Plenary opening session of the European Continental Assembly, Peles, Romania 

•	Speech by Dacian Ciolos, the Romanian host of the Continental Assembly

Welcome to Romania, a country that surprises many people when hearing about it and who are astonished when they take the time to get to know it. If we are to believe the geographers, Romania is an island of Latin culture amidst a Slave sea, with a population of 23 million of which a third live in the countryside. After 40 years of communism, Romanians now demand recognition of their place in a region to which they belong historically, culturally and by inspiration: that region is Europe. This is the reason why we offered to host the European Assembly organised by the Alliance for a Responsible, Plural and United World. We want to show that Europe is not limited to its current political borders and that its future construction must occur eastwards as well as westwards, southwards and northwards; and with all those who are affected by the actions of Europeans, either directly or indirectly. This is why you have been invited here, all you who come from countries belonging to this European region. Therefore we welcome all the participants and wish you good luck, much inspiration and wisdom during the five days of debate and construction. We hope that this meeting will be fruitful and that it will entice you to return to Romania to see the country that lies beyond the airport of Otopeni, the road between Bucharest and Sinaia and the castle of Peles. There is much to be discovered, but unfortunately, during these five days, there will be very little time to make genuine contacts with Romanians given our heavily loaded programme. However, we hope that the entire reception team will show you what Romanian hospitality is capable of and we greet you as both tourists and friends. Good luck with your work.

•	Speech by Avram Fitiu, President of Agroecologia, the institution hosting the Continental Assembly
Unfortunately this speech was inaudible.

•	Speech by Manola Gardez Rauss,

I shall not express the pleasure with which we welcome you once again. 
Both you and we are here, which is the main thing. 
We are together, even though we are fewer than expected. Many participants were prevented from coming at the last minute, held up by personal or professional reasons. However, I spare a thought for those who could not come for reasons independent from their will and in particular for a Palestinian friend who was unable to go to Amman airport in Jordan because the borders have been closed. Also for all our other friends, some of whom are here, who live in difficult circumstances.

There are about 140 of us here, though many around the world will be able to follow our proceedings remotely. Thanks to Dacian, we are 140 lucky persons welcomed to stay in the midst of these superb mountains, at the heart of the continent that concerns us today.
140 persons from precisely 39 countries, with their specificities and cultures, but today we shall join together around the same table. We have five days of meetings and debates. I would not go as far as to say that this occasion is unique, but in any case we have been offered an exceptional opportunity.
Without wanting to make flagrant shortcuts, or in any way make inaccurate parallels, I believe that this meeting that we have wanted, desired and organised for over a year, at least in the spirit in which we have prepared it, is being held at the right time. It is in line with recent events such as Seattle, Prague, Nice, Porto Alegre, Quebec, and Genoa tomorrow, which, failing great innovation, are nonetheless “alternative” expressions organised by civil society. No doubt, many other such events will come.
If only to mention the World Social Forum, the only event in which I participated, we are here today in a kind of prolongation, though in different form. 
Together at this European Continental Assembly, we shall:
obviously get to know each other;
and certainly pool our knowledge and resources.
I divine it to be a moment of fruitful reflection for proposals.
I have the presentiment that it will be a place of reawakening and replenishing energy to overcome the powerlessness that we sometimes feel as individuals in defending certain values and ideas;
I hope it will be a creative space for developing together a project for society, our project for society, and diffusing it more widely.
And, above all, I hope that it will be a festive moment.

