Libraries, Culture and Democracy

You already introduced me with my function, and I think I probably have one of the most pretentious titles in the European institutional architecture: Director for Democracy. It started off as something even worse — they originally wanted to call it "Directorate of Democracy." I objected to that quite strongly. There are already enough people in the world trying to direct democracy, and what we are trying to do at the Council of Europe is really the opposite of that.

The title is relatively recent. It came out of the Summit of Heads of State and Government of the Council of Europe, which took place in Reykjavik in 2023, with the objective of identifying, articulating and agreeing on ways in which member states could respond effectively to what has been described as democratic backsliding — not an easy task, because democratic backsliding is not happening in outer space. It is happening within the European space, within the Council of Europe space. So it is a complex and challenging task to identify and agree on measures in those circumstances.

Nevertheless, some important decisions have been taken — the Reykjavik Principles for Democracy among them — and one of the outcomes was also a reorganisation of the Council of Europe. Reorganisation always sounds very exciting. I believe it was Petronius, in the Satyricon, who wrote that if you want to create the resemblance of progress, you restructure. Bureaucracies have been doing that successfully for over two thousand years, and we did it too. But this one mattered, because it created the directorate that reflects a broadened paradigm on how we see democracy and how we sustain, support and reinforce it, and make it more resilient.

It is not a new paradigm — it is a broadened one. We have long worked on the institutional side of democracy, because any functioning democracy requires institutions: legislation, parliament, judiciary. All of that remains important. What had been neglected, and what is now reflected in the directorate I lead, is the substantive part of democracy — the democratic environment that those institutions need in order to function, because they do not exist in a vacuum. I don't think that reorganisation simply created the resemblance of progress. At the very least, it laid the conditions for real progress, by bringing together the different ways in which member states, at all levels, invest in and nurture that democratic space. The directorate now brings together education, including civic education, youth, culture and heritage, media freedom and civil society. That does not cover every relevant area, but it brings together a good number of the important ones.

Thank you very much for inviting me to be a keynote speaker. I always find this rather intimidating, because in my experience I usually end up speaking on a subject that most people in the room know far more about than I do — which is very likely the case today, since I'd wager that nearly everyone here knows more about national libraries than I do. There is an expression, in the part of Europe I come from, for "semi-expertise": a semi-expert is someone who overhears a conversation on public transport in the morning and is able to give a conference on the subject that same evening. It's a phenomenon known the world over — it's just that in that particular region, we've turned it into an art form. That's often how I feel in situations like this one. I hope I won't disappoint you. I will, of course, speak on the suggested subject, but I want to approach it from two angles.

The first is the perspective of a citizen. I mentioned that I met the director of the National Library in Ljubljana just before this event. I spent a great deal of time in the National Library of Slovenia when I was a student, many years ago now. I'm sure you are all very proud of your own national libraries, and rightly so — they are iconic buildings. I won't claim to be entirely objective, but I think the National Library of Ljubljana really stands out, with the possible exception of this one, and certainly the one in Sarajevo. The Ljubljana library was completed just before the Second World War by the famous Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik — one of his most celebrated buildings. He designed much of the city centre, and had time left over for work in Prague, including Prague Castle, and buildings in Vienna. It's a truly remarkable place. Its iconic status is also evident in the fact that Slovenia has been trying to build a second national library building since 1987 — and still hasn't seriously started. There are all sorts of official reasons given, but I think the truth is simpler: the original is just too intimidating. It would be like trying to build a second Eiffel Tower in Paris — unimaginable.

I spent a great deal of time in that building because a fellow law student and friend of mine, Max, worked there. I went almost every day — sometimes to study, but mostly just to spend time with Max, a person of enormous intellect and spirit, even though he managed to study law even longer than Nelson Mandela did, and with far less excuse. He knew everybody. He knew everything — about culture, about sport, about football especially. He was a walking encyclopedia, a piece of living cultural heritage, made all the more tangible by how tangible a presence he was himself. He seemed the perfect person to be stationed at the gate of that house of knowledge which every national library represents.

What struck me then, and has stayed with me since, is that even going there day after day, it was still deeply impressive simply to walk in and be there. Of course architecture plays a part, but what really matters is what emanates from the role, the mission, the importance a national library holds in a nation's culture and life. I think that for a secular state, building a national library may be the closest thing to building a temple. That's genuinely the feeling it gives. From the very beginning, national libraries have been of extreme importance and relevance to citizens, even those who don't visit every day.

