged threats are identified.
First, the commercialisation of culture and the arts i.e. entertainment, culture debased or reduced to entertainment.

The second is the cultural globalisation, the threat of uniformity, of homogenisation and sometimes is labelled as ”Americanisation”, which threatens the national cultures, especially of small nations. Both arguments rest on the assumption that arts should not be considered as a commodity. Both arguments call for counterweights, for regulatory mechanisms, for greater involvement of the public sector. In other words, calling for the protection or the support of the state. I deliberately use these words, the state and protection. That in turn raises the issues of artistic freedom and the ominous idea of the state as a sponsor and even as an administrator of culture. This idea formulated here in Prague, where for forty years as elsewhere in Central Europe, the state was the main administrator, sponsor, controller of artistic activity, has, of course, particular resonance and therefore we should be aware that we have witnessed here in Prague the formidable move from a state-controlled culture towards a free expression of artistic activity, but one which takes place within the framework of the market. We can hear the effects of this trend perhaps today.

To debate these issues, these alleged threats and the role of alternatives to globalisation we have a very impressive list of speakers. We are very fortunate to have two keynote speakers, who will introduce us straight to the heart of the subject. The first is Mr Jostein Gaarder a Norwegian philosopher, who teaches at Bergen University. His books have been translated into 45 languages. That is, I suppose a triumph of globalisation too, a very positive one indeed. He is very famous for his best-selling book ”Sophie’s World”. He will introduce us to the alleged threats to the arts and culture.

Jostein Gaarder
In 1750 the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau published his Discours sur les sciences et les arts (Discourse on the Arts and Sciences). The publication was the prize paper in response to a subject set by the academy in Dijon, and the topic was whether the revival of the arts had contributed to a better society. It was a rhetorical question, of course, a question that, so to speak, had to be answered by a clear confirmation. However, full of emotion Rousseau declared his famous denial. Arts and science have not brought human beings a better quality of life. Rousseau was among the first critics of the modern world asserting that primitive savagery is superior to civilised life.

Exactly 250 years later we are confronted with a related question, and this time in Prague: Is Globalisation a Threat to Arts? It is as if the question is equally rhetorical this time. Are we not supposed to answer by an alarming "yes"? The arts are of profound value both for individuals and for our civilisation - and now they are put in jeopardy by globalisation, but is this really the situation? Consider only the almost unreal democratisation of the access to information and knowledge provided by the Internet. It's calculated that mankind only during the last seven years has doubled its amount of written text - and at the same time it's more accessible than ever. One is almost tempted to return to the approach of Rousseau and later Nietzsche: Isn't there a limit to how much culture we are able to digest - or can bear to relate to. Don't we also need some time and space to live and thus make our own genuine experiences? These are also relevant questions. But I shall keep to the topic of this afternoon: Is Globalisation a Threat to Arts?

The question is of course what exactly we mean by "globalisation". Do we mean the intense cultural diffusion we have witnessed over the last decades? Or do we mean the formation of a new "trans-national" civilisation that may overshadow traditional cultural life on a national and local level? Or are we more worried that the spread of western entertainment industry will lead to a passive consumption of hits and happenings, a process that consequently is a threat to arts in a more pure sense?

I think it may be useful to distinguish vide between culture and civilisation. "Culture" or cultural life is a local activity and must be distinguished from the global or trans-national "civilisation" we are also a part of. The question then is whether the process of globalisation is a threat to local activity. We will come back to this question, but let us first look at some historic examples.

Arts and science have always flourished when different cultures have melted together. Such a cultural encounter happened some 4000 years ago when the early Indo-Europeans migrated to India and there mingled with the old Indus culture. Another example of cultural diffusion was the influence on Judaism by Iranian cosmology. This influence was an important premise also for Jesus and the early Christian church.

The first really cosmopolitan civilisation came into existence after Alexander the Great, when a lot of different national cultures mingled together in the big melting pot of Arts, religion and science that we call Hellenism. Even the Italian Renaissance was partly caused by a meeting between cultures. From the Moorish Spain came Arabian and Aristotelian traditions, and from the east came Byzantine and Platonic traditions. In this way the cosmopolitan community of Hellenism was partially restored - and further developed.

Cultural diffusion has followed the human race from the first tribes set out of Africa, and for arts and culture very successfully so. There has never existed any "primitive", "aboriginal" or "unaffected" human culture - exactly as there has never existed any pure human race. Arts and science have developed rapidly whenever different cultures have been confronted. How would Hinduism be possible without the meeting between the old Indus-culture and the oral and practical traditions of the early Indo-Europeans? What would the Old Testament look like without the Egyptian, Babylonian and Iranian influence? How would the Christian church arise outside a Hellenistic civilisation? I feel tempted to quote some riddles from Zen Buddhism: "How is the sound of one hand?" Or: "How did your face look before you were born?"

This does not mean that we should underestimate the value of national, local or even isolated traditions. On the contrary, history is full of examples showing how genuine human values and experiences have been conveyed to the world community from local cultures. Buddha was deeply marked by his Indian background. On that background he developed a universal philosophy that was no longer bound to an Indian atmosphere. However, the universal appeal in Buddhism had its essential assumptions in a specific national or regional context. When Buddhism much later came to Japan via China it got its distinctive Japanese expressions. A similar process took place when the Mahayana-Buddhism intermingled with the old Tibetan culture and its traditional religion.

History has shown that we can never underestimate the capacity of small communities to develop human values that later may become important for the whole world. Very much of what we today combine with Arts, science and philosophy can be traced back to a small community in Greece 2500 years ago, namely the city-state of Athens. It was not very many individuals who found the Promised Land in Israel almost 4000 years ago.

It is because of people's local belonging that they have a significant message to the world community. One does never contribute to the world in spite of being brought up in a small community, but because of this. One simply needs strong roots in a local community to communicate with the world. An individual who has no roots in a local culture has no notions to guide him in his confrontation with the global civilisation.

Then local cultures have always also been raped and destroyed because of human greed, brutalism and intolerance. A lot of valuable human experiences have consequently been cut down before they have reached the world community. This activity - we could call it crimes against humanity - still goes on, and it goes on as a result of what we call "globalisation". It's obvious that the process of globalisation is threatening many people's dignity and values. I have met people in South-East Asia and in the Pacific who have expressed their profound grief for the cultural losses they have been caused as a result of colonialism and neo-colonialism.

It's in the local culture the real values first arise. A person who is not taking part in the local life, but who is only trying to be fashionable, risks in the local community to be considered a fool, or even a parasite of the community and not without reason: Such a person doesn't really contribute with anything himself. He is just a consumer.

When we are talking about globalisation of culture, we often mean the globalisation of the entertainment industry. The question then is to what extent the global entertainment industry threatens the traditional cultural life and cultural heritage in a wider sense. The question is whether the global entertainment culture is able to paralyse people's activity. For culture is activity. Culture is activity on people's own terms.

By cultural activity we don't mean that the activity is "original" or "pure" for an ethnic or local group of people. When many Norwegians in narrow valleys of the country practise the American style of Country & Western it is an example of contemporary cultural activity in Norway. The opposite is the force-feeding on cultural fast - food. There are also Norwegians wasting their lives by watching soap operas on TV. I wouldn't call that a cultural activity. When more and more people on the Pacific islands get television sets and satellite antennas the problem is not that the people watch American soap, but the passivity of consumption itself. Or as the alcoholic said in one of his bright moments: "Before I was drinking from the bottle. Now the bottle is drinking from me." The same can definitely be said about the television-set.

The globalisation of entertainment culture can consequently threaten people's cultural lives, for instance traditional storytelling in the home or religious festivals with traditional song, dance and theatre. Whether the impulse for the cultural activity is "aboriginal" or inspired from abroad is then more or less irrelevant. When European baroque music is performed with great piety for instance in Japan, it is a valuable part of contemporary cultural activities in Japan. It is not a negative effect of globalisation. Eastern and western music have already for a long time inspired each other and thus given birth to valuable innovations. Fortunately poets all around the world have been inspired by Japanese haiku-poetry. For culture is activity. It's something we create and make. It's not first of all a respectful preservation of something very old or aboriginal. It would, however, be sad if Japanese people totally lost their interest in performing the traditional Kabuki or Bunraku theatre. It would be sad not merely for the Japanese community, but also for the world community. When a lot of people in my own country practise the traditional Japanese fighting sports, it's a part of contemporary cultural activities in Norway. If it totally displaced traditional Norwegian folkdance however, I would feel more worried; but that will never happen. We live in a more and more pluralistic and heterogeneous society, and that is both within the small communities around the world and in the global civilisation as a whole. There are not many cities in Europe today that cannot offer a course in African dance. I consider this to be an enrichment of cultural life in Europe.

In the era of globalisation we can sometimes see some funny paradoxes concerning the spread and distribution of arts and intellectual life. I have for instance the impression that the young Japanese have a much weaker knowledge of Buddhist philosophy than young people do for instance in Norway and Germany. At the same time I have the impression that students at Japanese universities are more concerned with the philosophy of Kant or Heidegger than the case is for students in Germany. German students are more interested in the philosophy of Zen. Some years ago I gave a few lectures at Japanese universities. I was talking about the importance of philosophy, and I was in my lecture careful to emphasise when I was talking about "philosophy" in general and when I was talking about "western philosophy". But then both students and professors were confused. They said: ”What do you mean by "western philosophy"? Isn't philosophy western?”

