Europe Day 2025: Culture in Action, Across the Continent

From street conversations to policy salons, from SPUI25 to Paradiso—Europe Day came alive in every corner of Amsterdam.

Every year on 9 May, Europe Day marks the anniversary of the Schuman Declaration. At the European Cultural Foundation, it’s never just a date. It’s a call to action, to imagination, and to solidarity. This year, we answered that call with a full day of programming that put culture, storytelling, and civic dialogue at the heart of the European project.

We began the day with Culture Leads the Way, a collaborative event hosted at H’ART Museum alongside DutchCulture, Creative Europe Desk NL, and EIT Culture & Creativity. The event brought together artists, policymakers, and changemakers to examine how cultural work is not just a reflection of our societies, but an engine that drives them forward. In our dedicated session, we revisited our Cultural Deal for Europe campaign, exploring how culture connects the local and the continental.

In the afternoon, we launched the 2025 edition of our annual magazine, Common Ground, at Athenaeum Nieuwscentrum. Featuring contributions by philosopher Alicja Gescinska and photographer Max Slobodda, as well as an interview with European Commissioner for Culture Glenn Micallef, among others, the magazine is a mosaic of essays, artwork, and ideas that remind us what European culture can be: vivid, contested, plural, and deeply interconnected.

Later, we gathered at SPUI25 for Europe Up for Grabs, a live public conversation co-organised with DutchCulture and supported by the European Commission Representation in the Netherlands. Moderated by The Europeans podcast, the evening featured Başak Layic’s unforgettable story, “Europe, an Unfinished Love Story,” and brought together diverse voices—from photojournalist Rob Hornstra to artist Yuliia Elyas—to explore how we can reclaim a shared European future.

We ended the day at Paradiso with Europe Night, hosted by De Kiesmannen: a club night where music, performance and public dialogue collided. We invited The Europeans back on stage to continue the conversation. All night long, we gathered #MyEuropeDayOff stories from festivalgoers who imagined what it would look like if Europe Day were a holiday for all.

This year’s Europe Day programming was a success not only in terms of turnout and engagement but also in terms of its overall impact. It was a powerful reminder that European unity doesn’t begin in institutions—it begins in the spaces where people gather to share culture, challenge ideas, and imagine better futures.

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Photo by Xander Remkes.