Goals

The necessary balance between subdivided means of human commerce has become jeopardized by current economic primacy and thrown into question, which in turn is compromising the entire traditional value system in western culture. For this reason, a solution must be found to regain equilibrium.
This is where the WORLD CULTURE FORUM would like to contribute. Based on an integral cultural understanding, its initiators aim to help the general public document and establish the existential significance of culture for a better global community. Its concern is to establish a platform for a systematically comprehensive dialogue to establish awareness and solve problems. Controversial theses are also of particular concern, as their development should disembogue prescient declarations, along with possible solutions. Among the founders of the WORLD CULTURE FORUM, it is a foregone conclusion that, in the dynamic and complicated world in which we live today, we can only find temporary solutions to such problems, and that these solutions must be reworked and redefined over time.

With so many other cultural circles in the backdrop, one challenge for a systematically comprehensive dialogue is the question of whether a secure, independent European identity can be maintained? Working within the scope of a WORLD CULTURE FORUM with partners from the Middle East, Asia, Africa and South America, all of whom wish to achieve a unified, pliable vision of global order, the challenge is to find more precise descriptions and definitions of our identity vis-a-vis shared value systems. How does our societal framework fit into the greater balance of the powers of art and society, economics, politics and religion, what is effective, and where are the dangers within the aspired vision of this greater balance?

The second WORLD CULTURE FORUM will offer the chance grapple with these difficult issues, with the hope that a coherent answer and a European consensus will be reached. The initiators of this event agree that an exemplary discussion will ensue, that the paradigmatic framework of art, science, economics, religion and politics within the phenomenon of the European city can be addressed. The history and development of European cities, with the possible inclusion of historical sources in Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean, is also a history of social, cultural, economic, political and religious interplay within experimental settings. This is where European behavioral patterns were formed. Do the value systems that stem from these settings stand a chance in a globally organized world? Can they survive, must they change, or are they the wrong model for other world regions? Are our European experiences a basis for a fruitful dialogue with the world of Islam, with Far Eastern thought, with African or South American, post-colonial societies?

Answers to such questions are not only of abstract value. In a global environment, they concern every politician, everyone involved in economy, every interculturally engaged artist, and every representative of a significant world religion. Everyone is effected as an individual, which in turn means that everyone’s function is effected within the regulated systems of art and science, economics, politics and religion.