Our Shared Europe Report

Executive Summary - Taking the Temperature

The British Council has more than 70 years of experience in creating mutually beneficial relationships between Britain and the peoples of other countries. In recent years, the organisation has been thinking and consulting about how this experience can be harnessed to begin to address one of the biggest cultural relations challenges of all time. Our Shared Europe comes from a desire to place the British Council’s resources in the service of such an ambition, and to invite partners and like-minded groups to join in.



After an initial consultation meeting in London with a group of UK-based experts in October 2007, an initial concept paper (Annexe 1) was tested in interviews and round-table meetings with over 150 professionals from 17 cities in ten countries. These countries were (in alphabetical order): Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Egypt, France, Germany, Morocco, the Netherlands, Spain, Turkey, and the UK. Interviewees also came from Portugal.

The experts that we met were drawn from: higher education and research (including teachers and those who work with young people); Muslim community non-governmental organisations and faith groups (including religious leaders); city and metropolitan authorities; the creative industries (artists, film-makers and playwrights); media; and public relations.

Among those interviewed, there was close to unanimity on several things:

• the project is ambitious
• the fall in trust between communities needs urgent attention
• the British Council is bold, brave and prescient in its desire to want to make a difference
• the British Council cannot undertake an initiative such as Our Shared Europe on its own.

A clear majority agreed that there is a real need for public recognition of the contribution of Muslim cultures to the making of Europe. The project research team discovered a number of exciting and forward-looking initiatives in many European cities that have been designed to recognise these contributions, and they discovered many initiatives intended to strengthen trust between communities.

Some concerns were also raised. A number of respondents said that a project that is designed to reduce mistrust needs to acknowledge all aspects of any shared history. If this history involves pain as well as pleasure, then the initiative needs to find ways of talking about the tragedies as much as the triumphs. Another consistent voice (especially among elites) in different cities was that Europe’s uniqueness lay in laïcité.* Concern was also raised as to whether the project represented the softer side to European counter-terrorism efforts, for which there is currently much public funding.