Something is wrong if for instance the rich philosophical traditions from India or China are forgotten as a consequence of a strong cultural diffusion from the west. Globalisation can attack people's roots in their own local or national environment, as their orientation is becoming more global. This is a problem because all societies need a common platform. In the old towns and villages the marketplace was a definite place where people met and ideas and thoughts were shared. Without such a daily dialogue, without a set of common references, a local community will disintegrate, and finally break up. This is the situation also for the nations. We need some common arenas to maintain a national community, and I think we will need national entities also in the future. Even in a modern society we need places to meet. It's simply a question of having an identity. But we more and more also live in a global village. That has become a part of our identity as well.

Is it possible to distinguish between local culture and "World Arts"? Is it possible at the same time to take part in the cultural life of the village and in the cultural life of the "global village"? I think so, and I'm even more convinced that taking part in the life of the global village requires a certain commitment also in the local culture. Also if the local cultures are deprived of commitment it will undermine or ruin the arts in the global village. We need a foot in both camps.

In fact, there are indications that globalisation will give birth to a renaissance of local culture and local community. May be it's the national identity and national arts that are most threatened by globalisation. A poet may write a collection of poems that is not selling more than two hundred copies, and most of the copies are perhaps sold in her own native district, but the same poet may be able to gather thousands of people for readings. We want to see the poet, we want to meet her, not only on TV. The global community has created a new need for physical contact. In Europe today philosophy-cafes, poetry-cafes, etc. are flourishing. From such kinds of activity there will always emerge impulses that are conveyed also to the global community.

I must now apologise for including a personal experience. The reason for taking that liberty, is that the story I will tell may be able to illustrate some of the questions we are dealing with today. In the Aims Paper for the Conference the following question is asked: What role could some national cultures play in a globalised world - especially those parts which are dependent on language? I will again indicate that it's often from the roots of a local culture that significant impulses may emerge, impulses that paradoxically are able to try strength against a global entertainment industry.

Ten years ago I wrote the book "Sophie's World", a "novel about the history of philosophy". In spite of the pompous title I considered this book to be a limited Norwegian project. I was not able to imagine that this specific book would ever be translated into any other language. In fact, I actually had to convince my Norwegian publishing house to publish it, a huge introduction to Western philosophy, especially meant for young adults. For the publishing house hesitated. When they finally decided to publish the book, I wrote a postcard to my editor expressing my gratitude for the decision to publish such a non-commercial book and for cultural reasons only. But we were wrong, both the publishing house and myself. The "non-commercial" book was quickly published in more than 40 languages and has today sold more than 20 million copies. But why? How could we be so wrong? What was the reason why such a Norwegian phenomenon as "Sophie's World" could experience such a global spread? We were baffled.

Ten years later I am still asked whether I wrote the book in English, and I reply that I of course wrote it in Norwegian. I don't say that I couldn't imagine that the book would create any interest outside Norway, or simply that I wrote the book for use in Norway. But I add that it's not a coincidence that this specific book was written by a Norwegian.

We have in Norway a particularly rich tradition for popularisation of philosophy simply because all students of any academic study must first make a preliminary examination in the history of philosophy, the so-called examen philosophicum. This institution doesn't today have the same importance in other European nations - although it has its roots in a common European tradition. I can hardly imagine writing "Sophie's World" without this important national condition.

I had myself in many years been teaching philosophy in a special school characteristic of Scandinavia, the so-called Folk High School (Folkehoyskole). This is an optional year after High School and before you eventually start an academic study at university, a year's boarding school putting emphasis on "learning for life", with no examination or defined curriculum, but where the focus is on the arts, "the spoken word" and "the living interaction" between student and teacher. I would hardly have been able to write "Sophie's World" if I had not for many years been in dialogue with young people about existential matters - and specifically within the frame of a Folk High School, with all such a school implies, which I shall not go into here. Let me just add: The core of these Nordic Folk High Schools has been to protect and cultivate the living national language and the national culture.
Then a few words about the book and the national language as a medium. In Norway we have developed a long list of attempts to stimulate national literature as we are counting only four million people. Without these efforts I would perhaps never have become a writer. The Norwegian government buys minimum one thousand copies of almost every fictional book written in Norwegian. Without this backup my publishing house would perhaps not have dared to publish the odd novel "Sophie's World". Norwegian bookstores are obliged to have all Norwegian fictional titles in their shelves for minimum two years after they are published. We have fixed prices for books as a protection for small bookstores, for instance in rural districts. Without access to a bookstore you also lose one important access to the arts. As a single exception from all other products there is no VAT-taxation for books. When a Norwegian novel is translated to another language the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is often supporting the translation financially by a "translation grant".

An even more important assumption must be mentioned. I would perhaps never have become a writer if I hadn't grown up with parents who kept books in the house and also had time to read to the children. I wouldn't have been a Norwegian author if I didn't grow up with the Norwegian folk tales or the Old Norse mythology and sagas. I wouldn't have been an author if I had no contact with my roots in an almost thousand-years-old tradition of a written language. So I have been very privileged, because we are now also talking about national resources. My message is that we are above all talking about national investments. However, a local or national investment may sometimes be an investment also for the global community.

In the Aims Paper the following question is asked: Shall, can, and may the arts of the 21st Century play a role of national, political or some other kind of enlightenment, or shall, can and may it relinquish with society in the name of so-called "Pure Art"?

At the Forum 2000 conference in 1997 we discussed "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights". Not least have the arts been dependent on and have profited from some fundamental human rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press. But to talk only about freedom and rights without also focusing on responsibility and obligations, is almost absurd. As with a large family: First you have a number of obligations in regard to personal conduct. And then, yes then, the individual family member can eventually draw attention to the fact that she or he also has certain rights.

There are hundreds of organisations in the world today that take care of people's rights, and only a handful taking care of human obligations. My question is: What is the role of the arts in this picture? Both among artists and within the international entertainment industry, we often see examples of disclaiming responsibility - in the name of freedom of speech or simply in the name of the arts. On the contrary I would assert that an artist in the 21st century - whether a writer or a film director - has a particular moral responsibility.

The greatest challenge for the process of globalisation is as quick as possible to establish a trans-national rule that makes us capable of maintaining the environment on this planet. I mentioned that I have met people grieving for losses in their local cultures as a consequence of colonialism and neo-colonialism. Not only has culture been attacked, even more serious and irrevocable have been the effects on the environment, for instance by the extermination of endemic species. Some of these species still exist in traditional songs and folklore. They are just extinct from the surface of the earth.

A threat to old biotypes is of course also a threat to culture and Arts. Even a threat to the traditional economy is a threat to traditional culture. The basis for culture is nature. This may be easy to forget in a globalised society of consumption, where the distances between producer and consumer may be enormous. We buy our furniture in the corner shop, and we don't always think about the rain forest on the other side of the planet. But a robbery of a people's nature is also a robbery of the same people's culture and soul. It is not necessary to discuss what is the greatest loss. It would be equivalent to the following question: What would you least of all lose, your body or your mind?

This body and mind perspective - or nature and the arts - is of course as relevant for the whole planet. If our economic system is at odds with the limits set by nature, it is also a threat to the arts. For a playful, inventive and vain primate it may be easy to forget that we are after all nature. But are we so playful, inventive and vain that the play, the inventions and the arts come before our responsibility for the future of the planet? In the very hurried and intense process of globalisation I miss the clear voice of the arts pointing not only at freedom and rights, but at our responsibility for a sustainable future. Many artists today have a pretty high level of understanding of the challenges facing this world, but we feel paralysed by the political or economical system. This is the virtual paradox: We have sufficient insight - and we do know we are running out of time - but we can't manage to turn things around before it is too late. If we still can, I am convinced that artists will have to play a decisive role. Just like artists have often been the vanguard in the fight for human rights, they may have to be the front figures in the fight for human obligations.

When Churchill was appointed Prime Minister in May 1940, and the German military powers were advancing towards the English Channel, he said the following in the House of Commons: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, sweat and tears. The astonishing fact was that he managed to mobilise the nation despite his highly depressing political message. The reason was, of course, that people saw the great danger that was facing them. Today all people of the world are facing an even greater and looming danger - namely a more or less total collapse of the environment of this planet, including all the values of the arts. But what has become of political courage today? Where is the political drive? Which politicians dare to ask for a little sweat and tears in order to achieve a new and essential political course, simply to save the future of our children, the human civilisation - and not to forget - our human dignity?

In November 1942 - when the English nation's suffering was at its worst - Churchill spoke out again: ”This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.” Once again he succeeded to encourage the people in their precarious defensive war. Let us hope - and believe - that we are nearing the end of the beginning of this generation's precarious fight for protection of the environment and a more just distribution of the earth's resources. Without a much stronger commitment of the artists it may one day be too late. Now that the arts - at least a many places - have achieved their freedom and rights the time has come to point at its responsibility.

As pointed out at the Forum 2000 Conference in 97´ being a pessimist concerning the future of this planet is no option. Pessimism is an immoral attitude towards life. And hope - hope may be to fight against all odds. Can the arts bring some nourishment for such a fighting hope?

Perhaps the most important questions concerning the arts in the new global community is this: How can culture and the arts bring a young generation to believe in - and consequently fight for - a better and sustainable future of the planet? What visions can the arts bring to a young generation in a society where we already almost drown in materialism and silly consumerism?

It is an old saying that a frog that is placed in boiling water, will immediately leap out of danger. However: If the frog is placed in cold water that is gradually heated to the boiling point, then the frog will not perceive the danger and it will be boiled to death.

