Speech by Mirko Preatoni at the European Conference on Multipolarity

I am happy to participate in this important conference.

In the new multipolar world, a polyphony of cultures is developing.

In music, polyphony is the union of several voices, and each one plays its own melodic pattern.
In this polyphony, in order to be harmonious, each voice, each instrument, must first be tuned.
 And being tuned means centred on oneself, on its own identity.
 We need to start as a first point by remembering who we are.
 And today, in the West, this is the first challenge. 
This challenge consists in having the courage to defend our own identity, those constitutive and founding values around which the individual and the nation build a solid foundation.


The attack on the individual, the erasure of culture aims at the annulment of memory and conscience.Such a reset is a precondition for the rewriting of history and for the shutting down of any instance of rebirth. New rules are constantly being introduced which do not allow any stable point of reference, and are placed in a general deconstruction perspective of all certainty.
 For decades, globalism has crept like a parasite into our cultures and tried to corrode them from inside. The process of individual annihilation passes through the systematic demolition of every reference value.

But we must remember who we are, our origins. Italy is the child of classical Greco-Roman culture, Christianity and the Renaissance.

Culture, spirituality and beauty are the barriers that we must proudly raise against homogenization and flattening, against standardization and cultural impoverishment.

What we can do is cultivate the essential on a personal level, and on a social level to take clear positions and contribute to the spread of awareness regarding the processes currently underway; on an international level we must live this time as full of possibilities.

A wide-ranging intellectual project is taking shape to promote the development of solid international relations based on listening, and mutual respect. 

Listening and respect for others are the keywords of this new paradigm taking shape.  They are the cornerstones of the development of dialogue between the actors constituting this new multipolar world.

But in order to be able to listen to and respect the other, you must, first of all, respect yourself. When in Italy a university course on Dostoevsky is cancelled or the concert of a great Russian artist is cancelled, not only the culture of people with whom we have a deep and lasting friendship, but our own fundamental rights are under attack.

It is therefore also out of respect for ourselves that an articulated concrete response from below is needed by civil society.

The world of culture must not be a transmission belt for dominant ideologies, it must today find a genuine dialogue with people.


It is important to take back and defend cultural spaces.

What does this mean in concrete terms?

I will give two brief examples.

Initiatives such as the one that recently saw Valentina Lisitza perform in Milan at the invitation of an organizing committee that is an expression of Italian civil society should be promoted and supported. This extraordinary pianist, considered among the world's top performers, saw several concerts in Italy cancelled only because she had expressed criticism of the Kiev government and solidarity with the Russian Donbass populations under attack since 2014.

In a few days, the folk dance ensemble from the Republic of Mari El in central Russia will also be performing in Milan. This outstanding ensemble is an expression of the possibility of safeguarding and enhancing local traditions in an authentically multicultural context such as Russia.

The protection of differences, particularities and local identities represents an opportunity for cultural enrichment. It stands in stark contrast to the homogenizing tendency that suffocates the West, where the embrace of equality and of purely theoretical inclusiveness ends up as if "a livella" - like Italian world known artist Antonio De Curtis, Totò used to say - "a livella” that embrace everything and destroy everything.

On the contrary, respect for tradition combined with the defence of diversity is a synthetic image of what culture can do when it acts as a privileged instrument for the development and revitalisation of dialogue between peoples.


This kind of initiative, like today's conference, is therefore a concrete action with great symbolic value. It means remembering who we are, respecting ourselves in order to be ready to respect and listen to others.

As a dear friend of mine who has lived in many countries and now lives in Russia reminds me, respecting oneself does not mean 'tolerating' each other but recognising and acknowledging the absoluteness of the God who lives in each of us. It means wanting to grasp the absoluteness and non-relativity of human experience.

Multipolarity is not to impose relativism but to follow together a common path towards truth.

Thank you.