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International Conference on
"Dialogue among Civilizations"
Vilnius, Lithuania
23 - 26 April 2001

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Vilnius Declaration

1. Civilisations are entities of faith, historical memory, moral imagination, and human connection. They contain historically unique and self-asserting cultures, irreplaceable forms of human creativity, and also intellectual and moral sensibilities of large groups of people. Bio-diversity and cultural diversity are closely linked and are instrumental for the ability of humankind to adapt, create, and invent. No civilisation can solely assume the responsibility for the entire humanity; neither can a single civilisation claim exclusive rights to provide an ultimate and universally valid vision of how to be a human being in a complex and multifaceted world of today and tomorrow.

Like human beings, the historically formed and living civilisations can never be interchangeable, since they are all equally unique and valuable. The loss of any single trait of one of civilisations is the loss for the entire humanity.

2. The ideas of tolerance and of the dialogue among civilisations rest on a clear awareness of human incompleteness. This is particularly true of the concept of “the polylogue of civilisations” elaborated by Vytautas Kavolis, a great Lithuanian scholar.

3. Up to now the political exploitation of the concept of civilisation has been among the most problematic traits of the modern social sciences and humanities. Regrettably, the theoretically exhausted and morally dubious inclination to employ or even exceedingly exploit the concept of civilisation for sheer political and ideological purposes is still the case.

4. Simplistic, monologue-based, or otherwise politically convenient notions of civilisation should not be applied. Contrary to a firm conviction that Western civilisation was the only civilisation nurtured by dialogue-based individualism, liberty and toleration, scholars have stressed the importance of each civilisation and the dialogue among them as an inescapable part of the concept of civilisation itself.

5. Civilisations are symbolic designs within which people raise core questions concerning their being in the world, and also search for key concepts and frames of meaning to interpret themselves and the world around them. No civilisation can be regarded as a theory-emanating entity solely capable of interpreting the world and therefore framing the rest of the world as its empirical evidence. Genuine dialogue allows no room for absolute otherness, for it occurs among morally committed human individuals.

6. No civilisation can assume or represent complete humanity. The comparative approach therefore brings us to a proper understanding of the complementarity of civilisations. It powerfully stands against bias, clichés, demonisation of the Other, and the sense of superiority over other societies and cultures. The complementarity of civilisations would be unthinkable without constant interplay and exchange of such faculties of human thought and creativity as science, art, and philosophy; nor would it be possible without the ethical and spiritual dimension. Women and young people can play a crucial part in the process of bridging and uniting the world.

7. As a crucial attempt to uphold mutual respect, sympathetic understanding, and tolerance, the dialogue among civilisations is the only means to build a world of human dignity, solidarity, and hope. Such a dialogue of multiple, pluralistic, and communicating identities would result in a multi-civilisational universe of discourse. No civilisation could be demonised, and references to all of them, their intellectual traditions and masterpieces of art would come to the contemporary individual as easily and naturally as references to his or her own civilisation. A particular civilisation can experience itself or critically examine its core values only through a dialogue with other civilisations.

8. All governments and civil societies are enjoined, as an integrated part of their cultural policies, to take the initiative to further a dialogue among civilisations, in such a way that it can become an instrument of transformation, a yardstick for peace and tolerance, a vehicle for diversity and pluralism, especially in culture, with the ultimate aim of furthering the common good.