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Looking to the cultural world to solve Europe’s problems

Performers including the actor Jude Law, back row left, at the forum ‘‘Re:Creating Europe.’’Credit...Jan Boeve

AMSTERDAM — What if the solutions to Europe’s most pressing problems lie not in politics or diplomacy, but in art and culture?

With the European Union under pressure from economic stagnation, a wave of refugees, terror attacks and the possibility of Britain leaving the bloc, more than 150 cultural figures from 37 countries — including the actor Jude Law and the architect Rem Koolhaas — gathered here at a forum last week to explore that possibility.

“The debate about the future of Europe can only prosper with the imagination of artists and thinkers,” Yoeri Albrecht, the director of De Balie, an Amsterdam cultural center, and a curator of the forum “Re: Creating Europe,” said at the opening session June 1.

Until now, Mr. Albrecht said, that debate “has become the sole property of economists and public servants, and the discussion almost always circles around money and bureaucracy. But Europe is essentially about hope and forgiveness, and these two ideas are ideas built and made by culture.”

The forum was sponsored by several Dutch and European foundations and the city of Amsterdam and included lectures, interviews, performances and “expert sessions” at various locations throughout the city.

The three-day event opened with a performance created by the Belgian director and playwright Ivo van Hove. A multilingual cast, including Mr. Law, quoted passages from politicians, philosophers and authors who had considered the case for a unified Europe, pro and con.

Mr. Law gave a dramatic reading from the landmark 1946 speech by Winston Churchill that called for “a kind of United States of Europe” — where “small nations will count as much as large ones and gain their honor by a contribution to the common cause.” He also read from a recent speech by the former mayor of London, Boris Johnson, which criticized the euro and supported a British withdrawal from the European Union.

Other actors quoted Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front in France, arguing for a return to French sovereignty, as well as Jean Monnet, a founding father of the European Union, who postulated a common interest “beyond differences and geographical boundaries.’’

“Seventy years ago, Europe appeared as the kind of salvation to hundreds of years of nationalist wars, conflict and holocaust,” the American author and political theorist Benjamin R. Barber said after the opening session. “As hope unravels around the refugee crisis, around Brexit, around terrorism, people ask then is Europe unraveling? Is the idea unraveling? Was Europe the great salvation that has now failed?”

“The idea is,” he added, “if we find Europe again, maybe we could find our way out of all of these things.”

He warned against focusing too much on creating Europe as a single, united entity to the exclusion of people from elsewhere.

“It’s wonderful to see the Europeans struggling to rediscover Monnet’s dream of a unified Europe,” he said. “But at the same time a bit depressing to see how parochial Europe is. In some ways, Europe has become to the rest of the world what Germany once was to Europeans: an aggressive colonizing force with walls around it that talks about itself and ignores everyone else.”

Mr. Koolhaas; Luuk van Middelaar, a political theorist; and Mr. Albrecht led a 12-hour interview session that sought to answer the question, “What is Europe?”

Stella Ghervas, a Swiss historian, said that question had occupied thinkers for centuries.

“Everyone was trying to answer this question about how to have perpetual peace and how to solve this chronic disease of Europe, which was incessant war,” Ms. Ghervas said. “It’s a political definition of Europe that begins at the turn of the 18th century, a real need to propose alternatives to the conflicts of continental Europe.”

Mr. Barber gave the keynote address in an evening session at the Royal Concertgebouw concert hall, featuring a performance by the Dutch singer Wende. He proposed an international parliament of cities, in which mayors could share ideas for solving problems, rather than relying on nation-states, which he considers outdated because their governments are concerned with issues of borders and sovereignty that inhibit their ability to work together.

During the forum speakers grappled with the notion of finding a shared European cultural identity within a pluralistic society. Many were concerned that Europe was being defined only in response to world events, or in opposition to outside forces, rather than finding its own sense of ethics and direction.

In a session for policy makers at Castrum Peregrini, a cultural center that served as a secret hiding place for Jewish artists and intellectuals during World War II, Dublin’s city arts officer, Ray Yeates, referring to the economic crisis and the resulting breakdown of trust among European nations, said, “We’re all in a period of post-traumatic stress, where the fundamental part of us as citizens was struck at its core.”

“We have to think in a cultural way about what values could liberate us,” Mr. Yeates said. “We need a new myth, a new thing that defines us.”

A “final statement” was presented through artworks and performances at the Stedelijk Museum last Friday to Jet Bussemaker, the Dutch culture minister and a top cultural official at the Council of Europe.

In her closing remarks, Ms. Bussemaker said, “Ready-made solutions won’t help us tackle the problems that Europe faces.”

“When today’s artists connect the worlds of imagination, expertise and technology,” she added, “they give us wings to lift Europe to a higher plane and raise our thinking to a higher level.”

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