Is this generation such a frog? Is this generation's culture and the arts such a frog? I don't know, but it's actually up to us to prove. I seriously think it's up to artists of the global village to prove.

Human beings are social beings, and very much so. But we also belong to Earth. We have our important background in human history, but also the biological history of our planet is an essential part of our heritage. We are primates. We are vertebrates. It took some billions of years to create us, but will we survive this millennium?

Man is possibly the only living creature in the entire universe who has a universal consciousness. So conserving the living environment of this planet isn't just a global responsibility. It is a cosmic responsibility.

The arts are the celebration of human consciousness. Shouldn't the artist then be the first to defend from annihilation?

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you very much. You saw that the applause was strong, especially amongst the young people here, many of whom I am sure wish they had had you as their teacher. A Norwegian writer writing for a Norwegian readership and reaching a worldwide audience, without perceiving his book as a product of marketing. This is the optimistic story we all wanted to hear, going from the particular to the universal and also back. You stressed very rightly how globalisation goes hand in hand with renaissance or the reassertion of national culture, although the culture of small nations would not perhaps prosper unless like in Norway, there was public support for the arts.

Our second speaker is Dubravka Ugrešić, a well-known - and I hesitate: should I say Croatian or Yugoslav? - she says post-Yugoslav - writer, the author of novels, essays and short stories. She lives in Amsterdam, occasionally teaches at American universities. She is the author of ”Fording the Stream of Consciousness” and her book ”The Culture of Lies” has just been published in Prague. I have heard of great interest from Czech readers in her book. She has just finished a collection of essays called ”Reading Prohibited” about writers, literature and the global market. In a way we are getting a preview of her forthcoming book.

Dubravka Ugrešić
I will just read two short pages of my presentation. I must say that I am very much against, if I understood correctly, what Mr Gaarder said, especially that culture is activity. That was the communist idea, actually. It resulted in rich amateurism. Everyone from a communist country knows of the village theatre groups and of the reading clubs, etc.. This is precisely that communist idea of a contemporary cultural market that culture is democratic, that culture is for everybody, that everybody has the right to express himself or herself. Alvin Kenan the author of the book ”The Death of Literature” said that literature may have died but literary activity goes on. So I think we live in the age of activity, not of real culture. This democratisation, which is as I said is a communist idea, is realised by the market as everybody really can, I mean can write or paint. People can’t be a surgeon or a doctor, because that presupposes some knowledge, but everybody can write a book and that book can even be a best-seller.

There was a funny discussion between an art critic and a famous well-known young artist in The Guardian the other day. The art critic said politely that he believes that modern artists are illiterate and that modern art is basically a confidence trick. The young artist said, ”So what if I am illiterate, I still have a right to my voice.” Culture was never in the hands of the illiterates before. Now it is. You said that artists have moral obligations. They don’t have any moral obligations, neither does art. What art has to have is an aesthetic obligation. I would like to paraphrase Mr Havel about what he said about having a minimum responsibility concerning globalisation. I would like to say that in art there should be a minimum aesthetic responsibility.

Does the notion cultural texts, art and literature mean the same as it used to mean and does it mean the same to all. We live in a world of different perspectives and different systems of cultural references. Post-colonial theories brought up the identity of ”other”, its culture and its perspective. ”Other” or woman, gay, African, Albanian, Asian, Aborigine demands his/her/its position to be reinterpreted, de-stereotyped, de-colonialised, equalised in rights and power. Demanding the re-semantisation of the relation between the colonisers and the colonised, the ”other” assumes that the identity of the coloniser is firm and stable, which is not true any more.

West European culture as a firm system of values that dominated for centuries, is today, in the context of American global domination, a museum. Yes, a larger and more grandiose museum that, the African museum of facemasks or the Asian museum of handicraft, but nonetheless a museum. The other question which should be questioned again is the concept of art. The canons that were destroyed some decades ago were never really rebuilt again. Duchamps’ symbolic and ironic artistic gesture perpetuated itself in that gesture for decades, but it doesn’t change its basic artistic message. Are we sure that in the new context of different perspectives, different cultural identities and - by the same token - different status and function of art in a world dominated by infotainment we know what we are talking about when we use the word art?

The coloniser is definitely not the same any more. Its name is market. Its face is masked. To ask a dialogue with it, as post-colonial thinkers would like to, misses the point. It will suck in any resistance, any criticism on its account it will turn into profit. It will colonise us in a way we won’t notice. More than that it will colonise us with our own values, whatever they may be: identity, cultural, ethnic identities. It is hard to imagine effective resistance to the money, media moguls, powerful conglomerates, which rule the market, to the monopoly of bookshops, chains, galleries to the globalisation as commercial fundamentalism, as Soros put it, which includes culture. The strategy of money against money could make it. The question is what kind of culture would have the priority of the money givers? European bureaucracy often avoids representation of culture or the culture of representation of any idea of Europeanness, of European cultural standards, or the protection of regional and minority languages. A cultural concept that doesn’t really differ from the concept of national culture and its strategies of cultural representation. Festivals, institutions, NGOs, cultural managers certainly promote but also bureaucratise culture. Such concept of culture makes of it not the space of resistance but a service of representation of whatever it could be. The strategy of turn-off or non-playing misses the point. Let me give you an anecdote from Neil Postman’s book ”Amusing ourselves to death”. It says about the inhabitants of a little town of Farmington in Connecticut, who decided to fight against television. The local library organised a TV turn-off and the inhabitants didn’t watch television for a whole month and a certain Miss Babcock, preparing a new turn-off issued the following statement: ”Who knows if our campaign will have the same significance as it did last year when we had fantastic media coverage.”

Nevertheless the forms of resistance are not inconceivable. Within the complex and ambivalent structure of globalisation instead of obedient adaptation to the laws of the market, culture and art could become a site of resistance. In that case we must pose the old question again:” What is art? Does culture become a site of evaluation and re-evaluation, the establishment of new aesthetic and intellectual standards, the site of destereotypification, the site of commercial decontamination, the site of utopia of refuge?” If we accept Velimir Khlebnikov’s polarisation of division in culture into consumers potrebiteli and the creators proizvoditeli could offer the latter, the lunatics, the romantics, the inadaptable a roof over their head, because they are the ones who have lost it or we can decide not to talk about that. We can accept it and say that this is not the battle that has to be fought and let things go on. Then we should remember Jean Baudrillard’s thought that art does not die because there is not any, it dies because there is too much.

DISCUSSION

Jacques Rupnik
I think you have raised a number of issues, which will be provocative for the discussion. You mentioned an aesthetic obligation, which will have to be defined. Maybe our future speaker Lord Weidenfeld might give us his thoughts on that. The theme of the new insidious coloniser, the market, which in some ways has replaced the totalitarian threat that this part of Europe knows only too well will surely provoke some discussion. I have been asked to inform you that a group of anti-globalisation protestors have delivered a petition. It will be circulating around. Our next speaker is Lord Weidenfeld. It’s always a pleasure to introduce one’s own publisher, owner of the famous London-based publishing house, he’s also the chair of the Ben-Gurion University in Israel, Vice President of the Oxford Development Programme, a founder of ”Europeum”, a network of seven universities, of which Charles University is also a member. He will tell us more about these issues from the point of view of someone who is a practitioner and disseminator of culture and art. Lord Weidenfeld.

Sir Arthur George Weidenfeld
I have deliberately not prepared a paper, as I wanted to have a chance to pick up some points throughout the conference, mostly about the arts, but one or two points about the many theoretical points. Of the many challenging and partly contradictory definitions of globalisation, I would like to mention three. President Havel’s, which was a neutral process where the main protagonist is man. Dr. Giddens, who mentioned the communications revolution and Shimon Peres who spoke of a unifying effect where finally man will no longer be rent by individual enmities, but will strive together against common dangers. All those three beg many questions, but also have tremendous elements of truth.

It is of course true that in the arts we have the same problems. Commercialisation; with the lifting of censorship in the Soviet Union, the sales of classics fell by 80% and the sales of Western pornography rose by 250% or by 1000% according to some figures. There are no lessons to be drawn from it by saying that therefore communism is good for culture and the free market isn’t. It simply means that in its transition, a society has to take control of itself and make some adjustments. The example of a small country like Norway, knowing how to stimulate its own writing can be echoed in other countries such as Holland and Denmark. Of course, those countries have very high standards of living and budgetary allowances can be made even though stringent, allowances can be made. In the Third World the money is simply not there. The sad story of the Filipino novelist, who had to be discovered by a German or British metamorphosis, but it is not a bad example. It is perfectly true that some of the works written in the smaller languages can be brought to light through the pioneering efforts of editors, readers and literary critics.

There is another interesting phenomenon that through the discovery of a writer from one country, other writers from that country become more popular amongst readers. For instance, Mr Gaarder’s great predecessor in terms of big sales in Norway was Thor Heyerdahl. As a result every book published by a Norwegian explorer was bought blind by publishers all over the world. When Gabriel Marquez wrote his books it propelled an interest in Latin America, fuelled by the market, but it still resulted in a greater involvement, interest in a particular region. That’s part of life. What can we do in practical terms to make a difference to the present situation and for the plight of the writer? There are several ways of doing it. However, one has to be moderate and relativist, that is to say, certain solutions can apply in certain countries. We have to be modest in our aims. In Europe the idea of sponsorship and patronage is an important help. In countries such as Italy, Germany, France it was always tradition that the opera houses, theatres and certain types of serious literature were furthered and almost exclusively funded by the state and by the taxpayer. Such was the level of cultural participation that the taxpayer didn’t rebel. In Austria, for example, nobody would take to the street to demonstrate against money being given to the theatre or the opera. In England there would be protests as there is a tradition of private sponsorship that outweighs public sponsorships. Now that there are budgetary restrictions in Germany and Italy, they are helpless. Where do they find the money from? There is not the tradition of private sponsorship. We in England are better equipped for such a crisis than they are on the continent. The city of Berlin wants to close an opera house, for example. There are certain cures in certain countries that have to be put into being depending on the national traditions there. There must be more pressure on the authorities to give more fiscal inducements for culture so that the corporations or estates that are left over give an inducement to the donor. Another thing that can also be done is to have much more money spent on exchanges, scholarships and networking of universities, theatres and cultural institutions.