My name is Manola, it is my first name, that by which I am called by those who know me; it has the advantage of not being very common. I have been working at the Charles Leopold Mayer Foundation for the Progress of Humankind for six years.
Very briefly, for those that do not know it or have never heard of it, the FPH was founded according to the will of a chemist and physicist of Irish-Swiss-French origins who made a fortune, but who wanted to use his money to finance projects that matched his ethics, principles and philosophy. He left this fortune to his private secretary so that she could create this foundation and perpetuate its aid, subsidies and finance to all those in need of them to further human progress.
In the French name, "Fondation pour le Progrès de l'Homme", "homme" means humanity as whole.
Briefly, the FPH started with two committees, one was scientific while the other was "humanist", dealing with perceptions, society, education, etc. These two committees received demands for grants and were responsible for responding to them in accordance with the specifications left by Charles Leopold Mayer.
The management of this foundation was taken over from the outset by the son of Mayer's private secretary, Pierre Calame, who became president for several years though he is now its Director General for technical reasons.
The problem with Pierre is that he not only wanted to make the Foundation what Mayer hoped it would be, but he is also someone with many ideas. Thus, in a few years, from a foundation that gave grants to the projects that were proposed to it, it became one that had its own projects, completely open to the outside and which develops projects with every partner possible. These projects are now organised into seven programmes run by the foundation and we develop them in partnership with institutions, NGOs, and associations that carry out the same activities, and which have the same basic ethics and philosophy.
Very quickly, the programmes are:
ECO: an economy for a united society 
INO: sciences, techniques and society 
DIV: inter-cultural relations
ETA: relations between the State and society 
APM: family farming, societies and globalisation
PAX: construction of peace
and AVE: Future of the Planet, which supports the movement of the Alliance for a responsible, plural and united world. The word "plural" was added recently.
The Alliance is a collective movement without a formal legal structure. It is the emanation of the reflections of a number of persons, along with Pierre Calame, who at the beginning of the nineties carried out a review of the state of the world and its crises, crises that we are still experiencing today. They organised continental assemblies of smaller size than this and were led to drawing up a statement in the form of a Platform for a responsible and united world. This Platform, which is still a reference in the Alliance today, was sent to their acquaintances, friends and partners with the question: "What do we do now? It's all very well to say that things are going badly, but how can we progress to make them better?"
Some of the addressees signed the Platform and returned it, expressing their agreement with its diagnosis of the urgent need to change things. Thus the Alliance was born and this collective movement began.
It now has over 3,000 signatories. But what is an ally, apart from someone who works according to the principles set out in the Platform and gives their address in order to receive the information and communication tools that we develop at the Foundation? Many other people participate at our meetings and work with us without being included in the directory. This directory also includes collective signatures (even though no physical signature is required) that represent associations and organisations numbering from just a few persons to international entities that number several thousand persons.
In my opinion, the task of counting and knowing how many we are is not only difficult but rather pointless. What is important is that we are here at the right time and place.
Therefore the Alliance has grown and became quickly aware of the need to structure itself. This structuring has occurred on the basis of three directions:
The most obvious direction was the topical path, that is to say people working on a subject or problem that in most cases is their professional subject and who develop reflection in partnership with as many actors as possible on the topic in question.
The geocultural or regional path. This gathers a group of individuals in the same place or sphere who, generally, also work on a topic. The best example in the Alliance is the geocultural group of the great lakes region of Africa which works on the problem of searching for peace, unfortunately one that affects their daily lives. This group allows them to provide their regional vision of the problem.
Lastly, there is the collegial path, which is the last of the three groups to develop. What is a college in the Alliance? This subject gave rise to long debate. It is everything except corporatism, it is a group of people in the same socio-professional milieu (for example, teachers, jurists, scientists, politicians, elected representatives, unemployed persons, peasants, etc.) who present their views on the challenges that confront us; their collegial identity can provide new approaches and new visions.
The Alliance's organisation and its need for structure have developed through the organisation of human links. This is to say that the allies quickly needed communication tools, which is how an international review, the continental reviews, web sites, a directory, databases with experience records, etc. all started. The people involved gave themselves roles, since in addition to the workshop and college co-ordinators, a pool of facilitators was set up to implement the idea that has always guided the Alliance: that one must stop and think at a certain point in order to deepen insight into things. The step of making proposals is also important. This entails stopping the process of taking stock and passing on to the fruit of our work, making proposals. These may be in contradiction with other opinions, which leads to confrontation, opening up the widest possible debate. However, these proposals are snapshots that can obviously be improved and reflection continued. Today we present you with our proposals to improve things, to make world governance correspond with our hopes and make European governance the ideal framework for the Europe we really want to live in. This is in the spirit of our time, what is possible and above all feasible. This means that the feasibility of the proposals is obviously primordial. This stage of formulating proposals, which took place during 2000 and 2001 and one of whose aims was the continental forums, was difficult to set up because it is much easier to continue saying what is wrong rather than to stick one's neck out and take the risk of saying what is possible, feasible and doable. The 2000-2001 process had been planned for a long time and, initially this proposal stage was called "The General Council of the Planet", a title too imbued with French culture to be used by the other allies. In practice, this took place with the organisation of meetings that were as open as possible, which is to say international, for each topical workshop and college. As for the regions, this was organised in the form of continental meetings and we are one of five such meetings being held today in Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe and the Arab world. These five meetings will take place at the same time; we are the first to start and a day will be devoted for joint work with all the other meetings on June 21, when we can communicate with them. All the participants of these assemblies will work together at the same time, pursuing the same objectives. 
These five assemblies are the first part of this process carried out through 2000-2001 of which the next step will be the World Citizens Assembly at Lille, in the north of France, in December, once again organised by the Alliance for a responsible, plural and united world.
Just a word about our assembly. How has it been thought of and conceived? One day I woke up to read messages from other continents, allies and foreign friends that were starting to prepare their assemblies and became aware that not much was being done by the Europeans. At the time, I was co-ordinating the topical workshop "The Renewal of Politics" and, with the friends of this workshop, we decided to take on the organisation of this continental assembly, since we felt it was important that it should take place.

