On February 21, renowned Yale historian Timothy Snyder visited the Council of Europe to talk about “Illiberal trends in Europe today: Lessons from history”.

Timothy Snyder is a prominent historian and public intellectual and the author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, and The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America.

Director General of Democracy, Snežana Samardžić-Marković, took the opportunity to present Professor Snyder with a copy of the Council of Europe’s Reference Framework of Competence’s for Democratic Culture, which aims to help education systems and institutions provide learners with the competences required to preserve and develop our democracies based on participation and deliberation. Framework translates the conviction that democratic institutions and laws will work in practice only if they function within a culture of democracy: a set of attitudes and behaviours that seek resolutions of conflicts through dialogue, that accept that while majorities decide, minorities have certain inalienable rights; and that see diversities of background and opinion as a strength rather than as a threat.