International Conference |
Dear Ms. Françoise Rivière, Assistant Director-General of UNESCO!
Ladies and Gentlemen!
Colleagues!
Guests!
Friends!
It is a great honor and my pleasure to welcome here all the participants and organisers of this conference – UNESCO’s high-level officials and activists, ministers, diplomats, legislators, professionals in the spheres of culture, education, and science, representatives of civil society and private sector from more than 40 countries. A noble cause brings together all of the people here.
I am particularly pleased, and believe this is a good sign, that this meeting takes place in Saint Petersburg, in Konstantinovsky Palace, where the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin receives the heads of states. Saint Petersburg is a hospitable city with rich and diverse cultural life, a city of artists and intellectuals, a city of grand museums, libraries, and theatres. I hope that there will be enough time and the weather will stay nice for you to enjoy the beauty and magnificence of our northern capital and to feel its special attraction.
The proposal to hold this conference in Russia was first put forth by the Russian Federation Ministry of Culture and the UNESCO Information for All Programme National Committee of Russia in November 2003 in Moscow at the meeting of the Council on Culture and Art under the President of the Russian Federation, which focuses on the issues of Russia and UNESCO collaboration. The suggestion was supported by the Russian President and Koïchiro Matsuura, Director-General of UNESCO, who took part in that meeting.
The conference was conceptualised as one of the central UNESCO’s thematic meetings in preparation for the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis. The goal of the conference is to determine UNESCO’s further steps and key decisions regarding the formation of the global information society.
This conference was preceded by three thematic meetings recently held by UNESCO as part of the Summit’s preparatory stage: two in Paris and one in Bamako (Mali).
In contrast to these previous meetings, this conference encompasses all the spheres of UNESCO’s activity: culture, science, education, communication and information. According to the preferences declared by Koïchiro Matsuura, Director-General of UNESCO, the conference will focus upon the issues of cultural diversity in the knowledge societies.
Today’s forum also represents Russia’s contribution to the preparation of the Second Phase of the World Summit on the Information Society; the conference was granted a status of the Summit’s Thematic Meeting by the WSIS Executive Secretariat.
This conference takes place at the time when the whole world, all the countries, inter-governmental and international non-governmental organisations, and business community actively prepare for the Summit, when the new international information policy is formulated and the regional and national strategies of building the information society are identified.
Russia has always been an active member of UNESCO. Russia supported the idea of establishing the UNESCO Information for All Programme from the very beginning and is currently an enthusiastic member of its Intergovernmental Council. I should note that this Programme was created as a platform for international discussions concerning political, legal, ethical, and social problems that are related to the global information society, as well as for preparing and implementing projects aimed at providing widespread access to information and knowledge.
Today it is UNESCO that articulates the opinions of the part of the world academic, educational, cultural and political elite that believes that the cooperative efforts of the governments, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector can and should channel the global information society’s development towards its humanization, bridging the digital divide, preserving cultural and language diversity on the planet, thus deliberately building the knowledge society.
The inter-cultural dialogue and tolerance, high respect for cultural diversity are, perhaps, the key conditions of building the information society in the increasingly globalised world. We should view the support of the cultural diversity not as a burdensome obligation constantly requiring new resources and efforts, but rather as an aggregate of the multiple building blocks for the emerging universal civil culture, which requires universal ethics and values.
In Russia, which is a very interesting and immensely rich country in terms of the cultural diversity, we feel this particularly strongly and understand it from our own historic and modern experience. It is evident for us that cultural diversity and pride in one’s cultural uniqueness have always been one of the fundamental sources of the social energy for the peoples and ethnic groups populating our country.
We should have a clear understanding that the globalisation processes combined with the rapid development of the information and communication technologies, on the one hand, threaten the cultural diversity but, on the other hand, create new conditions for a dialogue between cultures and civilizations and take this dialogue to a new, more productive level by engaging hundreds of thousands and millions of people from our countries.
I am deeply convinced that this conference will be highly productive with bright presentations and interesting discussions; it will undoubtedly facilitate the achievement of our common goals.
I sincerely wish you every success in the conference work and hope that its results will be a worthy contribution to the formulation of the modern international, regional, and national cultural and information policy in addition to strengthening UNESCO’s global position.
In conclusion, I would like to express a deep gratitude to all the members of the organising committee and the program committee, to the conference meeting and section moderators, and to the presenters.
Thank you for your attention.