Address by the Head of Delegation,
European Union, EC Delegation in Korea
Dorian Prince
Education and Culture in the EU embraces three main goals: bringing people together to foster respect and understanding, create a European knowledge area, and support the development of cultural and audio-visual sectors.
The cultural and audiovisual sector brings people together and harbors important economies for the EU. A European knowledge area with innovative capacity, qualifications, skills and competencies is key to achieving the strategic target of the EU to become the most competitive economy in the world capable of sustainable growth, with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion.
After 11 September, however, it is the EU's experience of bringing its people together which attained new significance: The European Union and European integration builds on mutual respect and understanding between all people. The EU and the European Commission seek to further this respect and understanding by encouraging European citizens, be they young or adult, to meet and learn from each other. The exchange activities under the youth and education programs, the town twinning and civil society actions, but also our culture activities under the Culture 2000 program contribute to this goal. Although these actions so far have mainly focused on creating respect and better understanding between citizens of present and future Member States, the 11 September events show that we need to extend them to include non-Member States' citizens as well.
The fellowships under the ASEM-DUO Program are a timely initiative as is the cooperation of our EU Member States in attracting more Korean Students to European Universities thus laying an important foundation for future contacts and cooperation in science and technology, culture, and politics.
In this sense, I most warmly welcome the outreach initiative of the Lektorenvereinigung. I wish it fruitful discussions and plenty of success.
Copyright © 2002 by Dorian Price
