S PEECH BY E LISABETH G ATEAU

Mrs Bürgermeister, Mr. Landeshauptmann, Mr. President of the Tyrolean Parliament, dignitaries, ladies and gentlemen, and dear friends who have come here today,

By bestowing the Emperor Maximilian Pri-ze on me, you have created a moment of great emotion and pride for me. Emotion, because, as some of you will know, my fami-ly on my mother’s side is Czech, and recei-ving a prize named after a Habsburg is the-refore extremely moving for someone who has ties, as I have, to the former Austro-Hun-garian Empire. Extremely moving also becau-se this ceremony is taking place in Innsbruck where many aspects of my European life took root. When I began to work for the Council of European Municipalities and Regi-ons, Dr. Alois Lugger was the first vice-pre-sident of this organisation, and I would like to take this opportunity of welcoming Mrs.

Lugger. It is a great pleasure for me to meet her again, and my thoughts also turn to Dr.

Lugger who, if I am not mistaken, will cele-brate his 92nd birthday tomorrow. Many congratulations.

And yet another reason for emotion is obviously the fact that this prize is a Euro-pean prize, rewarding its winners for a career dedicated to the construction of Europe.

Again, an emotional moment.

As regards pride, this prize makes me proud because it makes me a remote and modest (very modest) heir to this great Emperor. He

was - as has been mentioned here today - a great European and - which is what I like about him a great deal - a great administra-tor at the same time. After all, it is the com-bination of these two tasks that I have been dealing with over all these years. For those moments of emotions and pride I would like to thank the Land of the Tyrol and Dr. van Staa - I fully understand that he cannot be here today, and like everybody else here I would like to share the grief that lies over Austria at present. Secondly I would like to thank Mrs. Zach and the city of Innsbruck.

My gratitude also goes to the leaders of the CEMR, the Council of European Municipa-lities and Regions, and I can see here Dr.

Hofmann and Dr. Hoffschulte. For me, Dr.

Hofmann has always been a man with many ideas, but also a man who actually put tho-se ideas into practice. Most of the achieve-ments realised for the municipalities and regions in Europe that have been mentioned here today were already in Dr. Hofmann’s mind decades ago. And then Dr. Hoffschul-te: he is the theoretician who manages to achieve the practical implementation of his theories. He is the theoretician of subsidiarity who is not only active in Europe but in the entire world, and I am sure that I will also have the pleasure of working with him in the future. I will talk about other CEMR lea-ders in a minute, but first I would also like to thank all the previous winners of this pri-ze - they have already been mentioned ear-lier on, and, in particular, a former prize win-ner who is here today: Alain Chénard, the man who is faithful to his ideas.

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I would like to express my thanks to all my friends who have helped me in my Europe-an work, my work for the municipalities Europe-and regions - and I hope I haven’t forgotten anybody in this. I can see here Dr. Pramböck -and I am very happy to meet him here again - he has contributed to our European work for the municipalities and regions and will, I am sure, continue to do so.

To me, my career, the path that you have described, Mr. Landeshauptmann, is nothing major, just a modest contribution to a vast historic movement. I am not forgetting glo-balisation, this huge global development that we seem to be discovering only now, but that actually began a long time ago when the small world of the Mediterranean expan-ded towards Europe, and later on towards America and the East - and Marco Polo tra-velled to the Far East. Globalisation started a long time ago, and is now reaching its con-clusion. We made a big mistake in not see-ing this sooner. Parallel to this movement of globalisation there is the other movement of decentralisation. And it is this latter one that I have dealt with all these years. I love history and I always try to imagine how it all star-ted with those municipalities in the 12th cen-tury, at the height of the Middle Ages, when they started, bit by bit, in forcing their own individual charters of rights and freedoms between the 10th and the 12th century, and then, later on, from the 17th to the 19th and 20th century, when the States were con-structed. Things started to become more dif-ficult for the municipalities and regions. And then came the result of what was probably

too much nationalism: the two world wars.

I think of my two grandfathers who were both soldiers and fought in World War I.

They could have fought against each other since they served in enemy armies, but in the end, thanks to a wedding - and I say this in a country that is well aware of the use-fulness of marriage - thanks to a wedding between a Czech and a Frenchman, good Europeans were born.

