How to love a continent?

Is there anyone interested to fall in love, to be part of a traditional and emotional relationship? Who wishes to live a high quality life in peace and prosperity? Who can identify with a multicultural community, full of languages, traditions and culture? Who is dreaming the European dream?
Gabriella Gönczy is member of the civil society movement called “A soul for Europe” where people from all over Europe are shaping the cultural image of this continent.

Twenty-seven governments in twenty-seven countries speaking twenty-three official languages, are living in one economic area, with one parliament, using one currency with half a billion other people, sharing advantages of this economic cooperation called European Union. This institutional political System exists without being connected to its citizens. But how do you identify yourself with an economic institution? The current Policy Makers in Brussels will not help to bring up the missing excitements. Hence the Europeans will not appreciate all the other benefits every one of us could take from this multicultural and multilingual continent.

Gabriella Gönczy, as I would say a convinced European, knows about the problem: “Nobody loves their home country because of its politics, its currency or its market. The same applies to our home continent: As long as Europe is perceived predominantly as an administrative and bureaucratic institution, it will be difficult for us to love Europe.” To change this circumstances the civil society initiative “A Soul for Europe” employs a Europe of the Europeans with a novel, future-oriented model for cooperation between civil society and policy makers, rather than just a Europe of institutions and regulations. The initiative works on transnational culture projects to support a European identity and to enable a European sense of community. In this context Gabriella Gönczy explains the importance of culture: “In the process of European integration, the power of culture can act as a positive tenor. Culture is the cement that holds the continent together, the basis for cohesion and community in Europe.”

Her commitment to building a soul for Europe is connected to the near European history. Gabriella Gönczy was 17 years old when the turn in East West Policy came to Hungary. In this time she was living in Budapest, where the optimistic atmosphere of the Hungarian society was tangible. The population was full of dreams towards a united Europe, hoping to get connected with the economic prosperity of Western Europe. But in the beginning of the nineties the economic situation in Hungary hadn’t changed and people became frustrated. In these years Gabriella Gönczy went to study in Berlin. Here she was surrounded by the atmosphere of change in the former divided city. She saw the rapid growth in Berlin’s culture sector, the tourist boom and the annual increment of artists from all over the world.

On the first of May in 2004, 15 years after the change, people in ten East European countries celebrated the second reunion of Europe; the membership to the European Union. In the same year Gabriella Gönczy joined the first Berlin conference of “A soul for Europe”. High politicians came together with young people from all over Europe on panel discussions. Her subject was “East-west communication”, her thesis: “The catch-up process of the countries from East Europe is only possible with culture.”

Nowadays Gabriella Gönczy, as a member of the strategy group of “A soul for Europe”, is involved into a cooperation with the European Film Academy. On the Europe Culture Forum in 2009 numerous well known film directors and members of the European Film Academy have set up a think tank called “The Image of Europe”, where there are offering their help to the European Commission in shaping the future of European cinema as part of European identity. “In this context”, demands Gabriella Gönczy in her keynote on the European Cultural Congress from 2011, “is it important to work on educational goals as part of the European Media Programme, which means to include films, like literature in the school curricula and to teach children who live in a world dominated by images, from primary school on, about the grammar of the moving image just as they are taught the grammar of the written word. European identity and intercultural communication skills should become core elements of media literacy in the future.” Furthermore she recommends to the representative bodies of the EU “to use film in particular as a medium to disseminate images of Europe in order to promote Europe’s attractiveness and successful development.” She hopes that more Europeans start dreaming the European dream.