Mustafa says:

WE CAN LİVE TOGETHER

By the process of globalization nationalist motivated events caused a lot of problems, even wars. Moreover after the Cold War some experts, one of them being Samuel P. Huntington, predicted that the fundamental source of conflict will be cultural.
“The fault line between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.”

Those kinds of predictions are really dangerous in our times because the differences between cultures don’t cause conflict but those kinds of ideas and predictions can cause them. Main solution of the problems is to learn about each others, because by this way we can get rid of our prejudices and the best way of learning about cultures are learning their symbols and the meaning of those symbols

For that kind of purpose we, 26 youngsters from 4 different countries, gathered in Curtea de Argeş, a small lovely Romanian town. The aim was to learn the symbols of the countries. In this way we didn’t learn only about the symbols of the countries we also learned about their cultures, their cultural symbols, their way of life. Gradually we were knowing each other, we were chatting and we saw that we can get on well, no matter we belong to different cultures. Our hotel was like a laboratory for social scientist, we were like test subjects, the question of study was “Can people from different cultures live together?”

After those kind of activities, (exchanges) we should think that what this exchange added us, what is our benefit? To answer this question we must compare our first and last day in exchange. In the first day maybe some of us had some prejudices against other cultures but in the last day this prejudices have gradually melted. We can live together, we can get on well, we can be friends and we can prevent the “clash of civilizations”.
Mustafa Demir
Leader of Turkish Group.