Home / Quotes

Quotes

Corina Şuteu

The bureaucratic time and the artist time are not the same: bureaucracy is tempted to give answers, whereas artists are looking at the complexity of what reality is.

Diederik Paalman

A visa policy is led by the Ministry of the Interior and not by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, which is usually more open and relaxed on this matter. The Ministry of the Interior is much more focused on security issues and sees visas as a tool to regulate entry on its territory.

Diederik Paalman

We, at DG HOME, think that many of the problems that people are confronted with in the Schengen visa system can be remedied by issuing quicker multi-entry visas.

Michael Reiterer

I would think about 3 different levels in cultural diplomacy. First of all, diplomats have to work on frameworks to make sure that you can travel as an artist, get a visa, there is no censorship. Secondly, culture is a tool to work on cultural diplomacy, and I think we made a lot of mistakes in the past. After 1989, we, collectively, did not pay enough attention to promote Western values (…). Finally, culture is important in diplomacy (…) because sometimes you do not know how to communicate, so there is art.

Michael Reiterer

They – the rest of the world – think Europe is a sort of economic entity. Therefore we have to become political, we have to become more cultural. Because I do not want to sell Europe as an import-export club.

Katelijn Verstraete

This debate on Europe (…) is taking place with young people. Are they not more connected to the local, and the global through digital information?

Xavier Troussard

The uniqueness of this project is that we are trying to respect diversity, implementing solidarity, to cooperate and to create a political experiment. I see the major role of the EU as an enabler in this process, on top of what the Member States may do, not as an entity which should capture one image, frame it and say this is European culture.

Renilde Steeghs

The fact that we stay away from the content, that is the value. The fact that we do not want to determine the content is in itself a value that we are exporting.

Renilde Steeghs

We should concentrate first on having the basic rights on where the European Union can do things, where the Member States are absolutely unable to do things on their own. And then we can prove our value and build from that.

Andrew Senior

We need to build things about how we go, about understanding how we position ourselves, how we engage, how we converse, through culture, through the economy (…). How can you have a dialogue with somebody if you cannot really think about what collaboration looks like?