Cultural institutions and politics

Abstract

In this essay I wish to discuss the importance of culture and cultural exchanges as an instrument of communication and how a good cultural policy, carried out by respective cultural institutions in foreign countries can have an incidence on the social, technical and economic development of peoples. An authoritative representative of the British Government who was presiding over a meeting of Mixed Commission discussing a Cultural Agreement once pointed out, with the typically refined British sense of humour even when tackling serious discussions, that if someone had proposed, a few years back, the appropriation of public funds for such an agreement, they would have been brushed aside "with bewilderment and indignation". (Ministro Gennaro De Novellis - Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs - 1962) Today the situation is reversed. In a speech at the 26th UNESCO General Conference, the then Italian Minister for Foreign Affairs Gianni de Michelis, had stated: "At the General Assembly of the UN I referred to the need for reform of the United Nations, to fit it for the tasks it is called upon to perform in a radically changed context. I would now like to extend these same reflections to UNESCO. We have witnessed with our own eyes a rapid succession of events that, introduction as the values of liberty, democracy and free initiative have been affirmed, has resulted in the fall of ideologies and power systems that had seemed set in stone. The old world order no longer exists and the new one has still to be built. New, non traditional issues, such as the protection of the environment, the achievement of which is one of the parameters of worldwide integration, take on great importance. The same can be said for the cultural dimension. [...]