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So there you are, having worked your way through an enormous crowd only to find yourself turning your back on your final prize, the Mona Lisa. Rather then allowing ourselves an extraordinary moment that might transcend into something inspiring and spiritual, we scramble to document us being there. When the act of capturing the experience has become more important than the experience itself. Painted by Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci, acquired by the French King Francis I to be admired by an apparently Greek reporter. How more European can one get? It is pre­cisely that cul­tural di­ver­sity that con­sti­tutes Eu­rope. “The Balkans produce more history than they can consume,” Winston Churchill once remarked, and the same is true about Europe. To be European involves confronting the past with all its horrors, as well as the European surplus of beauty. And to think as a Eu­ro­pean means to ac­knowl­edge the var­ied dif­fer­ences in Eu­rope, and even be proud of it. Because it is ultimately what distinguishes us from the rest of the world and gives us our common identity. After all, as the motto of the EU goes: “United in di­ver­sity.”

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