Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-10-27-Speech-3-218"

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"Mr President, I just wanted to make a few general points in connection with cultural matters. Although everyone appears to agree that culture is important in theory, in practice the situation is often quite different in Europe. Europe seems to be more interested in agriculture than culture. They only differ by four letters but that certainly makes a very big difference at the budgetary level. Any MEP with cultural sensitivities is still moved to read the European Council’s declarations of love when it comes to cultural matters. But this emotion soon gives way to disillusionment when the words are not followed by deeds, particularly where budgets are concerned. For there is nothing that the European Union spends so little on as culture and savings even have to be made in the little that we do spend, notwithstanding the fact that everyone always agrees that promoting culture is probably the only way to make the EU popular with its citizens. I therefore think that it would be particularly misguided of this Parliament not to follow the rapporteur’s recommendations, for you cannot keep saying that you think it is a shame that an ever-decreasing number of people vote in European elections, or that you regret that every inquiry shows that the EU appears to be ever more distant from the people of Europe, only to go making cutbacks in projects whose precise intention it is to bring the EU closer to the people. We certainly feel that we ought not to finance large-scale, expensive projects, but rather small-scale projects that the people of Europe can identify with and which could make a tremendous contribution at the socio-economic level in terms of job opportunities. Now that we are talking about the Europe of the next century, a new, wider Europe, an enlarged Europe, would it not perhaps be useful to pursue a bold cultural policy at long last, for culture is not something that should be talked about in the way that all the other “important” matters are discussed. Now that everything appears to be discussed in economic terms, perhaps it is time for us to start showing more interest in what are, after all, the origins of Europe, notably our culture."@en1

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