European Cultural Foundation seeks new imagination on anniversary.

'Nothing can make up for the past. But the real, enduring power of the past lies in how it affects our present and our future. What we can do is shape a future history in which we consciously and determinedly carry with us only the best of our past.' Don't keep rooting, but cognitive behavioural therapy for the whole of Europe, is how one could summarise Ahdaf Soueif's appeal. The Egyptian writer, one of the two laureates of the Princess Margriet Awards on 2 October, deeply impressed the room full of guests of the European Cultural Foundation (ECF), which awards the prize, with her acceptance speech.

Princess Margriet herself did not attend the presentation of the award named after her. She left the honour to Princess Laurentien, the current president of the foundation. It made the gathering a little less royal, much to the disappointment of the royalty press that had flocked, but also took away some of the potential fraughtness. Not that it was much of an issue on that evening at De Meervaart, but Ahdaf Soueif was declared tainted by several people thanks to an article in De Telegraaf on 11 September. Her support for a Palestinian organisation that is controversial in Germany because of its anti-Zionist course has got 'action journalist' Wierd Duk and his troll army after her. Duk suggests she holds anti-Semitic views.

Fortress Europe

The artist herself was especially dignified and forceful in her speech. Of course, she spoke of her field of activity in Gaza, but she emphatically stated that the oppression of the people living there came from both Egypt and Israel. She explained that the walls, fences and barbed wire that surround Gaza perfectly mirror the borders of Fortress Europe. A Europe, which, according to the writer, is squandering its own standards: 'The core values of the ECF - democracy, diversity, trust, solidarity, interdependence, freedom - are a mockery if the right to live by them is not the right of all humanity.'

So it did rub off, that Wednesday night, because the other winner also had a message with a sharp edge. The City of Women festival in the Slovenian city of Ljubljana, with an agenda focused on gender equality and empowerment, is a typical PMA winner, but the thank-you speech was also very much about a wound from Slovenia's past that is healing very slowly, while Europe looks on.

Wounds

In 1991, Slovenia declared its independence from Yugoslavia. It was the de facto beginning of the Yugoslav civil war. From one day to the next, twenty thousand citizens were suddenly declared stateless and unwanted because they had relatives or roots in one of the other republics of the former Yugoslavia. Europe did not exert enough pressure to end that civil rights robbery until 2004, so the wounds have still not healed. A similar fate now threatens European citizens in the UK as a result of a no-deal Brexit.

Perhaps such a prize as the Princess Margriet Award will help the healing process. The organisation, which was founded in 1954 to give cultural content to European cooperation, actually seeks friction and criticism in its awards. After all, the ECF argues, this is an essential part of European identity, if it exists at all.

Threats

Now this is quite tricky, because: what binds Sicily and Lapland together? Or Catalonia and Silesia? In this day and age, it seems like there is more what divides us than what unites us. The generation that founded the Union remembers that it was to end the centuries-long tradition of European wars that cost hundreds of millions of lives. Wars over land, religion or economic power.

Now identity is the buzzword. With rising populism and nationalism, nostalgia reigns supreme. In Poland and Hungary, the leadership is in the hands of people who are undisguised anti-Semites, Brexit is founded on a longing for the old British empire, and in the Netherlands, Forum calls for a return to the 19th-century nation-state.

Manifesto

However, the 'Amsterdam Manifesto', which the ECF presented on the occasion of its 65th anniversary, speaks mainly of unlimited idealism and hope for a frictionless future: 'We need to create a truly European sentiment, a European sense of destiny, a European sense of belonging. With such a sentiment, a better Europe is possible, but without it, Europe is vulnerable to division and disintegration.' Nice words, but also a bit '1950s'.

'We have to be careful that Europe does not become a museum,' said one of the attendees afterwards. The Hungarian-born artist found the idealism of the Manifesto naive: 'Europe also has dark sides and we should not ignore them.'

Imagination

The birthday party on 2 October was graced with the release of a fierce designed magazine of 230 pages. In it, stories of Europe, penned by everyone with something to say about it in the ECF context. Stories of hope, but also of fighting against despair, because things sometimes look pretty bleak.

The Amsterdam Manifesto then has a fitting answer to that:

'Today's times are difficult times. How can we respond to these challenges without just reacting? How can we work for Europe's future while addressing current problems? But challenging times are also times of opportunity, they create space and urgency for new thinking. Europe needs imagination.'‘