After the two world wars the decentralisati-on movement picked up again, fighting for municipal liberties. All this manifested its-elf in the Council of European Municipali-ties and Regions with the Charter of Muni-cipal Liberties signed in Versailles, which is the predecessor of the Charter of Local Self-government of the Council of Europe, which I have been dealing with for a long time. I have been following all this work over the years, all this work that, despite the strong resistance of the States, has made it possi-ble for us to arrive at a convention, a Euro-pean treaty that has been ratified by almost all member States or will be ratified soon by one last State.

Again, this is a larger movement - in other words it will go on. There is the Charter of Local Self-government, and now we try to obtain - and this is the task to which all the political leaders who have supported me have committed themselves - more and more guaranties for those municipal and regional liberties. The first step towards obtaining the-se guaranties was the Charter of Fundamental Rights, and I, once again, would like to thank

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all those who have fought that battle. The Charter of Fundamental Rights in which, for the first time, the principle of local self-gover-nment was finally recognised. And then we reached the moment of the European Con-vent where we managed, despite the diffi-culties, to make progress after all. At this point I do not want to go into detail about the adventures of the Council of European Municipalities and Regions that is the point of departure of all the regional and munici-pal matters that are currently being discus-sed, because I presume that previous win-ners of the Emperor Maximilian Prize have already done that at some length. My time at the Council of European Municipalities and Regions - these 25 years - was very important for me, but I would like to talk about the present, about what happened at the European convent, and about the futu-re and what will happen with the United Cities and Local Governments.

The European Convent was certainly one of the big moments of my life. Just imagine - I was being given the opportunity to be part of the team that was going to try to draft a constitution for 450 million Europeans. This was, for me, really something truly extraor-dinary. I must thank chairman Giscard d’Estaing, who was and still is, by the way -president of the Council of European Muni-cipalities and Regions when he was nomi-nated chairman of the Convent. I do not know what his thoughts were, I am not into rea-ding other people’s minds, but he was very much aware of the fact that as the chairman of the Convent he had to be extremely

cau-tious, as ‘cautious as a snake’ as he put it.

Because he was waylaid everywhere, and the critics were ready to assault him at any moment. So he knew he had to ensure, like all chairmen, a high degree of neutrality. And yet he decided to bring someone into the secretariat of the Convent - and you know that the secretariat of the Convent was exclu-sively composed of civil servants of the Euro-pean institutions - of civil servants of the Commission, of the Parliament and of the Council - and I am not one of these. But Gis-card d’Estaing wanted someone in the secre-tariat who was not a civil servant of the insti-tutions, someone representing the so-called civil society, someone from the world of local and regional government, and it was my task to represent both the civil society and the interests of local and regional government.

It was an extraordinary experience for me.

Our secretariat was located in the premises of the European Council. The reason I men-tion this is that during the 25 years that I had been working for the municipalities I had basically never been at the European Coun-cil, i.e. the house of the central governments.

I knew the Commission very well; I used to work with the European Parliament all the time, but the Council was more or less unkno-wn territory to me. By the way, it was pretty obvious that the people there regarded me with suspicion - who is this person coming here with all those requests concerning the municipalities and regions? We are the Sta-tes, we have very complicated matters to deal with, we have a constitution to prepare. How can somebody come here with subordinate matters such as those of the regions and

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cipalities? In other words, things were not easy. They were not easy, furthermore, becau-se there were four components of the Con-vent. These included the national govern-ments - and by their very nature central and national governments look after the matters of central governments and not after the mat-ters of the regions and municipalities. Then there were the national parliaments, and they were not particularly supportive of the muni-cipalities and regions either, except for some, and those exceptions were obviously the federal Germany and the federal Austria, who had sent representatives - at least this was the case for Germany - representatives of the second chamber, the Bundesrat. Thus there was, for example, Mr Teufel, previous win-ner of the Emperor Maximilian Prize, who played an important role in giving a voice to the regions and municipalities in the Con-vent. There was basically no other voice. I must therefore thank minister president Teu-fel for the work he did for the Convent.

And then there was Giscard d’Estaing on our side, and two other friends, namely president Dehaene who acted as the leader of the Chri-stian Democrats, who is himself mayor of Vil-voorde and a friend of the regions and muni-cipalities, and then Giuliano Amato, who led the Social Democrats and who also suppor-ted our interests. But you can see, that was basically it: the head, the leadership of the Convent, and some participants; and yet we had to manage to anchor the interests of the municipalities and regions in the constituti-on. And all I can say is that we managed. I must admit that I was really worried for many

months. The Convent took 15 months, and I must say that the articles concerning local self-government and subsidiarity only came up during the 12th/13th month, in other words towards the end. The end of the Convent was drawing nearer and our interests still were not part of the constitution. But finally it tur-ned out that, despite the strong resistance of some central States, common sense, the sen-se of history, the sen-sensen-se of the future won and we managed to include those articles on local liberties as well as those on subsidiarity, which, today and in the future, will provide us with a very solid legal basis for the defence of our rights of self-government.

