Rapporteurs :
Enrico BORGHI (Italy)
and Miljenko DORIC (Croatia)
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EXPLANATORY MEMORANDUM
The United Nations has declared 2002 International Year of Mountains. This affords the CLRAE an opportunity to support both the inclusion of mountain issues among Europe’s priorities and efforts to provide mountain region populations a better quality of life and sustainable development of their land.
The future of Europe is now a crucial question for all its citizens who want to know how the continent will be governed in the coming years. The declaration adopted by the Congress in the form of a Resolution on the occasion of International Year of Mountains is based on a clear philosophy: Europe cannot be built on the basis of simple, mechanistic patterns and abstract visionary planning, nor simply by signing bilateral agreements between states.
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We started from the belief that the future Europe should be the outcome of a complex process in which integration towards the unification of civil society, interests, functions, political subjectivity and external relations will have to be achieved gradually, through wide-ranging mediation, involving local and regional authorities and according to an un-technocratic political strategy. We believe that the new Europe being prepared in the « Convention on the future of Europe » will have to rely on elements which, historically, anthropologically, culturally and physically, form a conjunctive tissue, binding the whole together. It can be said that, in many cases, mountains constitute such a binding element.
It is difficult to accept the absence at European level of a policy for areas which, morphologically, bind together regions belonging to different European states. The connections between those areas are provided by the « highlands »: the Po valley is connected to the Rhine valley by the Alps; Catalonia to the South of France by the Pyrenees; the Alps and the Apennines provide Italy’s backbone. And in central and eastern Europe, the Balkans provide the link with the Slav world, the Tatra mountains join Poland and Hungary (new regions of the Europe of 2004), not forgetting the role of the Carpathians and the Caucasus. Along these mountain ranges, we find situations of serious economic and social difficulty, but also poles of socio-economic excellence (to mention only the Alps, there we find along the national route running from Grenoble to Bratislava: the Vorarlberg, Tyrol, Carinthia, the Salzburg region and the regions of Northern Italy).
In the draft Resolution prepared by the Congress’s Committee on Sustainable Development, we re-affirm that the future of the plains is closely linked to the management of the mountains. We believe that the mountains must not be treated as separate entities, dissociated and isolated from Europe’s other regions. To use Giustino Fortunato’s image, the mountains (the bones) and the plains (the flesh) should be regarded as parts of a single body which forms the territory of the Greater Europe of the future.
In the past, it must be admitted, the lack of a clear-sighted policy for mountain regions has caused their populations to desert them and led to the deterioration of these areas with serious consequences for the ecological and social equilibrium of all our European territories. Several studies have shown that poor management or abandonment of mountain areas have extremely negative consequences on life in the plains, especially with regard to water resources and the risk of natural disasters.
Where the future is concerned, it is obvious that the creation of a Europe concerned exclusively with strong areas linked to each other by a “spine” is not desirable. Obviously, the most disadvantaged regions should benefit from the financial support they need to make up lost ground in relation to the richer regions. But we believe that a comprehensive European mountains policy is necessary, not because an item entitled « mountains » must be entered in the list of European Union subsidies, but because the mountains play a key part in the concerted planning that is needed at European level.
The mountains, like other regions, are not immune to the challenge of globalisation and the opposite phenomenon, the development of ‘local’ sentiment which, if not controlled, can turn into parochialism, hindering integration and feeding anti-European policies. This sentiment is beginning to gain ground in mountain regions in the absence of a European mountains policy.
We emphasise that the European authorities need to evaluate better the potential integrating function of mountains as a linking factor in Greater Europe. No model can be all-embracing, especially as, in the years ahead, civil society will be strongly influenced by blends of interests and the interplay of political and cultural factors. It is probable that the need for a more ambitious policy, erecting the new model of Europe from aggregating elements, will be felt all the more strongly.
The mountain populations do not wish to be regarded as under-developed areas, but as resources to be drawn upon by the state, the regions and the European Union, culturally, politically and financially.
The mountain populations have repeatedly expressed the wish for the mountains to be accepted as an integrated system of economic and natural resources, commercial skills and technical know-how, with a capacity for local management of the financial aspects, especially by exploiting endogenous resources. The aim is to make the European mountain regions the habitat of environment-friendly development integrated with the human ability to devise modes of use, adapting nature to productive purposes while living in harmony with it; in short, the ability of businesses to create production systems evolving towards technology while preserving the environment for future generations. It is of paramount importance that mountain areas remain fully linked to industrial society.
