Common Ground 2025 Launched on Europe Day

Our annual magazine, Common Ground, was presented at Athenaeum Nieuwscentrum on Europe Day.

This launch saw contributions by Theresa Kuhn, Full Professor at the Capacity group European Studies, University of Amsterdam and academic director of the Amsterdam Center of European Studies (ACES), Arnold van Bruggen, journalist, filmmaker and researcher, who since 2020 works on The Europeans, a portrait of modern Europe, and André Wilkens, Director of the European Cultural Foundation.

The free magazine contents range from a manifesto for a European digital public space to photography-essays from Kyiv and south-western Spain, from an interview with European Commissioner for Culture Glenn Micallef to highighting ECF programmes, from a graphic novel on the European Parliament to an essay by philosopher Alicja Gescinksa and infographs on European sentiments. The magazine brings together the many different Europes we live in.

Our Director writes on the deeper ambition of Common Ground in his editorial: “To show that Europe’s power doesn’t lie in grand narratives or bureaucratic monoliths, but in its capacity to listen, to adapt, to imagine. That power lives in libraries and poems, in street art and fashion karaoke, in connecting rivers and historical memory.

If there’s a lesson to take from 1989, it’s not that history ended—but that we believed it could. Today, we can no longer “muddle through.” We have to act, with empathy and with imagination. We must reinvest in soft power—not as propaganda, but as practice. Culture is not a luxury. It is how Europe constantly learns to be European.

The fairy tale is over. But the story continues.

Let’s write it together.”