On 25 March 2017 we celebrated the 60th anniversary of the treaties of Rome that established what is now the European Union. The Rome Declaration that was published after the summit clearly mentioned cultural heritage and cultural diversity as two elements that need to be preserved as part of the efforts to build a social Europe based on social cohesion and convergence. Social cohesion, – or let's call it ‘solidarity’ – has been at the heart of the European project since the early days: Jean Monnet, one of its architects, famously noted that the objective of European integration was to ‘unite people, not creating coalitions of states’ and the intention was to do so ‘through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity’ as noted in the Schuman declaration of 9 May 1950.

Sixty years on, the concrete achievements are many: free movement of people, European citizenship, consumer protection, regional and agricultural development, the Erasmus programme and – above all – peace on our continent (just to name a few). These successes certainly made a convincing case for a united Europe. However, the difficulties in tackling the economic and migration crises and more recently Brexit have partially tarnished the picture.

Culture and inter-cultural dialogue could play a key role in magnifying the contribution made by the free movement of people in building trust and mutual understanding across a broader swathe of our society. Doing so is fundamental, as there cannot be solidarity without empathy, and there cannot be empathy without mutual understanding.

Considering that the European Union is founded on diversity, and in light of the fact that the perception of diversity tends to reduce solidarity, we must pro-actively work to strengthen solidarity at European level to protect our common achievements and be able to advance further.

As noted in the EU Global Strategy the world has never been so connected, complex and contested. As individuals, we have never been so interconnected with like-minded individuals worldwide, often more than with our own neighbours: social media put us in comfortable ‘silos’ of like-minded individuals where we are increasingly exposed largely to what we would tend to ‘like’, hence undermining our possibility to build a shared understanding and vision as it would happen in an ‘agora’. At the same time, the boundaries between what is external and internal are fading away as shown by global challenges such as migration and climate change.

Considering that the European Union is founded on diversity, and in light of the fact that the perception of diversity tends to reduce solidarity, we must pro-actively work to strengthen solidarity at European level to protect our common achievements and be able to advance further.

In all that, new narratives increasingly beefed up by fake news, propaganda or alternative facts are becoming the norm, aiming at weakening our societies' resilience, questioning the overarching universal principles on which our democracies operate and highlighting the divisions in our societies. The global arena is also rapidly changing with global powers such as the US slowly withdrawing from those multilateral fora that allowed global issues to be tackled (such as the UN climate conference COP21and UNESCO) and new rising powers taking the lead both economically and politically.

Challenges are increasingly global and interconnected and cannot be dealt with by individual countries because they are too large (e.g. climate change, migration) and because globalisation has weakened their ability to tackle them (e.g. corporate taxation, security). The need for global solutions is difficult to reconcile with the current identitarian closure, which fosters the creation of cohesive groups of individuals aware of their differences vis-à-vis other groups but unaware of their commonalities.

This lack of common ground and the development of ‘exclusive identities’ are the biggest barrier to mutual understanding: they undermine the emerging of empathy across distinct groups within our societies and do not allow us to harness the full potential that highly diverse (and cohesive) societies can develop. It is here that the current nationalist tendencies clash most violently with what is necessary: governance structures at local, regional and global levels that are accepted as legitimate by the people.

Empathy is the key to legitimise governance that is not legitimated otherwise by other legal, national or economic ties, and the more diverse a society is, the more necessary it becomes. Awareness must grow in our societies of the fact that there cannot be peace and prosperity for us if our neighbours are not at peace, and if our neighbours' neighbours are not at peace.

In this context the role of culture in the broader sense, including also intercultural dialogue, cultural heritage and people-topeople contacts – in addition to traditional fine arts – is key in order to build empathy within our societies in Europe but also between our European societies and the rest of the world.

Empathy is the key to legitimise governance that is not legitimated otherwise by other legal, national or economic ties, and the more diverse a society is, the more necessary it becomes.

As EU's foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini noted at the 2016 European Culture Forum: ‘Europe inspired the world because it was itself inspired by the world’. Such openness has made Europe successful and also increased the complexity of our societies, which have become mirrors of the world, with its opportunities and challenges.

Living together in a society is not easy, and requires investing in it constantly. Like a field, it must be sowed regularly with good seeds if we wish to have a good harvest. To benefit from such diversity and avoid falling into the populists' traps of the clash of civilisations we need to give ourselves the tools to understand such complexity. Culture can play the role of a vaccine against simplifications, racism and populism.

It is also in this light that 2018 has been declared the European Year of Cultural Heritage, which aims to ‘encourage more people to discover and explore Europe's cultural heritage, and to reinforce a sense of belonging to a common European family’ while also creating spaces for intercultural dialogue and boosting equal cooperation in the field of cultural heritage with citizens in third countries.

Along these lines, within the broader field of cultural relations a wider understanding of cultural diplomacy is seeing the light with a focus on empowering local actors and facilitating the creation of spaces for inter-cultural dialogue in order to build trust and mutual understanding.

Such culture is no longer considered as exclusively the ensemble of arts and creative sectors and a more anthropological understanding of culture is best placed to give us the tools to rebuild the social fabric of our societies as well as a sense of empathy as global citizens. A sense of belonging is increasingly crucial in order to gather the necessary support to tackle the global challenges that often unequally affect different sections of the global population (as it is the case with climate change). As such, intercultural dialogue can provide opportunities for a synthesis to emerge between global vision and local context and facilitate future cooperation across policy areas in addition to reinforcing the resilience of our societies to the risks represented by identitarian closure.

Living together in a society is not easy, and requires investing in it constantly. Like a field, it must be sowed regularly with good seeds if we wish to have a good harvest.

Europe, as a land of emigration and immigration, could play the useful role of a hub connecting diasporas from across the globe. Cities in Europe and in the rest of the world could act as connectors between what is global and local. Cities are hubs where people meet, create, innovate and tackle increasingly interrelated global and local challenges, ranging from climate change and security to health, migration and economic growth. Cities are places where people strive to be happy living side-by-side and sharing common public spaces and where inclusive identities can flourish on the wealth of cultural heritage and traditions when appropriate efforts to facilitate this are made.

have also been laboratories for democracy and political evolution throughout history and at a time when the tension between globalisation and regionalism/localism are increasingly evident, they could also regain a more prominent role in foreign affairs based on the strength of their cultural heritage. At the end of the day, cities are among the most resilient political entities ever invented and, most importantly, they are the closest to the people.