World Conference on City Diplomacy

Opening session, Wednesday, 11 June 2008

Speech by Keith Whitmore (United Kingdom, SOC), Chair of the Congress’s Institutional Committee

Dear friends, dear colleagues

It is a pleasure and an honour for me to address you today.

I have to confess to feeling a little like Molière's "Monsieur Jordan" who was delighted to discover that he'd been speaking prose for 40 years without realising it. 

Some of us here today have the same feeling about City Diplomacy - we've been doing it for many years without realising it.  We are here today at the first world conference on "City Diplomacy", we are here to clarify and debate what is a new concept but an old and well-established practice.

This is the first world conference on City Diplomacy. As part of our input to this conference, we have prepared a report on City Diplomacy - to which I would like to thank our Vice-President Onno Van Veldhuizen, who has acted as rapporteur and to your former Mayor Wim Deetman, who was with us to launch the report at our session in Malaga in March this year.

I believe that we are the first international organisation to produce a report on City Diplomacy. This is only natural. The Congress has been practising City Diplomacy for many years.

One of the main thrusts of our City Diplomacy activities comes in the form of what we refer to as our "monitoring activities". It is our job to ensure that our reference treaty - the European Charter for Local Self-Government - is properly applied by all the states which ratify it. This causes us to become involved in a number of disputes between local authorities and their central governments. We see our role here largely in terms of conflict prevention. We have a mandate to intervene to investigate alleged breaches of the Charter and it is our experience that such intervention can re-establish dialogue between the parties concerned and diffuse potentially explosive situations.

It is our experience - and our conviction - that peace must be firmly rooted at the local level in order to be enduring. Next year we will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Association of Local Democracy Agencies.

Local Democracy Agencies are another good example of city diplomacy. It is an example where the Congress has taken a lead in stimulating new partnerships with civil society to develop cooperation in post-conflict areas.

In our City Diplomacy report - that we worked on with the Dutch Association of Local Authorities - VNG - we also present the case study of the Municipal Alliance for Peace - the MAP - which has been working at the local level to bring both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict together.

The Congress intends to keep City Diplomacy high on its agenda. We are planning to follow up our City Diplomacy report with some pilot studies, which we hope will shed light on what are the key factors for success in city diplomacy initiatives.

This conference comes at a critical time. Municipal authorities are waking up to the enormous impact they can have in building peace. The Council of Europe Congress will continue to work with you to ensure that our actions will bring about real and lasting change.