On the question of language. In every period of history there has been a lingua franca. It was Latin, then French and now it is English, although Spanish and Mandarin Chinese as well as Hindi have substantial populations. But given the market strength of the United States and cyberspace, for better or worse is English is the lingua franca. How does one deal with the problem of the other languages?

One attitude says that there should be no monopoly of English as the main language, and the French are the prime advocates of that view. Of course the subtext is that they would like two main languages English and French and then they would be quite happy. The Germans could say that they have 83 million speakers in Europe and the Spaniards could say that they have over half a billion speakers worldwide. The question is are we going to have a tower of Babel, like the European Community with 30 languages or is there going to be some other regulation. If I plead for English in the immediate future it is not out of cultural patriotism, but solely because it is the best way of making people learn many languages is to say that there is one functional language but it is necessary to make it possible for people to learn other languages also. The learning of language is one of the most important things for all the governing people in the world. Of course there are problems with translation and this way you can have a much better grasp of other cultures. There are certain positive factors. The huge developments of mass tourism, live contacts between young people of course help people to have wider scope and a greater awareness and it reflects itself in literature too. For instance, if you come from the furthest most point of Scotland or from Puglia and visit Central Europe and then read a classic by a Central European author you have a different relationship to the novel than if you have never been there yourself. This is obvious and banal but it plays a certain part. I think that the learning of languages is extremely important. As a French writer put rather savagely, ”If a hotel porter in Istanbul can speak eight languages, why can’t a graduate from the Sorbonne speak more than one.” It is perfectly possible to have this greater awareness of the need to learn more languages.

The most important point of globalisation is that is strictly neutral but that it allows man choices that are totally contradictory. On the one hand, having a more global outreach has seen a reassertion of nationalism but the good thing is there has been greater information about regional identities. We are back at the basic question that this 21st century has given us arsenal of tools. Man can achieve almost any material wish within reason; at the same time he has a frightening array of choices of self-destruction. To end on a more satirical note, I am reminded by the Austrian satirist Nestroy, who says, ”Who is in the right? Who is in the wrong? Me or Me?”

Jacques Rupnik
I think you have raised a number of important issues. Particularly the question of different traditions and different situations. Even in the Western world, where, in France the King, then the state became the main sponsor as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of associations and foundations - very different traditions within the Western market societies and I think that some of these experiences may be of use here to the countries of East Central Europe. You mentioned that English is the lingua franca. You also mentioned that if a porter in Istanbul can do it, why not a student of the Sorbonne and I would say why not a Forum 2000 participant? Not because of my militant defence of francophonie but mainly because our next speaker will be speaking in French I will switch to one of my mother tongues.

It is a great honour and pleasure for me to now welcome Mário Soares. For all of us, his name is tied with the return of democracy to Portugal, with the Carnation Revolution in 1974. He was prime minister twice and he became president twice - in 1986 and 1991. His name is also connected with his country's joining the European Union in 1985. This double return, the return of democracy and the return to Europe, are themes very dear to the Czechs present here because they relate to their own democratic transformation and to their own return to Europe. Mr Mário Soares is now a member of many international commissions and is first and foremost the chairman of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Wise Persons. It is a great honour for me to give the floor to him now. Thank you, Mr Soares.

Mário Soares
Thank you. I would like to apologize for my French, but there are five official languages being used at this Forum. I am not a Frenchman and my mother tongue is not French but Portuguese. My second foreign language is Spanish and French is only my third foreign language. It is, however, much easier for me to speak French than English and so I am going to speak in French.
First, I would like to thank the president of the Czech Republic and all the organisers of this Forum for the invitation they sent me so that I could take part in this very interesting conference. It is a great honour for me.
I was asked to say a few thoughts here on a theme which is very topical and which has been discussed here several times before. The theme is: "Is Globalisation a Threat to Arts?". I am going to answer without hesitation: yes, it is! It is a threat, or it could become a threat. Globalisation poses a threat not only to culture but also to the future of the world unless we manage to control its harmful effects. At the same time, however, it is an inevitable phenomenon which is spreading more and more, and which we must learn to live with in the future. How? I think the way to do this is to try to regulate globalisation on an international level. If we fail to do this, it could have quite disastrous consequences for the world's nations. Let me use the example of poverty in the world. It is a new wall which divides the rich nations from the poor ones, those with access to knowledge from those who do not have access to it.
Nevertheless, the globalisation of the economy is an uncontrollable phenomenon in today's world. Following the fall of communism, there is a certain worship of the market as the Holy of Holies. One lady said here that we should not mix art with the market. That is true. Nevertheless, we mix the market economy, which is essential, with a market-oriented society, which is unacceptable. The speed with which capital moves between stock exchanges, from Tokyo to London, from Frankfurt to New York,… is not only breathtaking, but sometimes also disastrous for the economies of many countries. I can think of an example which I know very well, of what happened recently in Brazil, which is Portugal's sister country. The concentration of capital in some multinational companies has become a much greater force than the economic force of most UN member countries. This is not normal. I will give you another example. The highest value of economic globalisation are interests for interests' sake. We are forgetting that the market is here for people and not vice versa.
The globalisation of information is a good thing, but even this can lead to very negative phenomena. First and foremost because there is a very close link between the media and the financial circles which control the media. Secondly, and there is a connection, because the mass media is not interested in defending humanistic and spiritual values. A certain television director told me once that there is a recipe for how to make TV programmes: 30% of sex, 50% of violence and the rest is entertainment. The globalisation of knowledge, again, however, serving the interests of big business and not of humanity, often ignores the basic principles of ethics, as has happened many times in the field of biology, for example. In this respect, globalisation with some of its negative aspects can pose a serious threat for the variedness of culture, for humanistic and spiritual values, for a multi-cultural and multi-linguistic nature society, which is the main wealth of humanity. Globalisation leads to a uniform Anglo-Saxon way of thinking, and we are undeniably witnessing the hegemony of the English language in its most elementary form. This brings at the same time the advantage of good communication between people, but also poorer as regards human diversity.
The answer to globalisation in this perspective cannot be given by the new economy, let alone increasing world trade. The answer must be given by better international financial regulation, which, in my view, urgently requires reforming such institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. At the same time, we need to reinforce the United Nations and give it more funds since it is the only international institution which can legitimately try to create a new world order, one which is more just, free and equal. A world government capable of being effective in the fight against famine, lack of education, disease and disrupting the environmental balance of our planet should be created through the UN and not through some representatives of rich countries, like the G7 and the like.
To conclude, I think that globalisation is an unavoidable phenomenon which has very positive aspects, alongside other very negative ones. We need to support the former and limit the latter. How to do this? By coming together to reach a sensible answer to globalisation from a global perspective, in my view. By fighting the poverty which is growing in the world and which is a scandal from a moral viewpoint and a threat from a social viewpoint. By spreading the real culture of peace at a worldwide level. By fighting illiteracy and by trying to create genuine public opinion. By interconnecting individual non-governmental organisations into a kind of network so that they could defend the noble interest of humanism. At international level, the creation of large integrated wholes made up of several countries, such as, for example, the European Union or perhaps MERCOSUR, is an effective way of correcting aspects even more negative than globalisation, such as the hegemony of one state (the United States of America), or too high concentration of wealth in the hands of multi-national companies.
I think that the time has come to push through cultural diversity and the development of dialogue between cultures and religions. An ecumenical dialogue between religions is the best way of preventing the so-called "clash of civilisations", which is the title of a book by the American political analyst Samuel Huntington, who used this expression to define one of the characteristics which he thinks are symptomatic of this new century. Because of all this we must develop the spirit of tolerance and respect for others who are different. Otherwise, there will be neither dialogue nor pluralism, nor peace in the world. Thank you.

Jacques Rupnik
Our last speaker in this panel will be Mark Azzopardi. He is a Students Forum delegate, he is a student at the University of Malta specialising in mechanical engineering.

