Existing and Potential Fora for Intercultural Dialogue in the EU

The paper concentrates on the review of existing and potential institutional fora for intercultural dialogue, both in the sense of characteristics and activities of individual EU institutions and the Community action programmes. Main observations are those of existence of considerable number of Community initiatives and programmes (especially in the field of education, culture, media, youth and citizens’ participation) yet perhaps inevitably dispersed alongside various sectors and financing lines. Moreover, it seems that with the Community action in place less importance is attached in practice to regional and local level activities, where the Community competence does not reach and where exactly the intercultural dialogue should actually be taking prominent place as a daily phenomenon in Europe’s citizens lives. Therefore, it is proposed that more potential for the action within intercultural dialogue domain could be searched within the activities transgressing the policy sectors naturally involving intercultural dialogue and that the intercultural dialogue can build also on hard projects producing soft dialogue-related effects or soft value added from exploitation of vast potential of EU funding in other than culture, education and social policy spheres.