Today, if Europe were to decide to keep what the mountain populations and their local and regional authorities have built remote from the global market, it would be a grave mistake.
We in the Congress wish to use this symbolic International Year of Mountains to enhance awareness at all levels of government of the fact that mountains are not a marginal territory but a fundamental heritage at the disposal of all nations and whose preservation is indissolubly linked to human presence and human activities.
Over the centuries, the mountain populations have undergone historical change, preserving and passing on to future generations a unique heritage of democracy, relations, culture, economy and environment, and they wish to continue to manage those resources soundly in order to pass them on to future generations while improving their quality of life and that of town and plain dwellers.
The events we are witnessing today in Europe do not represent a mere change of gear, a superficial acceleration in the process of historical evolution; it is an increasingly complex process; it means that we need a political project, so that mountains and mountain dwellers are not only not excluded from that evolution, but so that they play their part in it and find renewed awareness of their values.
With this in mind, the draft Resolution sets out to list a number of strategic objectives to be pursued in the short term.
Firstly, official legal recognition of mountain regions’ special features in the new constitution of the European Union being drafted in the « Convention on the future of Europe”. The aim is to ensure that mountain regions are no longer regarded as disinherited rural areas, but as a resource and a social asset for the whole community, looking forward to a special European Union aid programme for mountains and a redefinition of the structural funds for 2007-2013. It would be possible to envisage the adoption of a programme of a politico-cultural nature for European mountain regions as a special economico-productive category, like the highly urbanised areas (cf the URBAN project).
As regards the means of achieving this objective, we wish to make it clear that the mountain regions are not asking for special contributions, but for strategic investment, not for extraordinary measures, but for special standards, not for hand-outs, but for concerted government policies.
In addition to the legal assertion of mountains’ special status, European competition rules need to be adapted to the need to reduce the economic and structural gap between the productive and social reality in mountain regions and elsewhere. Lasting, structural tax advantages could help achieve this.
All this should be accompanied by the legal, social and economic recognition of the value of environment-friendly productive activities in mountain regions. In practical terms, a system of standards should be devised which are adapted to mountain regions, clearly and objectively defining criteria for their physical identification and fostering conditions for improving their quality of life, particularly through efforts to enhance typical forms of local production. This system should also encourage enhancement of the cultural and environmental heritage by scientific and technological intervention and redefinition of national and Community strategic plans for major infrastructures and services.
In short, we wish to emphasise that it is essential to “unify the mountains” by setting a mountain objective at European level.
The Congress has been working towards this objective for many years and has produced two draft Council of Europe conventions: the draft European Charter of Mountain Regions, and the draft European Outline Convention on Mountain Regions. These two drafts, despite the pressure exerted by Europe’s local and regional authorities, have never received the consent of Council of Europe member states’ governments for adoption in the form of international conventions. We would also point out that the draft European Charter of Mountain Regions, the first version of which was adopted at Chamonix in 1994, was also supported by Michel Barnier, now the European Commissioner in charge of regional relations.
At the present time, as stated in the second paragraph of the resolution, the CLRAE proposes to start preparing a « declaratory » Mountains Charter based on the principles expressed in the above-mentioned draft conventions but not requiring signature and ratification by the Council of Europe member states.
The purpose of this new Charter would be to have a strong impact, in the context of future European policies, on behalf of the marginal areas which mountain regions in particular represent, both structurally and methodically. It could prefigure an important role for local and regional self-government in the organisation and representation of mountain interests according to the principles of autonomy and subsidiarity defended by the European Charter of Local Self-Government. It would seek not only to protect the environment but also to foster overall socio-economic development in the areas concerned, with a good level of co-ordination between central, regional and local government.
Such a Mountains Charter could help to define a common project, a mode of action, precise orientations, a shared philosophy to which mountain dwellers could subscribe, starting from the people who live there and their basic requirements. As emphasised in the Resolution, the future Charter could also lay the foundations for new cooperation between states, regions and towns that share mountain resources, by creating new institutions and networks.
We believe that mountains should be regarded as one of the most important challenges for Greater Europe: they could be included among Europe’s priorities through the presentation of a political project for the governance of mountain territories, adapted to interdependence with metropolitan and coastal areas, based on sustainable socio-productive development and enriched by the knowledge and know-how of the mountain community.
We hope that the Congress’s action will help bring about a genuine awareness of the importance of mountain regions in Europe. Mountain populations and their representatives could decide to progress in the same direction, express their identity and solidarity and form the alliances necessary to influence decisions concerning them.