Mark Azzopardi
I was thinking of starting with what exactly globalisation is, but I think that that has been covered quite well by everyone in these three days. I think what we can agree, as former President Soares pointed out, that globalisation is an irreversible phenomenon and that it really depends how we react to this phenomenon as to whether it will turn out to be a positive or negative thing. In relation to the art I think a positive fact is that there are more and more platforms being offered for art and culture to be expressed and to be shown. People all over the world have more of a chance to be exposed to many different types of culture. My idea of art is, and I am not expecting to come up with an academic definition, that it is a celebration of diversity, so whether globalisation succeeds in increasing this diversity or not, it will help art. The tendency that globalisation has of making people similar - the McDonalds syndrome, if you like (if you go to the other side of the world and switch on a computer and you are faced with exactly the same screen as at home) - is I think a negative aspect of globalisation. Art being an expression of who you are depends on the fact that people around the world are different from each other. I think even globalisation is giving us less time to think about art. The modernisation of the world gives us more things to do, more activities and maybe sometimes art is a production of reflection and silence and the time one can dedicate to it. Maybe this has something to do with the complaint that there is less and less great art and less and less great music. However, we need to take personal responsibility of how we face globalisation. It’s all very well to say that art is suffering, but I think every person has a limit to what he can change. Some are more influential than others, of course. As a student in a small country I try to take responsibility for the little I can do, but I try to do it. Coming from a country with a small culture I feel that globalisation is more and more at risk of destroying the smaller cultures because of the Westernisation and the commercialisation of larger cultures. For example we tend to lose our culture and try to borrow culture from abroad, because we don’t have enough faith or belief in the culture we have ourselves. I think it is the responsibility of every person, especially people who come from small cultures, to look at their culture and see what it has done for them and see where their people are thanks to that culture. We need to feel and become part of it and gain confidence in it, because only then can you put that culture out to interact with other cultures and that would be the beauty of globalisation, if it can happen. Many times I feel that the small cultures are not put out there, because the people who practise them are afraid that they will be engulfed by these larger cultures. I say: enjoy your personal culture, see what it means, see what it does, and try to put it out there to interact, not to compete with other cultures and I think it would contribute a lot to the idea that the world is beautiful, because it is so diverse. I would like to talk of something we discussed quite deeply at the Students’ Forum. I was part of Natural Workshop and the environment has been mentioned a lot. I would like to consider nature as the most wonderful work of art that we have and we have a duty to protect it, because we are part of it. I think that God has given us the right or the possibility to make a difference to this work of art, to either improve it or make it worse. I think that the importance of art is, in terms of globalisation and tolerance and acceptance, that art has the potential of making us move even further than acceptance. We don’t just tolerate each other because we are on the same planet - the negative implications of tolerance have already been mentioned - but we learn through education to accept each other and I think that through art we can learn to appreciate each other. So I think that art takes us even further, it is a sort of specialised aspect of education.

I want to say something that I have been thinking about all day and well, maybe it sounds silly, but I am a student and maybe you expect me to say silly things. I was looking at the Dalai Lama yesterday and I’m a bit upset that he is not here today as I would ask him to teach me how to smile. I have noticed that people are smiling less and less, especially in Europe and maybe the United States, in the so-called Western or modernised world. I think when we smile to each other we open our hearts to each other’s culture and we learn how to trust each other and appreciate each other even more. So many people worry about the problems of the world and they are big problems, but His Holiness has been exiled from his country and he is travelling the world sparkling in spite of the problems he has. We have so many lesser problems and we are always worried. This is one small concrete thing we can do if we start smiling more than we can improve our personal relations. My personal relations might not make a difference, but there are people here who have personal relationships that might make a difference to the globe.

We were talking a lot about religion and as a Catholic I was thinking that Jesus Christ must have smiled a lot and when you see pictures of him depicted he’s never smiling. I was thinking that in the context of art that maybe people should try to depict him in a more smiling way. Many times when we draw him rather than trying to be like him, we are trying to make him like us. We are always worried about the problems of the world and not taking a positive attitude and I’m sure that the prophets of other religions were also smiling. It is not as elaborate or global as some of the other messages you have heard today, but that’s what I’d like to leave you with. One last thing, the Natural Workshop that we had in the Students’ Forum in June came up with a dream of how we as young people see the future and we represented this dream in a poem. I’m not going to read it all but I will read the last bit. It’s not the great art that de Klerk called for yesterday and I suspect that Dubravka Ugrešić will call it ”amateur” which it is, but nevertheless I’m going to read it out and I think it encompasses well what I’ve been trying to say.

Sometimes at night
I just want to lie down outside
Listening to the world
And waiting for the moon
And the stars to disappear into the light.

I was quite nervous about doing this before, but I must say I quite enjoyed it.

Jacques Rupnik
Well I’m sure you understand that we enjoyed listening to your speech as much as you enjoyed giving it, particularly the emphasis you put on cultural interaction rather than competition, cultural interaction rather than simply tolerance. Tolerance can also be a form of indifference. I think that these are interesting notions that we will follow up on in the discussion.

Ladislav Čerych
Thank you, Mr Chairman.
Since you introduced French into our discussion, I am going to speak French and I apologise to those who will have to listen to an interpreter. I am not doing this only because you introduced French again. I have two or three other reasons to do so. Firstly, it is because we have been interpreting from French here and so it is not a problem technically, and secondly, because I think that this year - it was not the case one or two years ago - the voice of Francophone countries is missing here. Southern Europe is represented here by my friends Marcal Grilo and Josep Bricall, but it is not enough. Besides, they speak English even though they can speak excellent French. And the third reason is that I think that the French language and French intellectuals have a lot to say in this debate on cultural and spiritual values. I am not their spokesman but I hope that in the future this will be put right and that we will hear more views even though they might be in contradiction with what we are saying here. As you surely know, it is France - and I am not sure whether this is the case also in Italy, Spain or Portugal - where we hear most objections to the ideas that globalisation is identical with Americanisation, etc., which, as we could hear two days ago, a little out of place. It would be interesting, however, to hear these voices, these controversial views as well in our debate.
I would like to mention one other thing, very briefly. I participated in the organisation of the first day devoted to education, and as you know, three days of the Forum have been devoted to education, spiritual values and culture. I was intrigued that during the last two days, and mainly yesterday, to see that the debate always returned to education. Even though we discussed spiritual values and mainly, when we tried to define specific solutions, we reached the conclusion that it is necessary first and foremost to change some ways of educating and to take certain measures in this area. I think that this is rather important. It underlines not only the importance of the first day but also the mutual connection between these three themes, which were chosen for the Forum in 2000.
That is all I wanted to say. Thank you.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you Mr Čerych. Our next speaker is Mr Max-Neef

Manfred A. Max-Neef
Since we are coming to the end of three fascinating days, allow me to be a bit of a heretic at this stage. I would like to express some doubts and concerns, which I have. I wonder after so many discussions, to what degree are we dealing with a reality and to what degree are we dealing with a word. I say that because every decade we invent a word around which all the discussions centre. In the 50s it was Co-operation, in the 60s it was Development, in the 70s it was the New International Economic Order, then came Sustainability and now Globalisation. If we look back all of those were big problems. Funnily enough none of them got solved. So we should come to the conclusion that we never solve a problem we just get tired of them. Once we get tired of a problem we have to invent a new one.

The problems of sustainability are not solved, but it is absolutely clear that globalisation has taken over and the problems of sustainability are vanishing, it’s not in the forefront any more. This is strange, it is probably a human attribute to work that way. Professor Gaarder reminded us of a unique human attribute - a cosmic consciousness, but we have another very unique human attribute - human stupidity. We are the only stupid beings in the world. There are no stupid horses or stupid dogs and the point is that the precondition for being stupid is being intelligent. The stupid act is the act we commit against the evidence that we have. Don’t go down that alley because it’s dark and there is a hole in it. You go and you fall into the hole. That is the stupid act; you acted against the evidence and the information that you had. How much information do we really have and are we acting according to or against the information we have? We will see that we are systematically acting against the evidence that we have. I believe that we are condemned to being coherent with our attribute of human stupidity.

For me it was interesting in the last panels of today, because I honestly believe that the only thing that can take us out of this malady of stupidity is rediscovering the human being as a creator of art. Here again I would like to stress what Madame Ugrešić said about having a minimum standard of aesthetic principles. I was tremendously shocked about a month ago at an exhibition of contemporary art in the Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago. There was a lot of what is now called installations and one consisted of eleven grinders, the ones that you make fruit juice in, half-filled with water with goldfish swimming in them. The idea was that and this was the artistic expression, that you would press the button and grind that beautiful little fish alive. This was a ”work of art”. Of course there was a degree of scandal, and it was surprising to see how many artists were fanatically defending this ”art expression” This creates a great disconcert among people, at which point you say I don’t understand anything any more. Don’t we have other nobler concerns? Of course we have. We do this as a manifestation of human stupidity. I said it in my first intervention that we should not fool ourselves and I would like to repeat that. The only way is to recognise ourselves in the mirror in our internal and external nakedness without masks to hide our reality and then we can face up to the dramatic problems that lie ahead; and I have great hope when it comes to culture and the arts.

Jacques Rupnik
I have already quite a few speakers on my list, however I have been asked to make a short interruption to our discussion. Some of the protestors of the anti-globalisation movement have come here and their spokesman is keen to make a brief statement.

From the audience

I would like to clarify that I’m not the spokesman of the whole protest, because nobody is. I just wanted to bring to your attention, since you are talking about arts and representation, that one of the things we see as a challenge to peaceful social change is dissent. A form of dissent that thinks that the partner to communicate with are not the institutions, as we see them as part of the problem, but the people in the streets is being represented in such a negative form, in such a homogenised form that it leaves hardly any space for our message to be listened to. This type of criminalisation by the media which is usually coupled by the criminalisation by the state has also been seen in Prague as elsewhere in the world. It is not a local problem it is a global problem and that’s why we think that it is important for you to consider this problem. Here in Prague there are still people in jail, who according to our information should not be in jail now. Including the case of a 16 year old boy who has been in jail for three weeks and has not seen his parents - he broke the window of a car. The most urgent global issue that we think that should be taken into consideration is the fact that because of this negative representation on the side of states and the media, there is no space for constructive communication and this is in our opinion partly what leads to very confrontational forms of communication. We would be very grateful if you could consider these problems in your discussions.

