NEXPO – NALAS International Municipal Fair

Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 10-11 March 2011

Intervention by President Keith Whitmore, Congress of Local and Regional Authorities, Council of Europe

Thank you, Chair,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The idea of twinnings between towns and cities was born out of the ashes of the Second World War, with a noble aim of restoring trust and peaceful co-existence between communities. The Congress has always been supportive of this initiative. However, we went early on from the idea of simple twinning to the idea of partnerships for local democracy and development of a strong, democratic local self-government.

If I were just to give a list of Congress initiatives in South-East Europe, many of which evolved into successful partnership networks, these will include local democracy agencies and their association, ALDA; the Forum of Cities and Regions of South-East Europe; the Network of Associations of Local Authorities of South-East Europe (NALAS); the Adriatic and Black Sea Euroregions.

The underlying cause is the promotion of cross-border cooperation and intermunicipal/interregional cooperation in a broad sense, between municipalities and regions which do not necessarily border each other. Such cooperation has a great deal of economic and social benefits from the viewpoint of the experience-sharing, pooling of resources and the economies of scale (especially topical in the time of crisis), skills transfer, cross-investments in joint projects, etc. We are convinced that in the long run, such partnerships serve to improve territorial cohesion by levelling out the development gaps between communities.

At the same time, we should not lose sight of the key element of twinning – citizen-based or community-based exchanges. These exchanges contribute to increasing citizens’ involvement in community affairs and their overall participation in democratic processes at local level, which, in today’s context, has become a prerequisite of modern democracy and good governance. That is why today, the Congress includes citizen participation as an integral part of its work on improving governance of our communities – first and foremost through the full respect of the principles of local democracy laid down in the European Charter of Local Self-Government.

In fact, the right of citizens to participate in the affairs of their communities is enshrined in the Preamble of the Charter, and is now detailed in the additional Protocol to the Charter, adopted in 2009. We are convinced that the twinning process makes a valuable contribution to this objective. For its part, the Congress launched several years ago an initiative known as the European Local Democracy Week, which has become today a truly pan-European annual event marked in October.

The Week’s objective is to involve local residents to a greater extent in the affairs of their communities, to have them meet and exchange views with their local authorities, and to increase their knowledge of the functioning of local democracy. Last year, 170 municipalities from 24 countries took part in this event, and I hope that more towns and cities from South-East Europe will join this initiative this year and in the years to come.

In the same spirit of citizen and community participation, City Diplomacy and decentralised cooperation are also a tool for exchanges between the communities and a natural extension of twinning. In this framework, towns and cities are increasingly coming out as independent actors on the international scene to help their counterparts with conflict resolution and post-conflict reconstruction efforts. In June 2008, the Congress took an active part in the first World Conference on City Diplomacy, in The Hague, giving its strong support to this new tool for local authorities. In October 2009, we brought this message to the International Twinning Conference in Izmir, Turkey.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Today, we have several practical frameworks for this cooperation operating in the region, which I have just mentioned: the Association of Local Democracy Agencies, the Adriatic Euroregion and the Black Sea Euroregion, and I invite those municipalities and regions which have not yet done so to join them and to make good use of their participation in them.

We are also witnessing today a new trend of municipal Eurodistricts, with bordering towns setting up structures for joint management and decision-making, so-to-speak the ultimate twinning. For example, the host city of the Congress – Strasbourg – is creating the Strasbourg-Ortenau Eurodisctrict with its German counterparts across the border. In South-East Europe, we have the South Adriatic Eurodistrict, which has been operating successfully and which was presented to the Congress at one of its recent sessions.

Eurodistricts are a good example of inter-municipal cooperation, which is also represented in numerous municipal networks operating in Europe today – such as Cities for Local Integration Policy, Cities for Children, Energy Cities, Intercultural Cities or Cities for Human Rights, to name but a few. The Congress fully supports the development of inter-municipal cooperation which needs to be fostered in South-East Europe.

In conclusion, I would like to stress once again that our position on twinning remains unchanged: to pursue the path from twinning to partnership to full-scale cross-border and interregional cooperation as a way towards better integration and better territorial cohesion on our continent. 

Thank you.