(ANSA) - TRIESTE, 05 SET - The role that a link between the cultural heritage and science can play in a multicultural society, such as that of the Western Balkans, was the topic debated today at a meeting in the framework of ESOF 2020, focusing on the future role that cultural heritage may have about law and politics.

"Art and science - pointed out in her speech Francesca Fiorentini, a researcher at the University of Trieste - are tools that European institutions are consciously using as a technique for managing international relations, to achieve the goal of pacifying and reconciling countries above all in hot areas, where conflicts have not yet completely subsided. Just like the area of the Western Balkans." Tools through which, Fiorentini remarked, "it is possible to reach international policy objectives that it would still be too early to achieve through legal policy. In short, the effects of an enlargement of the EU, which is now still premature, are thus anticipated.".

Specifically, on the question of the long-standing conflicts between Serbia and Croatia, according to the researcher of the University of Trieste, "among the open bilateral issues between these two countries, of which Croatia is already a member of the EU whereas Serbia is no, there is the one relating to the restitution of immovable cultural assets. The EU expects these issues to be resolved, and the restitutions are completed. At the moment, unfortunately, they seem to be in a stalemate." The other speakers, who spoke by videoconference, were from the Western Balkans: Sloboda Midorovic, from the University of Novi Sad (Serbia), who reported on the state of the legal harmonization of the Balkan country with the EU, and Ivana Kunda, from the 'University of Rijeka, Croatia. (ANSA).