Jacques Rupnik
As you can see no one here refuses a discussion. In fact, President Havel organised a discussion on the eve of the IMF summit in Prague Castle with those people who are opposed to those institutions. I wasn’t here but I am told it was very interesting. There is no criminalisation here and this certainly not the attitude of this audience. The next speaker is Mr Jařab, the rector of Olomouc University.

Josef Jařab
I will continue on what we have just heard. Allen Ginsberg when he came to teach at my university in 1993, heard from students how important it was to read American literature before 1989 for - let us say political reasons. Alan thought it was reading the beat poetry, which was true. One of the students really shocked him when asked what text made the most impact on him, to read aesthetics as a political alternative. That student said Edgar Allan Poe. There was no reaction to that, only this year a book of Ginsberg essays was published posthumously, where he states that, ”only in the end of my life have I found out that I am probably as much in the lineage of Walt Whitman as I am of Edgar Allan Poe.” Why am I mentioning it here. I think it has already been mentioned that aesthetics can have a very powerful moral and even political impact in the right context.

I would like to comment on the importance of the creative process of an artist. It is one of the last processes that has a powerful impact on the audience as much as it has on the creator, if the creator invites the audience to the act of creation. I was very pleasantly surprised after ten years of being rector - which I no longer am - to be back in the classroom and read essays by students that I could never find ten or twelve years ago, where they praise so-called difficult authors for inviting them into co-operation of reading the text. I find that something very remarkable and something that we should create conditions for in the field of education. Here is the minimum of aesthetics, here is the standard. For a long time we were told that art reflects reality, but I find it much wiser to see art not reflecting the product of creativity, but the process of creation and creativity. There is a difference here and there is a moral value - and I think that our President has deduced that - that ensues from his experience as a writer, developing a text asks you to be as true as possible to the text and to the message. Ivan Klíma said it so beautifully in a few words that it is the personal message to the world and that is an ethical act. I don’t think that there is that much disagreement between Professor Gaarder and Dubravka Ugrešić as it seemed to me - at least at first sight. Democratisation is not solely a communist product; in fact democratisation of culture going with commercialisation started somewhere else with the development of mass culture and mass literature popular culture, developed more in the free world than in the totalitarian one. Creativity is something that was radiating the ideas of freedom of creating. One last thing: yes indeed, the arts are a celebration of the human consciousness, human creativity and I think that the discussions that Professor Max-Neef mentioned disappear are important to keep the awareness of the problem alive. Maybe we cannot solve anything definitely. There are no conclusive solutions to the large problems that we try to find names for, but awareness is the first important step.

Jacques Rupnik
I should remind everyone that the keynote speakers will have time to comment at the end of the session. We are very lucky in having two such differing speeches even though they possibly did not differ so much as you rightly suggest. Professor Smejkal from the diplomatic academy.

Petr Smejkal
I think that many artists don’t reflect the reality; they create a reality and I think it can be very dangerous. An artist’s reality can be very ambiguous and they create something that can become a reality, a very bad reality.

Jacques Rupnik
The next speaker is Mr Plotkin.

Mariano Plotkin
I would like to be cautious about these minimum standards in art. Among other things that the Pokémons of today maybe the classical art of tomorrow. Shakespeare, now part of the western canon, wasn’t considered high art in his day. Entertainment has always been part of the arts. Personally I don’t like the grinders with the fish in them but still I would like to call for some caution on the determining what the minimum standard of art is.

Jacques Rupnik
Yes I suppose it is just as difficult to establish artistic minimum as it is human rights minimum or a freedom minimum. Once you establish a minimum then you must establish norms and there would be disagreement or controversy over that. The next speaker is Ivan Klíma.

Ivan Klíma
I am happy to have heard dialogue between the speakers. I am partly on one side and partly on the second side. I said in my last contribution that nobody has the right to prescribe the writer what message he will bring to the audience. If I read a book I am happy to find a message; it is something that enriches the book. For me, maybe not for you. So I don’t see such contradiction in what you both said. I agree with the stress you put on the responsibility, on the right for responsibility on what we are doing for people, who are influencing. I would like to deal with something that was discussed before lunch, but still it is very important. It is about some control over the brutality in some films. I was fighting all my life against censorship under communism. The state has no power, and should have no power, but civic organisations can protest about too much brutality and put it to the courts to decide, if it can really damage younger generations. In my opinion we cannot entirely prove that TV influences young people. I’m also not so sure that if we let them run entirely free that they will always find some correct solution like these young people in the supermarket as was mentioned here. Maybe 90% will not be influenced, but if a few of them kill under the influence of a film then it has to be taken into account and we should react. Don’t compare control under the totalitarian system and the democratic system, it is something we cannot compare.

Jacques Rupnik
Here we have very different perspectives deriving from very different experiences. For many of those in the West, who are afraid of the marketisation of culture, the trivialisation and threat to national identity they think that regulation is the response. Some even talk of quotas on television for certain types of programmes. Seen from Central Europe the mere idea of control or quotas echoes state influence, state control and why not state censorship. The same words do not have the same echoes if you talk about them here in Prague or if you talk about them in Western Europe or America. Secondly, Dubravka Ugrešić’s experience of having had first the communist experience of the state control of the arts and then having the nation state controlling or promoting national culture. Which was worse she will tell us. And the third one, the market. So really we have three threats to artistic expression. The next speaker is Mr Eduardo Grilo from the Gulbenkian Foundation.

Eduardo Grilo
Firstly I would say how happy I am with these three days of debate. I thought before that this should be an open debate, but I didn’t realise that it would be so open with such open-minded participants. I really would like to say that probably in this debate we have listened to arguments and analysis that are more consistent than those coming from organisations that are against globalisation. I am very glad with that point. My second point refers to the hope that comes from this meeting and the hope that comes from the students. It was difficult to realise that the students, even though they are so young,
could have such a positive contribution here. I am extremely happy, as it shows that we are followed by a younger generation that understand what they are doing. They have proposals, they know what they want; they have proposals and we can rely on them. My last comment goes to Mr Gaarder. I very much like his book ”Sophie’s World”. You have confirmed what was difficult, that the author is similar to the book. I would like to insist that you offer us more Sophie books.

Jacques Rupnik
We have exhausted the list of the panellists so if anyone wants to speak... Hazel Henderson.

Hazel Henderson
If I may just return to this subject of censorship and I very much appreciate Ivan Klíma’s clarification. I would like to pick up on what Manfred Max-Neef said that we have plenty of information, but we don’t act on it. I want to get back to this thing we call commercial censorship. This is the distortion of information by commercial interests. I live with this every day, I am always dealing with it. It is very interesting to me that we defend so much the existing situation, which is the situation of commercial censorship and we want to give this complete freedom and licence to the commercial media. We are not so worried by the access of all the people and all the voices that are left out. I think I mentioned all the indigenous cultures in the world that have so much to offer us, and the culture of women. We are at the end of 6 000 years of patriarchy. Women do think differently, do have issues, do have different concerns. I am worried that the same commercial interests are mining culture. There are actually some people at the World Bank known as the Knowledge Prospectors and they are searching cultures for images to promote their commercial brands. This is the same kind of distortion when companies do bio-prospecting, where they try to capture the planet’s bio-diversity. This distortion of information is very serious.

Jacques Rupnik
The next speaker is Laura Laubeová from the Students' Forum.

Laura Laubeová
I am from Prague, I am a PhD student in public policy, I participated in the Students´ Forum and I am also a teacher at the department of International Studies and together with my students we run an NGO Transborder Initiative for Tolerance and Human Rights and I am also a mother. Yesterday, I was sharing my feelings with my family about the Forum and I talked about the Dalai Lama about justice, solidarity and love. My daughter asked me why are those people who are here different to those people, who are in power and care about money and markets? I didn’t know how to answer the question. In the meantime I realised, maybe what she meant, that those people who are here do not have power. This question is still open to me.

Professor Giddens managed to successfully elicit smiles on most faces here when he mentioned the Seattle demonstrator, who had a banner of anti-globalisation, who is ridiculous because he himself had been globalised in Seattle. I haven’t been to Seattle, but I was here when there were protestors against the negative aspects of globalisation. My question is: Why is it different when Archbishop Ganda, who mentioned the negative impacts as well as Mario Soares say something from the people on the street? Where is the limit? We are teaching children or schools are supposed to teach active citizenship, democracy, etc.. If people’s voices aren’t heard then they go to the streets. Where are the limits? If anyone can answer these two questions then I will be very enriched by this meeting.

Jacques Rupnik
The next speaker is Yousif al-Khoei

Yousif al-Khoei
A number of speakers mentioned the need to include indigenous and minority cultures in the media. I wonder if any of the panel have any solution short of censorship, where many of the minorities are stereotypes in the public media, especially Hollywood movies.

Jacques Rupnik
Both speakers will address that in their concluding remarks. Fritjof Capra is on my list.

Fritjof Capra
I would like to address the second question posed by Laura about the opponents to economic globalisation in Seattle and Prague and other places. I think it is a good example of commercial censorship as mentioned by Hazel Henderson. The media that are owned by the corporations do not want to portray a sophisticated opposition to globalisation, so they portray this opposition as violent people in the street. There has been violence and this has been very unfortunate, but this has been on a minute scale. The larger opposition forms a vast network of NGOs, who are very well organised and have formed very detailed and sophisticated analyses of economic globalisation; they have their lawyers, their scholars with PhDs, their web sites, seminars, publications; its all abundantly documented, but this is not portrayed by the media.
After Seattle there was a most cynical report in the Economist and so I’m not surprised that Professor Giddens was influenced by that.

