WorldView/Paul Gillespie: Rotterdam is the world's largest port, stretching 40 kilometres from the city down to the sea. The 328 million tons of cargo it handled last year was more than Antwerp, Hamburg, and Marseille combined.
It employs 60,000 people directly and four times that number indirectly throughout the Netherlands, bringing containers, oil, chemicals, coal and other ores to the city, processing them and despatching them throughout Europe.
Some 40 per cent of its 600,000 population was born outside the Netherlands, many of them in Turkey, Morocco and other North African states - and the figure will climb to 60 per cent by 2020. Altogether there are some 160 nationalities in the city.
Rotterdam became the fulcrum for a new politics of immigration in recent years. Pim Fortuyn's populist party was born there three years ago and had a flash success in the 2002 elections on a platform of restricting immigration because, as he put it, the Netherlands "is full" and cannot absorb more people.
Since his assassination just after the elections, his party has collapsed nationally, but still has power in the city. His successors are not as talented and have had to compromise in running it; but the shock of his election continues to affect Dutch politics. The new centre-right government has tightly restricted immigration and insists that those who have settled in the country must have proficiency in the Dutch language as well as their own.
Visiting the huge port this week on a beautiful glass and aluminium ferry, 180 delegates at a conference on sharing European cultures were given this information by one of its deputy mayors (a member of the right-wing coalition governing Rotterdam) and by Bert van Meggelen, an architect and consultant who was director of the Rotterdam Cultural Capital of Europe in 2001.
He told us the city is a place for the traveller, not the tourist. It is a tough, prosaic but open city, where it used to be said that men's shirts were sold with the sleeves rolled up. He made a strong plea for the creation of a new politics of social and cultural cohesion to manage such diversities. He highlighted the iconic role of the marvellous cable-stayed Erasmus Bridge across the River Maas completed in 1996 as a symbol of its multiculturalism.
Dutch delegates at the conference emphasised how important it is to go beyond multiculturalism in creating such cohesion towards an interculturalism in which there is a real dialogue and if necessary an argument about values, rather than the recognition and expression of closed identities. Before Fortuyn, there was a certain taboo in dealing with such issues. Many immigrant families remained unable to speak Dutch in the second generation.
Another iconic building in the city, Europe's highest mosque, is nearing completion. Fortuyn argued that Islamic values are incompatible with the relaxed tolerance which allowed him to live his life openly as a gay. He agreed that many of his followers were racist, but sharply differentiated himself from Le Pen and Haider, saying his politics were quite different.
Van Meggelen says there is no option but to search for a way to live together and not to seek utopian populist solidarities based on false accounts of Rotterdam's history. The modern port was built up by immigrants early in the last century. It was rebuilt after being flattened by bombing in the second World War mainly by Turkish and Maghrebi immigrant workers who are there to stay.
As he spoke we passed a firm entitled De Neue Heuse Kant. I was reminded of the philosopher's insistence that we live unavoidably side by side with one another, so that communities are made from "people around here" - the proximity principle - as well as "people like us", the principle of affinity. Balancing them remains a highly challenging task, well documented in the UN Development Programme's latest report this week on the theme of cultural liberty in today's diverse world.
The conference was organised by the European Cultural Foundation to celebrate its 50th anniversary and formulate a plan for sharing cultures in the new, enlarged European Union and its wider neighbourhood of states to the north, east and Mediterranean south. It is signed by hundreds of cultural organisations, artists and writers from all over the continent and was presented this week to an informal meeting of ministers of culture in Rotterdam, meeting under the Dutch EU presidency.
It calls for a substantial cultural mobility programme allowing for: much greater circulation of such goods and ideas; a better-resourced and more user-friendly EU cultural programme with more pooled projects to build trust; a European policy for cultural diversity, expressed in foreign policy and trade negotiations as well as in projection of the EU's considerable "soft power"; supporting the emergence of a European civil society, including the promotion of a public space for reflection, critique and debate, bolstered by a stronger cross-border media environment; effective support for intercultural dialogue worldwide, notably with these new neighbours; and for practical alliances and partnerships.
These are progressive and desirable objectives, made more necessary by growing interdependence and the need to keep borders open. While they were sympathetically received by the ministers, the resources available remain pitifully small - some €34 million in the existing EU budget, less than one tenth what the ECF argues is needed.
It was Robert Schuman not Jean Monnet who said that if he had to start again with European integration he would begin with culture. On the evidence of the debates at this conference there is a chance to begin anew now that the central and eastern European states are members and when five or six new members are joining over the next period, including Turkey. Cultural politics play a larger and more serious role in their societies - and a broader definition which can encompass football or song contests as well as particular arts.