Cultural participation as an instrument of democratic resilience
Sir Jonathan Mills AO is a prominent Australian-born composer and festival director, who resides in the UK. In the 1990s he worked in the Architecture Faculty of RMIT University in Melbourne, leading courses in acoustic design. He is the composer of several award-winning operas and works for chamber ensemble and orchestra. His opera Eternity Man was recognised by a Genesis Foundation commission in 2003 and his oratorio Sandakan Threnody won the Prix Italia in 2005. He has been director of various music and multi-arts festivals in Australia and also in the UK, where he was the director of the Edinburgh International Festival between 2007 and 2014. He is currently Director of the Edinburgh International Culture Summit, a UNESCO-recognised biennial meeting held in conjunction with Edinburgh’s summer festivals and is the current President of the EFFE International Jury. EFFE (Europe for Festivals, Festivals for Europe) was initiated by the European Festivals Association. Jonathan is visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh and Vice Chancellor’s (Professorial) Fellow at the University of Melbourne. His work has been recognised by awards from the governments of Australia, Britain, France, Poland and South Korea.
Cultural participation as an instrument of democratic resilience describes one of the most vital forces in civic life; how people meet, listen, and share stories; how they imagine common futures. If democracy is to govern and succeed, it must also nurture.
We can view this challenge in several ways: through a bureaucratic lens with noble, vague declarations about equality and access or a managerial lens attached to a mania for measurement and metrics. Beyond these lies an organic vista – the lived experience of art, music, theatre, dance and literature, where people laugh, argue, celebrate and reconcile.
The tension between abstract principle and lived practice is where democracy is tested and proved, and more than occasionally, disproved. The scientist and humanist Stephen Jay Gould observed our tendency to polarise complexity. In his book The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister’s Pox (2002), he wrote: “From the dawn of recorded human rumination, our best philosophers have noted, and usually lamented, our strong tendency to frame any complex issue as a battle between two opposing camps. Around AD 200, for example, Diogenes Laertius cited the dictum of his illustrious forebear Protagoras… ‘There are two sides to every question, each exactly opposite to the other’.”
In contrast to this destructive habit, Gould proposes the idea of consilience – a “jumping together” of knowledge that seeks not uniformity, but creative vitality where different modes of thought converge – as an alternative to enduring philosophical dichotomies.
In another book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, biologist Edward O. Wilson captured the idea perfectly: “The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science; the common love of both is consilience.”
Europe’s vitality lies in convergence – in a civic imagination able to bind difference into shared purpose. As Umberto Eco reminded us in Istanbul in 2010, “the language of Europe is translation”.
Within our patchwork of cultures, we must translate ourselves to each other – across languages, histories, and perspectives – until translation becomes a civic habit, the daily rehearsal of intelligibility.
Yet public debate still slips into needless clashes – North versus South, East versus West, metropolitan versus provincial, centre versus periphery. Consilience is a provocation against both an urge for uniformity, and an addiction to disagreement. Translation keeps us active and honest.
In an increasingly rancorous world, it is a challenge which applies equally to dogmatic political perspectives, contrarian social theories, and quasi tribal, increasingly singular, cultural identities.
For far too long, those on the “progressive” side of politics have been complacent in descriptions of multiculturalism; as mere coexistence, people living side by side, rather than together.
The sociologist Ulrich Beck urges a higher form of tolerance and understanding: “Cosmopolitan tolerance is neither defensive nor passive. It means opening oneself to the world of the Other… The walls between (them) must be replaced by bridges.”
And for any bridge to be viable, it must be built on the foundation of mutual respect, and a genuine desire to find communality. What Gould describes in the life of ideas, Beck urges in the life of communities.
Cultural participation is where Europe’s consilience can happen – where divergent languages and beliefs meet, not to erase difference but to create new meanings. There is no better way to witness ‘participation in culture’ throughout Europe today, than in or at a festival.
Across history and geography, festivals take countless forms – from the ritual feasts and reversals of ancient societies – the carnivals of misrule, harvest celebrations and rites of passage that marked the turning of seasons – to the pilgrimages of faiths that continue to draw millions; the Camino de Santiago across Spain, the Kumbh Mela in India, the Hajj in Mecca.
Throughout history, these gatherings have offered people a structure in which to express faith and imagination, even freedom. The Greeks turned them into theatre and sport – the Olympic Games as a truce among rivals, the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles as civic forums of empathy.
Later centuries transformed them again; the pleasure gardens of enlightenment London, with elaborate spectacles and promenades, became the forebears of today’s civic festivals – the open-air celebrations where strangers meet as citizens rather than as consumers.
From these origins today’s astonishing abundance flows: between 40.000 and 50.000 festivals across Europe. If only a thousand people attend each, this means that tens of millions gather annually in theatres, fields and town squares.
Look at the Netherlands – seventeen million people and a thousand festivals, one for every 17.000 inhabitants. Or Malta – 25 arts festivals for a population of 560.000. And Finland where over 100 professional festivals welcome 2.3 million visits each year.
Most skeptically in Scotland, where Edinburgh’s summer festivals issue around three million tickets each August, with 27.000 artists performing 40.000 shows across 800 venues.
These are not diversions but rehearsals for democracy itself – spaces of dialogue, disagreement, and essential recognition both of strangeness and of the stranger.
Such gatherings cannot be taken for granted. One of our great modern challenges is digital isolation – citizens absorbed on screens, addicted to devices, detached from one another.
As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt warns in The Anxious Generation, an entire cohort of young people is growing up mediated by smartphones and social media – less inclined, and less equipped, to meet face-to-face, to argue, to play, to participate.
