09/05/2026
Happy Europe Day! 🇪🇺
Why We Are Explicitly pro-European
There was a stretch of years in which a generic, soft Europeanism could be assumed in any cultural organisation in our part of the continent; it was the water we swam in. That assumption is no longer safe. Europeanism is now contested, in our own country and in others, and an organisation that fails to state its position has, in effect, stated a different one.
So we state ours. We are pro-European in three concrete senses.
First, in the structural sense: most of the projects we run are designed within European programmes (Erasmus+, AFCN aligned with European cultural strategy, frameworks supported by European institutes). Our consortia are always transnational. Our partners come from Cyprus, Italy, Greece, Spain, Croatia, Poland, and from other countries as the work expands. The European character of our work is not a flavour; it is the architecture.
Second, in the cultural sense: we believe in the European intellectual tradition, with its long argument between many languages and many religious and political settlements. That tradition is not perfect, and we do not pretend it is; we are nonetheless persuaded that it is the inheritance most likely to keep producing, in the future, the kind of pluralism we want to live inside.
Third, in the practical sense: we name our funders, our partners, and our budgets. We do not hide them behind generic gratitude formulas. The specificity is itself a small political act. It tells our readers that European cooperation is not abstract; it has line items, deadlines, project numbers, and people.
The position is not anti-anything. We work with non-European partners when the work calls for it; we admire civic and cultural traditions that originate elsewhere; we do not believe Europe has a monopoly on good ideas. What we do believe is that, given the choice, the European framework is the one in which our particular kind of work is most likely to keep being possible.