Strasbourg, 11/10/2012 (Agence Europe) - For one of its “Democracy in the 21st century” crossroads - talking spaces dedicated to the exchange of good practice - the World Forum for Democracy moved from the Council of Europe to the General Council of the Lower Rhine on Wednesday 10 October. The meeting, entitled “Democracy without borders” lent itself to this relocation as, on the subject of cross-border cooperation, Strasbourg and Alsace are generally thought of as a particularly meaningful European laboratory. “Operated between France, Germany and Switzerland, this cooperation is deployed in the space where Rhine humanism was born in the 16th century”, said Guy-Dominique Kennel, the president of the General Council, and it has been launched with the idea of deepening a “true democracy”.
Eurodistrict, the Franco-German television channel with ARTE, and Basle-Mulhouse EuroAirport feature among numerous innovative experiences in a region whose capital, Strasbourg, welcomed the seat of the Council of Europe in 1949, then that of the European Parliament. But the subject of the Forum is global and it was therefore speakers coming from different horizons who took the floor at the round table. Experiences from Ireland, Serbia, Azerbaijan, West Africa, France and Switzerland were exchanged with, among the questions raised, that of knowing if democracy was a condition for cross-border cooperation. Democracy is a facilitator on the subject, to deny it would be absurd, and Andy Pollack from Ireland, the director of the centre for cross-border studies in Dublin, said clearly that cross-border cooperation between Ireland and Northern Ireland had been an important element in the peace process favoured by the fact that “we had to deal with two democracies”. For Nadia Cuk from Serbia, the deputy director of the Council of Europe office in Belgrade, democracy is indispensable to a true cross-border cooperation. “This last was not truly able to be put in place in the 1990s because there was no true democracy in my country”, she said. “Today with the accession of Hungary to the European Union and the candidacy of Serbia, things are possible”. Ilgar Mammodov, the director of the school of politics in Baku, Azerbaijan, was more nuanced when he stated that “if the decision was taken at the level of the central State, it could work”. In his view, “democracy improves the process of cross-border cooperation but cannot be an indispensable condition. To demand it in advance would make any development impossible”. The example of West Africa given by Hassan Shire Sheikh from Uganda, the executive director of the “Project of human rights defenders from East Africa and the Horn of Africa”, was all grist for the mill of this point of view. “Cooperation reduces tension”, he said. “Security problems can sometimes be governed by trade. It is about going beyond the ceasefire”, he went on. Tasked with drawing conclusions from the morning's work, French diplomat Michel Foucher, the director of studies and research at the institute of high studies of national defence, insisted for his part on the fact that “a democracy must be efficient”. “Everyone rebelled against the coup d'état in Mali”, he said, “but no one criticised the regime in power which had previously lost control of half of its territory. In the face of negative forces, it is necessary to use force. The democracies of Africa cannot be naïve. The cross-border culture must not become unrealistic. In Somalia it is moreover the Kenyan army which has just chased Al Shabaab Islamist groups away from the town of Kismayo”.
A Council of Europe which is too discreet and under-utilised. Coming back to the role of the Council of Europe at the debates on Wednesday, Foucher underlined the role of this latter after the fall of the Berlin Wall. “I remember discussions with Catherin Lalumière who was then the secretary general”, he said. Lalumière questioned: “Is it necessary to wait for the resolution of the democratic issue by the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, or to accept their accession in order to make them move into a 'decontamination area'?” Lalumière preferred the second way and she was right. From her point of view, the Council of Europe is then a “laboratory of democracy” but, he added, it has suffered since the 1990s from competition from the European Union and the OSCE in the area of a political voice. A voice which, in his opinion, should have made itself heard at the 2008 crisis between Georgia and Russia on the subject of North Ossetia. “The secretary general of the Council of Europe should then have asked for the suspension of these two countries at war” (our translation throughout).
Another handicap of the Strasbourg-based institution, in Foucher's eyes, is its political under-utilisation in Paris.
The programme, videos and speeches from the World Forum for Democracy can be found on: http://www.coe.int (VL/transl.fl)