Now let me turn to the perspective of the Director for Democracy, and offer a brief historical view of the role of culture, knowledge and cultural heritage for the Council of Europe. Let's go back to the period immediately after the Second World War, when the Council of Europe was created, in 1949. Looking back today, it can feel almost inevitable, logical, spontaneous, that a few years after that terrible trauma of global conflict we began that remarkable journey of European integration. When I speak of Europe, I mean both the Council that came first and the European Communities — now the European Union — because they were born of the same historical experience, the same vision of how to answer that bitter and bloody history.

But none of it was natural or inevitable. From the perspective of the time, it would have sounded like science fiction to imagine that in a Europe still in ruins, still bearing the wounds of war, traumatised, grieving, suspicious of one another, one could say: let's build something that brings all these nations to work together toward European unity and cooperation. Science fiction. And the founders of the European project were not blind to the difficulty. What's striking is that they knew that simply setting up institutions was bound to fail — that they had to create an environment in which those institutions could actually take root, be understood, be embraced by European citizens.

That's why it's so telling that the European Convention on Human Rights was adopted in 1950, a year after the Council of Europe was founded — and the very next convention, before any other, was the European Cultural Convention of 1954. We now have over two hundred conventions, but the fact that culture came second, right after human rights and before anything else, was no accident. It was a deliberate political act to build the environment the European project needed in order to have any chance of success. The European Cultural Convention covers education, culture, cultural heritage, languages, the teaching of history — and from that alone, you can see how fundamental the role of national libraries is in supporting, sustaining and enriching that space.

It worked, at the time. Yet we seem to have forgotten this just when the European project, in its broadest sense, faces serious threats from multiple directions. We are slow to recognise how important it would be to reinforce exactly these contributions — the ones that can help repair and restore the fabric of unity and commitment to democratic values on which Europe was built. It remains an uphill struggle to explain to political decision-makers why culture matters for democracy, why cultural heritage matters, why libraries matter. But I think it's something we need to keep doing together — perhaps one of the priorities of our future cooperation.

The second reason this matters, from the perspective of the Director for Democracy — and I promise to keep this brief, though I'm not sure I'll manage — is how democratic backsliding, through authoritarian populism, so often manifests as an assault on culture itself. It works by reframing notions of culture, heritage, identity and tradition — the very notions at the heart of the European Cultural Convention — instrumentalising and even weaponising them to undermine the democratic values underpinning the European project. That demands a response. We need to reclaim the space to define what culture means in a democratic society, what tradition means, what identity means. Here again, national libraries have an extremely important role to play.

History itself is being weaponised. The distortion of history is a weapon in today's world, tied to a broader rejection of science, facts and reason that gained real momentum during the pandemic. We need to respond to this collectively, and we won't be able to do so without libraries — national libraries above all — playing an important part in that effort.

National libraries are a country's preeminent repository of information. Your institutions have collected countless rare and significant works from the past, forming an important part of what we now consider cultural heritage. But your duty to collect and preserve the nation's literature, within and beyond its borders, may constitute an equally important part of the cultural heritage of the future. Your role as custodians of cultural memory, now and going forward, should not be underestimated.

As you know, the core mandate of the Council of Europe is to promote, defend and protect human rights and democracy through international conventions and other legal instruments, and to enable Europe's citizens to participate effectively in today's complex and diverse democratic societies — encouraging active, responsible citizenship by giving people a genuine sense of ownership over decision-making and institutions. In that context, libraries not only continue to play a crucial democratic role in the twenty-first century, but have both the opportunity and, I would say, the responsibility to take on new roles — creating spaces for democratic participation and adapting to the technological, societal, economic and political challenges we all face. If anyone thinks the role of libraries is diminishing in this highly technological world, I would argue the opposite is true. It needs reflection and adaptation, but the mission of libraries — national libraries in particular — should only grow, and should be recognised as such.

Libraries must continue to be, and to expand as, places of equal access to information and knowledge; places that integrate different communities; places of socialisation and social cohesion, learning and education; places that enable democratic participation and support democratic values. Let's not forget that totalitarian and autocratic regimes routinely restrict access to information, including through restricted access to libraries. Many of you will be aware of the legislative changes in a former Council of Europe member state, Russia, where arbitrary decisions have banned and narrowed access to information in libraries, shrinking the budgets of public and scientific libraries by some 15 percent — and, in some municipal libraries, by as much as 70 percent.