A preparatory meeting with the most active European allies validated the idea that this assembly was important, and that it was an integral part, along with the other continental assemblies, of this approach to seek proposals and identify the four subjects of the assembly: 
GOV, democratic governance for Europe
MIG, migrations and multicultural citizenship
RUR, the European Rural World 
and WORK, work and social organisation. 
Why choose these four subjects? Because they seem to embody the major problems of our time and they are wide enough to cover a number of challenges that confront us daily. Obviously, there are other challenges, especially education. Why isn't education one of our subjects, since it is at the very core of these challenges? Without doubt for reasons specific to the Alliance, for which the education workshop in Europe is not very active. It has been given attention, but the other continents have focused on it more. Also because we had to cope with the limits of the allies present at the preparatory meeting and with the interests of the persons in the initial kernel, that is to say the members of the "Renewal of Politics" workshop.
The World Citizens Assembly (WCA) at Lille will be the occasion for gathering all these proposals from around the world, and which, we hope, will reflect the widest diversity manifested by 400 participants. The identification of these 400 persons represents a rigorous approach regarding populations. Rather than focusing on national proportionality, we chose a system based on the world's major regions. 
The Charter for a responsible, plural and united world will be presented to the Assembly, in addition to the proposal booklets.
The Charter is the expression of the need for a third pillar, in addition to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which concerns individuals, and the United Nations Charter, which concerns relations between nations and societal relations. A third pillar was lacking which dealt with the environment, and relations between individuals and the planet. This Alliance Charter, now called the Charter of Human Responsibilities, started as an emanation of the Earth Charter, born at the Rio Summit of 1992, since Pierre Calame had long been a member of the international committee of the Earth Council.
The Charter of Human Responsibilities could be the emanation of different charters, for example, the Africans are writing one for their continent. Some people have invited us to write one for Europe during our assembly. It us up to us to see if we wish to, if we see the need and especially if we feel it pertinent. If so it will be the European Charter that will then go to Lille as part of the formulation of the World Charter.

