Round Table Stresses Importance of Diversity for Democracy
Participants of Wednesday's round table in Ljubljana examining intercultural dialogue and the spread of democracy concluded that people must learn to live with diversity instead of trying to do away with differences.
According to the participants of the round table held on the fringes of Thursday's international conference on interethnic and interfaith relations in Kosovo, different cultures must be accepted and a common identity found among them.
Among the participants, Foreign Minister Dimitrij Rupel pointed to the visionary works of Slovenian Romantic poet France Preseren in the field of diversity.
The event also saw the participation of US political scientist and author of numerous books on intercultural dialogue, Benjamin Barber, former envoy of the UN secretary general for the Year of Dialogue Among Civilisations Giandomenico Picco and lecturer at the Ljubljana Faculty of Theology Drago Ocvirk.
Barber and Picco are also members of the Group for Intercultural Dialogue that was established by the Slovenian Foreign Ministry and the Centre for European Perspective and which held its maiden session earlier on Wednesday.
Barber said he was happy to be in Slovenia, a small country, since democracy was made for small countries. As such, Slovenia can now talk to large democracies about the spread of intercultural dialogue, as big countries have not been overly successful in this aspect.
Barber said that the expansion of democracy requires a bottom-up approach and cannot be forced top-down.
Each nation must fight for democracy and pay a price for it, something that requires time, he stressed.
Democracy is not brought about by the constitution nor by elections, said Barber and added that this is where the main mistake of the US lies in its intervention in Iraq.
According to Barber, the key to a real democracy is the "common civic good", as a real democracy is a democracy of "citizenship", which is something that needs to be learnt.
Barber stressed the importance of bringing up young people with democratic awareness, an aspect also highlighted by Picco.
According to Picco, young people need role models who will reject notions that there are lives that are worth less or that there are children who are worth less.
The first thing that needs to be accomplished, however, is to overcome the notion that the world is bipolar and to bring together people from all sides into a "coalition of regular people" that would draft a manifest applicable to all.
Meanwhile, Rupel stressed that the European Union had at least to a degree been successful in building a culture of diversity.
As an example of cultural diversity in the EU, Rupel pointed to the 27 member states and 23 official languages, as well as national coins for the single currency, the euro.
The Slovenian two euro coin features France Preseren and is different to those in the other eurozone members, but is worth the same, said Rupel.
Rupel reiterated that Slovenia has made the promotion of intercultural dialogue one of the priorities of its upcoming stint as EU president in the first half of 2008.
Meanwhile, Ocvirk focused on the Catholic view of democracy and intercultural dialogue. According to Ocvirk, the Church has become a promoter of human rights in recent decades. He pointed to the work of popes John XXIII and John Paul II in this respect.
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