The success of many far-rights, anti-immigration parties in various elections in European countries is a clear sign of a growing malaise.

But it has to be taken as a wake-up call. How we will master the political, social and cultural tensions that have emerged over the past decade will have a decisive impact on the future and health of democracy on the continent. At least this is my profound conviction.

The main point that I want to emphasize is that with the paradigm shift new tools and opportunities are available for conflict transformation.

I want emphasize the need to use soft power tools, namely what we can call "cultural diplomacy" at large.

This is an important tool, in particular when looking at the world in 2011 and we realize that out of a total of 143 conflicts, 108 had a cultural dimension.

However, please note that by stressing this dimension of some conflicts, I am in no way making the case for the culturalisation of political conflicts.

Indeed political problems have to be solved by political means.

But it is also quite clear that protracted conflicts, even when settled by a binding political agreement between political actors or governments focused on the issues of contention, must always be embedded in a much broader process involving people at all levels of society if we want to reach sustainable peace.

This is why even in major politically harsh conflicts, soft power has a powerful - although often neglected - role to play because, after all, reconciliation as part of peace-building depends highly on cultural and identity issues, narratives and stories built and exchanged about conflicts, stories that influence their resolution or contribute to their perpetuation.

Just take the conflict in the Balkans, apartheid in South Africa or the case of East-Timor, three different examples but all of them showing the role of cultural and public diplomacy, as one can call it, as a soft power tool to build sustainable peace among people.

Take also the 60 year-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict and see how much we should invest in soft power to influence the behaviour of the two parts in order to get the desired outcome of peace.

After all, peace is never made but it is always in the making and negotiated agreements alone do not make peace, whereas people do. So let us invest in soft power tools that can be use to change perceptions and worldviews and by changing them, improve the quality of interaction between peoples.

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