Economic growth - despite its importance and priority – is not an end in itself; it is rather a means to make life more balanced and moderate.
A development that does not integrate the cultural dimension is not sustainable. The integration of culture into our development strategies is one of the factors of success of our experiment, which has devised legislation that blends authenticity with modernity and has implemented policies that nurture literature and the arts as well as encouraging national innovative and intellectual production and cultural industries.
Based on this, the state pays attention to heritage as a 'national treasure', a linchpin of identity and a source of social cohesion.
For all these reasons, we recognise and appreciate cultural and human diversity, which we consider a key engine for sustainable development and a means for deepening the culture of openness, dialogue, communication and coexistence, and the denunciation of intolerance, extremism and intellectual isolation.
(Source: HH UAE National Day Speech 2017, as posted on The National)