Before, I drew a parallel between what we are experiencing here and Porto Alegre. In fact there is real collaboration, I would even say interlocking, between the two events, since many Alliance members were present in Brazil last January when we organised over 40 workshops. Even at a late date, the Brazilian organisers involved us in the preparation, some of them being allies too. Now there is even a proposal to twin the state of Rio Grande do Sul with the Nord Pas de Calais region in which Lille is located. Apart from being organised by people who know each other well and who have worked together before, these two events share common inspirations and complementary approaches, thus there is mutual strengthening between them. The FSM and AMC sprang from the same awareness, ethics and perspectives. (Here, I quote a passage from a document written by Pierre Calame): "Implementing new regulations world-wide cannot be done through economic globalisation, which spreads by opening up markets, or by belief in the market’s self-regulating power and the generalisation of trade relations. The dead end of the current development system makes it necessary to conceive and carry out major changes that should occur by building a world civil society. This civil society is not in the tow of major economic and political powers and is not reduced to simple actions of resistance. It sets its own agenda, or at least it is starting to, and it is formulating its own proposals that take root in alternatives conceived at local level. It demonstrates that another world is possible."
Regarding the similarity of their approaches: the FSM is a forum where militant initiatives meet and will continue to meet; the second, the AMC, is an international work process that places emphasis on the world's diversity and formulating proposals.
Here in Romania, I believe that we have come together for and because of this logic, that of welcoming efforts to build world civil society, even though we are starting by organising it at continental level. It is the will to rethink forms of governance, to be actors of a humanised globalisation in the service of genuine and sustainable development. However, we also know that by working in this direction, we need to create locally, and here and now at continental level we must create the conditions of truly shared and efficient governance.
We must set up a European network that can appropriate the proposals we make and diffuse them widely throughout civil society.
My personal idea, which has also taken root in the minds of some of us in a very close circle of partners, particularly Sandro, would be to use a European journal and a web site, in partnership with every alternative entity that already works in the same direction, whether press agencies, media, the written press, radio, television, etc. that provide "other", alternative sources of information. This is where I count on you, on the network that we are perhaps setting up today, to inform us of what exists in each of your countries. We often hear that civil society does not exist in certain Eastern European countries, though I find this hard to believe and I would like to talk to you specifically about this subject.
Likewise, what are the many and diverse elements that result from the work of each of us and that we shall attempt to organise roughly during these five days? We have thought of them as taking two forms, what I shall call guiding principles and the much spoken of proposals.
The guiding principles are the directions or reference outlines that define the project for the society we aspire to. These principles are a universal vocation and express the evolution of political philosophy, history and how this evolution occurs. For example, ecology, a much misused term, is a guiding principle that has succeeded in coming to the fore, at least in the minds of some. Now other principles need promoting, such as the much-needed return of economics in the service of humankind rather than vice-versa. The proposals represent the quest for a concrete application of these guiding principles in each sector of human activity and thus governance.
Although these principles already lead the way for some in their work and reflections, the proposals are often still to be formulated. These proposals are directly linked to the changes required to transform the course of the current trend of globalisation. Unfortunately, they often require political and cultural action opposed to currently dominant interests. To illustrate these examples of proposals, I shall mention the necessary redistribution of wealth that can, among other things, be achieved by implementing the proposal for a basic income, a subject that you will deal with in the WORK workshop. Likewise, in MIG, you used the electronic forum for six months before this meeting, in which some of you participated, to develop the principle of freedom of circulation and civic participation. This can take the form of a proposal for equal access to political rights for all.
Our meeting today must not remain a simple episode, we must plan and organise this approach further. As organisers, one of our proposals is to organise a process to strengthen European civil society with the aim of opening up a wide debate on these principles and proposals, bearing in mind the European elections of 2004. Our contribution will be to start this debate which in turn should encourage the newly elected parliament to make use of these elements and take on the responsibility of giving Europe a Constitution.
All this will be debated in different forms that you will organise with your topical co-ordinators in the work groups.
I take this opportunity to present them to you now and they will do their utmost so that we can achieve the results desired at the end of the five days.
They work in pairs. 
Sandro Guiglia and Elise Massicard for GOV
Hans Harms and Hugues Puel for WORK
Philippe Cacciabue and Iain Farquar for RUR
Karine Boyer and Paul Oriol for MIG.

To conclude on a less formal note and so that the work done in the groups is as interactive as possible, I invite the participants of the different topical groups to rise and present themselves.
Thank you everyone and thank you for being here.