Jacques Rupnik
I think that I could go into this discussion myself and step out of my role as moderator and perhaps have two reactions to what you just said. Yes, the media maybe have over-emphasised the question of violence, but there was organised violence. Someone like myself who comes here as often as possible and I talk to my friends here, who are just as critical of some aspects of globalisation as you are, were shocked and appalled by imported violence. The culture of this country is a non-violent one. The resistance to the 1968 invasion was non-violent, the Velvet Revolution was a non-violent defeat of a totalitarian regime, and even the divorce of Czechoslovakia was a non-violent one, as opposed to Yugoslavia. To see an imported culture of violence was for many people here a shock. The media played their part; maybe they are biased. Violence has been here and it was maybe misrepresented, but it was a shock. There has also been an attempt at dialogue, I mentioned here that President Havel organised a debate about globalisation with the opponents of globalisation.

There is a very lively debate in Western Europe about globalisation. In Paris, where I live, the dominant consensus is totally against globalisation. Even the IMF and the World Bank speeches are full of apologies and self-criticism and bending over backwards to admit their sins and recuperating the arguments of their critics. You may say that this is repressive tolerance, that they are taking over the criticism from the critics to diffuse it and we are back to the discussion about culture. A certain form of cultural marketisation is just a soft means of control. This is certainly Dubravka Ugrešić’s thesis. I’m sorry if I have stepped out of the role of moderator and I know that the moderator should moderate himself.

Fritjof Capra
Can I have one more sentence? The NGO coalition were just as shocked by the violence as you were and they have expressed this in public in the Manchester Daily Guardian printed a whole page on this, I can give it to you.

Jacques Rupnik
The next speaker is Martin Terefe

Martin Terefe
I’d like to add a little point about the definition of globalisation. It has been mentioned that globalisation is an irreversible process. Yes, as long as our distribution of fuel and electricity systems that support transportation and communications systems is intact, globalisation may be an irreversible process. The way we treat our ecological resources, it may not be an irreversible feature. I would like to propose to the forum that sustainability be a topic of debate every year until it is solved.

Jacques Rupnik
The next speaker is Peter Scott from Kingston University in the United Kingdom.

Peter Scott
I would like to answer Laura’s first question about why we talk here and have these high ideals and the politicians don’t seem to carry it out. I would like to defend the politicians. I feel that we get the politicians we deserve. If we live in democratic states we get the right to vote, the right to participate. What is shocking is the low level of participation and the low levels of debate in democracies. One of the crucial tasks of the 21st century is for us to recover faith in the capacity of democratic states. What has happened, - and I’m talking mainly about Western Europe, - is that we act much less as citizens, reducing the democratic power and act much more as consumers. We complain that we are in thrall to commercialisation, but we have produced that end ourselves. We have to get a better balance and recover faith in the democratic state. During the civil war in England there was a brief interlude where England was republic and was called the Commonwealth of England. This old fashioned title is still preserved in some American states, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, for example, and I think that that is a fitting name, as it is our common wealth. Unless we have some faith that we can act together through the state, in a broad sense and not simply through the government, we will never get the balance right and we will always be complaining in gatherings like this about the negative impacts of commercialisation, when in fact we are, in this awful negative way, consumers, citizens of this commercial state about which we complain.

Jacques Rupnik
The next speaker is Mr James Bradley from St. Andrews University.

James Bradley
I asked myself what am I going to see. I have come to a place where some of the people I respect the most are here: the Dalai Lama, Mr Ivan Klíma and the future-thinking President Havel. He’s always thought where he’s going and where he wants to take people. What I have seen while everyone is discussing the way that everyone is accounting future generations are going to change things. I ask myself how much do you really know the future generations? The Students' Forum accounts for a minority of the vast diversity of the youth today. There is no accounting for the frustration and the insecurity felt by the youth. I would like to ask President Havel, while his future-thinking accounts for a lot of things not heard in Britain, and I have had to come to the Czech Republic to get a voice, what do you do about the quieter and more disgruntled elements of the youth that aren’t accounted for?

Jan Kukačka
As an economic analyst and publicist I see life in the Czech Republic after the Velvet Revolution and I must say that I think that we do not have a civil society yet. I would ask the panel to tell me what to do about culture in a situation where all the newspapers have been privatised and for the new owners it is essential to make profit and not the service to the public. It is not self-sustainable and so they must write what the advertisers want.

Jacques Rupnik
The next speaker is Mr Karfík, the editor of a leading Czech literary journal. It has a great tradition here and was very important in the 1960s and was revived here in the 1990s and this is a particularly interesting experience that Mr Karfík can draw on.

Vladimír Karfík
Thank you for allowing me to speak. Today, I have followed with interest
how the discussion began to become abrupt. I liked very much what Mrs.
Dubravka Ugrešič said at the beginning of her contribution. Mr. Jostein
Gaarder asked for that very sharp rebuttal by his somehow nationalistic
revivalist concept of his extensive speech. I understand the bristled
reaction, as we have a similar cultural and political experience as does
Mrs. Dubravka Ugrešič, although we do not see the situation so clearly.
The danger of a free, in no way regulated, market is manifesting in our
country, especially in the sphere of the print media.

The fact that the print media is solely in private hands is not as
important as the fact that it is concentrated in the hands of several,
but not many, international individuals, and it is this concentration
that evokes apprehension and can also endanger freedom of speech. We
have not objected to the quick entry of supranational publishing
companies because of the fact that they are foreign, but it disquiets
us, being in the Czech market, that they behave as if they were in a
colonial territory. They behave in this manner because they are allowed
to, with no restrictions, not as they do at home or in other countries
where they produce trash for profit as well, but have to also release
mature literature. We can hardly resist against this influence of the
market because our politic elites deified the free market without having
respected the specific needs of the national culture which, in our case,
is that our language is used only in this small territory. The struggle
of culture with the unregulated market, here in our Republic, is
aggravated because there is no advanced, corrective civil society; that
is why we have a continual dispute with political elites who, by tooth
and nail, obstruct the development of free civil activates, so as not to
loose anything from their portion of power.

I also liked how Mrs. Dubravka Ugrešič differentiated between culture
and art. Culture is a configuration of very divergent phenomena and
activities; whereas, art has a joint aesthetic value, the only attribute
without which an artistic work cannot exist. A great number of various
works are coming into being; but, it is particularly their aesthetic
function that decides their longevity. The only obligation of an artist
is the fidelity to this aesthetic function. In this respect, we must
remain quite liberal; censorship has nothing to do with art.

An artist does not need, in this way, to take social responsibility into
account. As a citizen, he must respect it, but as an artist not. An
artist has the right to be socially irresponsible: that is the
uniqueness of his being. And, in such a case, if art also represents a
power against negative social phenomena it is solely, and only, because
it is autonomous unto itself.


Mr Oceánský
I just wanted to say that this is a very good initiative. The kind of protest that you have on the street is not the kind of protest that you can enclose in a castle or an event of this kind. The basic message is that it is a counter-cultural message, nothing to do with institutions: it is about a dominant culture that is actively promoted, implemented and enforced by these institutions. That’s why these protestors feel that they cannot express it to those institutions that are very much part of the problem. That’s why it has to be expressed from the grass roots to achieve greater and deeper degree of democracy and participation. This counter-cultural message, which questions the basic values on which our society is based. This message is regarded as trivial, juvenile and not worthy of consideration and this leads to violence, as they want to express this message and they do not know how, as there is no medium. I, as a non-violent activist declare my active solidarity with those who came here to break windows, because that’s the only the way they find to express their feeling to do with their future and the future of others and I will continue to express this solidarity as long there is no space for these feelings and these ideas to be expressed.

Jacques Rupnik
I think that you will appreciate that you came in, we opened the floor and you spoke so I think you can see that there are other methods apart from violence. As for a non violent activist sympathising with violence, I have my reservations. I suppose we are in the city of Franz Kafka so absurdity is not totally out of place.

Jiří Musil
Because I want to speak clearly and perspicuously, I will use my
mother tongue. I would like to react to what we have just heard.

I understand this young man's fury and I agree with him that I
would like to see more participative democracy. But, my dear
colleague, our experience is somewhat different; we are, for
example, afraid of the anxiety of disruption. You don't
understand this reaction because you are deeply convinced that
it is necessary to disrupt what you call a certain form of
culture. After experiencing life, we are now more careful. Please
understand that we fear violence. Therefore, we cannot
acquiescence when an argument develops into throwing cobble
stones at people or into windows.

I would like you to understand the experience of a people who
have lived practically their entire lives under totalitarian
systems which began for the most part by disruption. We cannot
accept that disruption. We must find an equilibrium between
authority and rule, on the one hand, and liberty and
participation, which you long for so much; and I will personally
strive for it to be as progressive as possible.

I repeat for the third time: Please, consider the experience of
the Central European countries, the threat of chaos, and think
carefully about all that you do. I apologize for this somewhat
emotional tone, but it cost us our lives.

Jacques Rupnik
The next speaker is Mr Ladislav Čerych

Ladislav Čerych
After this very emotional remark from Jiří Musil, with which I fully agree, I would like to make one, which is more methodological. One of the conclusions is the fact that globalisation as a concept, as a trend, has many dimensions. There is no one globalisation, but many trends. In that sense I would like to draw your attention to the interview with President Havel in today’s Lidové noviny where he says that the term globalisation should be used as little as possible and with great care as it is open to so many interpretations. Whether this assembly can invent a new term I doubt, but I think we should have this in our minds.