In such conditions, the act of physical assembly – to share a space and a story – becomes more urgent, and more precious.
Festivals remind us that democracy is not nurtured through a screen but in the immediacy of presence, voice, and encounter.
Culture, here, is not a luxury. It is a civic necessity – a living rehearsal of democracy.
As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835 in Democracy in America: “The strength of free nations resides in the locality. Local institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people’s reach.”
Democracy grows from the ground up – not from decrees at the centre, but from the habits of association. Theatres, choirs, festivals and cultural groups are our schools of democracy; the places where consilience is practised and translation is lived.
The Edinburgh International Festival founded in 1947, embodies this spirit. Barely two years after a conflict that killed 60 million people, the city of Edinburgh invited the Vienna Philharmonic, a cultural jewel from a recent enemy, to perform a Mahler symphony under the baton of a Jewish maestro (Bruno Walter).
The Lord Provost at the time, Sir John Falconer, called it “a platform for the flowering of the human spirit.” Half a century later, George Steiner described it as “an enactment of European communion — a foresight of hope after Europe’s near self-slaughter.”
Likewise, the Salzburg Festival – founded in 1920 amid hunger and ruin – was, as Anne Applebaum notes, an act of civic defiance: an effort “to repair the torn threads of our common European heritage.”
As I begin to consider my role as Artistic Director of Lublin 2029, European Capital of Culture, we should recall that Sigismund II Augustus, at the signing of the Union of Lublin (1569), declared: “Non novum populum velut ex alieno genere constituimus, sed unum corpus ex duobus populis efficimus” (“We do not create a new people from strangers, but forge one body from many.”)
That 16th century ideal of shared sovereignty prefigures today’s European Union – a union not of uniformity, but of plurality.
So let me say this to the politicians. Democracy is fragile. It is not natural to our instincts of tribal loyalty, or personal survival. It must be nurtured, cultivated, and above all, rehearsed.
There is an understandable tendency, within the complex systems of the European Union, to insist on standardised definitions of identity, and uniform delineations of values. Yet Europe exists – gloriously – in its ambiguity, its messiness, its resistance to conformity. That is where its vitality lies. In seeking connection across our values, we must not smooth away the very rough edges, that give Europe its creative pulse.
At this moment, politicians must recognise that the fracturing of our democratic fabric is both measurable and urgent. As the renowned American political scientist Robert Putnam has consistently argued, when diversity rises without corresponding investment in shared civic identity, communities tend to “hunker down,” trust declines and participation withers.
A wide spectrum of political analysis now warns that in many Western nations, the gravest threats to stability stem not from foreign adversaries but from “dire social instability,” cultural fragmentation and collapsing trust. Leaders must actively renew the civic frameworks that turn diversity into cohesion – ensuring that difference becomes a democratic strength, not a source of internal conflict.
Europe’s strength has always been polyphonic – a harmony composed of distinct and sometimes dissonant voices. It is not a top-down structure but a grass-roots discourse. Its authority should emerge from listening, not instruction; from participation, not prescription.
The values of Europe, must likewise emerge from its communities – not as decrees from above, but as discoveries from within.
When people gather at a festival, they practise democracy. They show that community can be built not only through blood, but through trust and imagination.
Yet the extraordinary flowering of festivals across Europe is too often ignored – or mismanaged – as a democratic resource. Centralised bureaucracies either overlook local practice or demand conformity to national and supra-national protocols. That is precisely the wrong way round.
As Michael Power observed in his book The Audit Society; Rituals of Verification (1999), we have drifted into an age where “auditing is not merely a practice, but a cultural symbol of control.” His warning, almost three decades ago, was that systems of measurement – originally designed to ensure accountability – have replaced the very trust and judgement they were meant to support.
When cultural participation is reduced to metrics of attendance or compliance, the living substance of democracy is replaced by bureaucratic ritual. The true audit of our societies must be qualitative, not quantitative – found in the depth of encounter, not the length of a spreadsheet.
We need to listen to what is happening on the ground – in the myriad local spaces regularly transformed by the power of culture. With consilience as our guiding metaphor, let us resist the temptation of dichotomy – of “us versus them.” Let us build the civic habits of gathering, arguing and celebrating that festivals embody.
For every day, across more than 40.000 festivals – in towns and villages, in capitals and borderlands – tens of millions of Europeans are already building the bridges, our politics so desperately needs. That is our resilience, our inheritance, and our hope.
This text is the keynote of Sir Jonathan Mills at the Berlin Conference on 7 November 2025, organised by Stiftung Zukunft Berlin in cooperation with A Soul for Europe, the European Festivals Association, and the Evangelische Akademie zu Berlin.
Notes and Sources
1. Stephen Jay Gould, The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister’s Pox (2002)
2. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998)
3. Umberto Eco, European Writers’ Parliament (Istanbul, 2010)
4. Ulrich Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision (2006)
5. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835)
6. George Steiner, Edinburgh Festival Oration (1997); In Bluebeard’s Castle (1971)
7. Anne Applebaum, “Letter from Salzburg: Democracy and the Music Festival,” The Atlantic (2025)
8. Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation (2024)
9. Sigismund II Augustus, declaration at the Union of Lublin (1569)
10. Robert Putnam, E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the 21st Century (2007)
11. David Betz, Civil War Comes to the West (2025)
12. Michael Power, The Audit Society: The Rituals of Verification (1997)
Festival Life creates shared moments of audiences and artists, eye-to-eye