And it isn't only censorship and restricted access. National libraries and cultural heritage more broadly are, in conflict, very often the first targets of aggression. One example is one that image just behind me: the National Library of Sarajevo was not destroyed by accident during the war — it was targeted, deliberately, to erase the cultural presence of the people, of every nationality and ethnic group, living in that city. We are seeing the same today in Russia's aggression against Ukraine, where important cultural sites are not damaged incidentally but targeted as part of a deliberate campaign, with the same objective as the destruction of the Sarajevo library. Only last night, important European cultural heritage in Kyiv was targeted again, with fires reported at a cathedral and monastery there. These are not theoretical threats. They are very real, and they underline how important it is to reinforce our support, our resources and our attention to everything that sustains culture and heritage, at every level and in every setting.

Our work on libraries — including with your association, EBLIDA, notably on the Recommendation on library legislation and policy in Europe — goes back more than a quarter of a century, to the first guidelines on the responsibilities of the state, local authorities and professionals, prepared and adopted by the Council of Europe's Intergovernmental Committee on Culture. These have recently been updated, in cooperation with EBLIDA, into a new non-binding legal instrument adopted by the Committee of Ministers. It is soft law — non-binding — but I believe it provides a very important basis for member states as they shape their national policies in this area.

I had the honour, two years ago, of presenting this recommendation in this very building. It has five main sections, all relevant to national libraries given the role and leadership you represent in this ecosystem in your respective countries: freedom of expression, free access to information and democratic participation; the place of libraries within the European agenda on sustainable development; global and local threats to library operations; digital transformation and the expansion of AI-based library networks; and, finally, copyright and the protection of library heritage. We hope this recommendation will serve as useful guidance for the steps and policies that today's situation requires.

Two aspects strike me as particularly important from the perspective of the Director for Democracy — and then I really will conclude. First, that libraries should ensure access to information and act as inclusive institutions. Second, that libraries should act as spaces that promote democratic participation. Access to information is indispensable for a functioning democracy. We rightly speak often about freedom of expression, grounded in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. But Article 10 protects not only the freedom to express and impart information, but equally — and importantly — the freedom to receive information, to have access to it. If you are skilled at restricting or manipulating access to information, you can leave people entirely free to express themselves however they like, and still achieve your objectives — less visibly, perhaps, but no less effectively or damagingly for democracy. This is why access to information, and the role of national libraries in securing it, cannot be underestimated.

Second, libraries as spaces for democratic participation. One factor — certainly not the origin of all our problems, but one that is clearly not helping — is the loss of spaces and opportunities for people to actually meet, speak and engage with one another. Without that, it's hard to imagine a functioning democracy. We can do a great deal on our phones, but we cannot run a democracy by replacing all human interaction and engagement with digital means. Libraries are among the precious, and increasingly rare, spaces that can offer that opportunity — and can help counter these trends and support democracy.

All of this feeds into a major Council of Europe initiative — we are good at launching major initiatives, and I'm confident this one will deliver results — called the New Democratic Pact for Europe. In essence, it says: we are in a difficult situation, and we need to critically assess what we have been doing, identify what we should have been doing but weren't, and decide what we should do going forward — by engaging the broadest possible range of interlocutors, going beyond the usual circle where everyone already knows what everyone else will say. That critical dialogue is ongoing, which is one reason I'm glad to attend meetings like this one, and I will stop shortly so that I can hear your questions, reactions and criticisms, all of which I will bring back to Strasbourg and feed into the Pact.

We are organising the Pact around six workstreams, and I think national libraries have something to contribute to every one of them: countering disinformation; social issues; non-discrimination and equal access to democratic participation; functioning democratic institutions; and new technologies — not only how to defend ourselves against the risks of artificial intelligence, but also how to use new technologies and AI to protect and strengthen democracy. The process will conclude in about a year. What is already becoming clear is that we have managed to carry that broader understanding of what democracy requires into this work, and that everything about it is deeply transversal. In short: protecting democracy, saving democracy, halting democratic backsliding, means that a great many people need to do a great many things better than they have so far — and do them together. That, in essence, is the philosophy of the New Democratic Pact for Europe.

Let me close by returning to my friend Max, from the National Library of Ljubljana. When he passed away, far too young and far too early, more than a hundred people contributed to a book in his memory — artists, politicians, people from civil society, friends, and librarians who each wrote him a message. That book now sits in the National Library of Ljubljana. I think he'd deserve a memorial plaque too — I see the Director of the Slovenian National Library is in the room, so we can talk about that later. The book is titled "Max, the Midfielder of the City." For those unfamiliar with football, the midfielder is a vital position: the player who connects everyone else, organises the game, links defence and attack, and keeps the whole thing moving forward. It's an unusual analogy, I know, but I think national libraries play a similar role in a democratic society.

So that's what I'll leave you with: be a bit like Max. Be a midfielder. Connect. Make things move forward. Thank you.