Tang Kwan Lui
I sat through the conference for three days with lots of contradictions. When I first heard the term globalisation I thought that that was very true, then I hear how globalisation was Americanisation, after all there is McDonalds everywhere. Then with talk of Pokémon and the Beatles I realised that there are so many different influences, music, walkmans from Japan, even religion. Then I remember what Peter said about the astronaut looking at us and we are one Earth as we globalise we become one. Maybe we need to create some facility to hang on to our uniqueness and I say that not so much in the vein of Milošević or Hitler with genocide. Even in plants there are hybrids and after a while one strain becomes weak and at a point it becomes necessary to find something natural genes that could bring salvation. So scientists look back to the wild plants and see what has evolved over these centuries that is so valuable. Even in my trips to Scotland I have always marvelled at how I’m so cold, yet the people of Scotland are always so hot. I always say, ”Your blood must have anti-freeze in it.” So obviously Darwinism is at work. On top of that we all have our cultural differences. All I am saying is that is it would be very important that if some of that uniqueness is maintained so that if we need it there is somewhere we can draw from.

I heard the young lady about how she spoke to her daughter, who said that these are all people that have no power. Well that’s partially true and partially not. President Havel is here and he has power and others too. Mostly I reflected on what Prince Hassan said yesterday about not forgetting history. I came to Prague before and I remember thinking how gloomy! After the fall of communism I don’t see smiles and when people said that Prague was so beautiful I couldn’t quite feel it. This time when I arrived here I turned up a bit early so I took a ride around the streets and people were smiling walking around. I thought what a marvellous transformation and I would like to ask President Havel what input he has had over this process. The other person is, of course, President Lee Teng-hui also brought democracy to Taiwan in a peaceful manner. Overall it was a rather peaceful process. Maybe they can share with us a little bit of what they did right, so that it didn’t erupt into outright violence and so we can learn from it.

Jacques Rupnik
The last and hopefully brief statement, because we are running out of time, from Lucia Amalia de León Zamorra from Charles University.

Lucia Amalia de León Zamorra
I would address the two people, one from Yugoslavia and one from your country, about state control. I was wondering whether you can compare dialogue and discourse with control. I am a Mexican and I have been studying in Faculty of Philosophy and have been asked to make a comparison of the discourse of President Havel and Octavio Paz, both political writers. I have been working with the Power of the Powerless, which Mr Havel wrote in 1977 and with the Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz. I can clearly say that a comparison must be done carefully, but I found an answer in anthropology to explain how two men from two different cultures can be dissidents and what does this word dissident mean? How much all of us are a dissident in ourselves and how much all of us have the same inner, human nature, which has been transformed all around the world? In anthropology, Edward Sapir said, ”It is important to make a difference between the core and peripheral elements.” What we have been discussing over the past three days are core elements and peripheral elements. It is important to have in mind that we are a single human race all through history. Mr Havel’s example as well as many other men who have devoted their lives to truth we can see that we can make a better world.

Yesterday it was said, the Velvet Revolution and Mr Havel appeared from nowhere. I have studied Czech culture and Mr Havel is the very proud product of this proud culture from Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Jan Patočka, Jan Opletal, to Jan Hus. As a Mexican I can say that we have many men as well as in Africa, Asia who are also living for the truth. So Mr Havel, I have read your work and thank you it has changed my life.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you very much. That was a very fitting conclusion to our debate. We will still hear from our two speakers, who will respond to the questions. I was struck in the presentations that they gave us two very different, but perhaps only apparently different perspectives on the topic we are discussing. On the one hand a more optimistic view of globalisation that Jostein Gaarder gave us. The wonderful story of a Norwegian schoolteacher who writes a book for his pupils and sells tens of million copies worldwide. Globalisation as we like it. Globalisation with a human face.

Then we have the more anxious view from Dubravka Ugrešić who reflected on the role of the artist under the communist totalitarianism and under the nationalist nation state builders, but also of the artist trying to cope with repressive tolerance of the market to use Marcuse´s phrase. She spoke of colonisation and of the old enemy we knew, the communist censorship and the new enemy the market is more insidious and perhaps she meant that it is no less dangerous. This is interesting as there is this interchange between East-West of experiences. It used to be that the artists of Eastern Europe envied the artists of the West the freedom and the market forces. The artists in Western Europe envied intellectuals the artists in Eastern European, who had no freedom but when they said something it mattered. Philip Roth put it in a nutshell, ”In the West everything goes, nothing matters. In the East nothing goes, everything matters.” Now, of course after 1989, the two worlds merged, the West took over the rest. Artists of Eastern Europe got what they longed for, the freedom of expression, their own role in that context. Perhaps some of them resent it, perhaps some of them also feel liberated from that role of eternal spokesman of the nation, the people, the cause of eternal suppliers of hope. Now we are all in the same boat, which we call globalisation. I would now like to ask our two main speakers if they want to give us a concluding word.

Dubravka Ugrešić
I’m so sorry it seems that I have been misinterpreted or somehow understood wrongly, as I heard some very defensive voices and then I understood that I am attacking something, which is not true. I will try to stick to the theme ”Art and Globalisation”. It is a tremendously wide issue, which includes so many spheres - media, post-modernism, the role of art, post-colonialism, markets, money, the structure of the distributors, conglomerates etc. To give an easy conclusion is really not simple. I tried to concentrate on one small sphere - what has really happened to the notion of art and literature in this modern world. Some of you who have asked questions seem to me that you are dealing with notions of art, like everything is clear. Drastic changes happened in our world, our artistic world, literature, etc., within those thirty years. Things are not the same any more. Not because a piece of art has changed its substance, but because of the environment has changed. What happened to so-called high art? This is what I tried to question. I have nothing against mass culture, trivial culture, pop-culture, etc. I am not in power, I am a freelance author living in Amsterdam. I am not in a position where I can be against anything. Yes, I enjoy it the same as you.

I am just questioning that within those thirty years, the division between high art and mass culture has been deleted. High art has been pushed to the limits, I asked why has this happened. Thirty years ago it was still protected by academia, professors, educational systems and literary departments, including American universities. It was protected, interpreted and the knowledge passed on by so-called arbiters, literary schools very powerful like semiotics, structuralism, deconstruction, I mean schools who really tried seriously to deal with art. Those schools today no longer exist. The whole environment protecting works of art disappeared. No more fat journals, no more reviews, no more space in daily newspapers, no more space in the media. So what happened within those thirty years, while intellectuals were so shy and didn’t want to impose any values, other arbiters occupied the space. Those arbiters are market arbiters who replaced the academics. Good is what sells, bad is what does not sell. While the intellectuals are shy to respond, the market has been aggressive, creating slogans. This is beautiful. They know what is beautiful because we are not sure, right? This is because we have lost a system of aesthetic values. When was the last aesthetic written? 50 years ago, nobody dares to impose while the market dares.

Jostein Gaarder
I would like to express my thanks to President Havel for this very generosity of the Forum 2000 conference and we will all go home having taken impressions with us and I think it is very important as all of us talk with many people. I would also like to thank Dubravka and say that I actually totally agree with you and all of your concerns and worries about high art or pure art, as I believe it is important to distinguish between high and low art.

I expressed my worry that globalisation or the entertainment industry or the same forces that you see as an enemy for real art can threaten people’s own activity, their culture. When I use the word culture I don’t mean it as a synonym for high art or pure art. I mean local traditions, plays, religious festivals, dances, etc. Television and the Internet is making people read less, both trivial literature and high art. The picture you gave is very evident that sex and crime and very much crime, that is very much what people talk about and it is even dealt with by cultural journalists as not different in any way from a real work of art. What I focused on is that when art and artists around the world have achieved freedom and rights. I still think that there is a special responsibility for artists, also because the entertainment industry and the low culture is so mighty. This is how the world ends: not with a bang but with a beautiful piece of art. It is an old discussion whether an artist has a human responsibility in the work. In the entertainment industry you find these beautiful aesthetic films, like the last video I saw which was a rock video about necrophilia, a disgusting piece of art, but beautiful, professionally done and that’s why its so seductive.

It was also mentioned by Ivan Klíma: we meet these in the courtrooms around the world - the fourteen- year- old boy that says ”I saw Natural Born Killers before I committed this”. So I think that art is responsible in a new, maybe more profound way, especially concerning our common human effort to save our environment. One thing I would say to Dubravka; of course we need critics of art, because things that present themselves as art aren’t necessarily art, just because of the mechanisms or the economy. That is what we lack - critics of the arts. Let me say one last thing, I was in Spain and I saw different cultural newspapers with the lists of best-sellers, there was a non-fiction best-seller list and actually more than one paper had a best-seller list for poetry. Maybe no. 1 sold only 17 copies but that is more than the one selling 14 copies. I will repeat myself. It is an old saying that the frog that is placed in boiling water will immediately leap out of danger, but the frog that is placed in cold water that is gradually heated to boiling point, it will not perceive the danger and be boiled to death.

Is this generation such a frog? Is this generation's culture and arts such a frog? I don't know, but it's actually up to us to prove. I seriously think it's up to artists of the global village to prove.

Arts are the celebration of human consciousness. Shouldn't the artist then be the first to defend it from annihilation or extinction?

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you both for your splendid conclusion to our debate and it turns out that you are not as far apart as we initially thought. I think you will agree with me that we had a very lively, interesting session this afternoon. We haven’t exhausted the topic but maybe we have exhausted the participants. I thank you all for participating and it is now an honour and pleasure for me to ask the President of the Czech Republic, Mr Václav Havel, to give us the concluding words. Mr President.