All we need now, as we all know, is the rati-fication of this constitution, and I sincerely hope that it will be ratified by all countries, because, as you know again, if only one country does not ratify it, everything will be called into question again.

Mr. Landeshauptmann, you mentioned the possibility of lodging a complaint at the Euro-pean Court in order to defend oneself against infringements of the principle of subsidiari-ty. It is the Committee of Regions that will be able to do that. Allow me to share my ana-lysis of this with you. I think there will be very few complaints filed, because what counts is not the complaint itself, which can take years and nobody knows what the outcome will be - because that is what always happens when you go to court: you do not know the final result for years. What counts is the threat -the dissuasion. It is -the sheer possibility of taking court action. I believe this is what is

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going to change the way laws are prepared in Europe. Legislators will be very careful not to risk a complaint at the European Court. So this will change the situation of the munici-palities and regions in Europe entirely, even before anybody takes court action.

Well, that is what I wanted to say on the Con-vent. Allow me to add just a few comments on my present work, in other words on the United Cities and Local Governments, the organisation that accorded me the honour of nominating me as secretary general. I would image that I owe this nomination to my Euro-pean experience, to my experience gathered at the Council of European Municipalities and Regions. This body, as you know, represents the most powerful pillar of United Cities and Local Governments. Since the organisation is based on regional and continental sections, and Europe obviously plays a major role, it is one of the key driving forces of this orga-nisation which, I hope, will be able to push forward the federal approach that you have mentioned, Mr. Landeshauptmann, an approach and a philosophy that I fully sup-port. For me, working for United Cities and Local Governments means pursuing this very objective: pursuing this approach that each continent on our planet should organise its-elf in the way the European continent mana-ged to organise itself, so that we may one day reach a world governance in a peaceful world.

So the objectives I am pursuing are still exac-tly the same.

Allow me, dear friends, to end by sharing with you the great joy I experienced just after taking

up my new job. A fortnight ago, a report draf-ted by the former president of Brazil, Henri-que Cardoso was published; HenriHenri-que Car-doso had prepared it together with a working group at the request of Kofi Annan, the secre-tary general of the United Nations. This Car-doso report deals with the reform of the Uni-ted Nations. Kofi Annan had asked Mr. Car-doso to look into how the role of the United Nations could be strengthened, in the light of the great difficulty this organisation has in doing its job and in existing. So, at a moment whe-re we witness a certain loss of confidence in the world institutions, president Cardoso has tried to come up with ideas as to how to find new scope for action for the United Nations, this international, worldwide organisation. And I take great pleasure in telling you that presi-dent Cardoso has come up with some thirty proposals that will soon be presented to the United Nations’ General Assembly, i.e. to our governments, and among those thirty propo-sals there is a certain proposal 17 and a cer-tain proposal 18 which I would like to share with you. Proposal 17 simply says - in a nuts-hell, leaving aside all the recitals and expla-nations - that: The United Nations’ General Assembly should recognise the principle of local self-government... [A bit of the original speech is missing here]... A General Assemb-ly where there would be representatives of the national parliaments but also representatives of the elected municipal and local bodies that would therefore be directly linked to the Gene-ral Assembly of the United Nations. These are two major suggestions which, I hope, will make it possible to change things at a world level so that we will no longer be in a situation

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re major global problems are being ‘solved’ at the world level without consulting those con-cerned. Just think that the objectives launched by the United Nations for the millennium - one of them was combating the slum areas in the cities - were formulated without consulting the cities at all. That is a real shame. So now it has been suggested that the United Nations, whe-never they launch a policy, should consult the parties concerned, and first and foremost the regions and the municipalities.

This is what the future could look like. This will be our next battle, dear friends, and we will have to win it. It will not be easy. I do not want to mention the big States, the big member States of the United Nations, the very big States that are not in favour of local and regional government at all. What I can say, dear friends, Europeans, Austro-Europeans, Italo-Europeans, and Franco-Europeans like myself, is that new battles for the regions and municipalities are awaiting us. Thank you for your attention.

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