•	Sandro Guiglia, co-ordinator of the GOV topic

I am Italian and live in Tuscany, a beautiful region of Italy. With Elise we would like to give you a brief presentation of our approach and the subjects to be debated in the "Democratic Governance for Europe" group. We thought about presenting each topic so that the participants of all the groups know the perspectives of the four work topics. However, we are also concerned with preventing reflection from wandering.
Since we have only been able to choose four topics, despite the obvious fact the complexity of our questioning implies far wider examination, we can at least hold our four topics in rein for they are interconnected.
Our group will define the term "governance" since it is a term used in a rather new way, at least in the Latin world and it can be ambiguous. 
Our point of departure was awareness of globalisation, awareness that every citizen of the world, the whole of humanity, has a common destiny. This applies both to the risks inherent to the survival of the planet and to economic globalisation, occurring side by side with technical and cultural globalisation. Manola mentioned this earlier. Many of us are against globalisation in its economic form; however, we accept the good that other forms of globalisation can bring. Once again, we need to agree on terms and examine these aspects. What is certain, since the last world war and the demise of real (or so-called real) socialism, is that governance is needed at world-wide level. Awareness of the magnitude of the challenges facing us occurred at the Rio Summit, where we saw that we were in the process of leaving a poisoned and fragmented world to future generations.
So what form should this world governance take and who should govern?
Many of us are sure that current world governance does not exist, is inefficient or even dangerous. The United Nations Organisation, founded after the Second World War, was seen as the embodiment of a major concept, that of the sovereignty of states. However, as the victors were the major powers, they gave themselves the right of veto, later granted to Russia and then China. There is nothing fortuitous about the rich countries of the Western world starting up the G5, then the G7 and now the G8 to form alliances. It is the all powerful and above all rich that have decided to manage the world's problems. Bush's recent decision on the Kyoto agreement proves this point: "nothing must interfere with the interests of the West!"
The feeling now is that in reality those who really manage the future of the planet are multinational corporations and international finance, or what I would call speculative finance in that it has no link with productive activities.
So we can consider that the economic takes precedence over the political, since although states still hold great power, they have lost control over the economy on which nations were based and built themselves during the nineteenth century. This loss of control over the economy has resulted in the corresponding loss of the capacity to redistribute revenues, the wealth produced and the loss of the capacity to achieve consensus within countries, through the downsizing of the Welfare State.
As for Europe, under the heading "What foreign policy for Europe?" we must still look at the problem of strong American presence (without taking an anti-American stance) that remains a huge influence. We must also be brave enough to deal with the influence of NATO, which was founded as a joint defence system but has now turned into an international police force.
All these subjects of reflection lead to us to believe that we must build a new form of governance. We could imagine a type of governance that does not use the same current structure of nation-states, that is to say a vertical structure with a president who would govern the world. Rather, we think in terms of multi-nodal government with agreements between nodes to protect their respective diversity. This could be achieved by setting up regional centres (not necessarily continental ones). In view of this we wondered how to go about constituting and developing the European regional centre, which raises the question of the European Union, federation or confederation. So we want to see how we can build a European regional centre capable of contributing to world governance (which is both our starting point and our goal). This does not entail building a system but carrying out an innovative experiment. For example, the federation of the United States was born from a war of liberation, and was completely different from the approach we take in the construction of Europe, with all its differences, a Europe that has fought for centuries and which now seeks unity in diversity, to constitute a new form of governance. 
The other subject is that of sketching out a European project. This is the reason we have chosen not to invite participants from only the fifteen countries of the Union or its 26 future countries, but to extend our invitation to the countries of the continent and neighbouring countries, that is to say states that will approach Europe in order to build a utopian project together, in the positive meaning of the term.
Today, a Portuguese friend and I said to each other that realism is impossible without utopia, though real utopia is impossible without realism. This is the type of approach we want to take. 
Why create a European project? Above all for European citizens (for those who live on the continent), to give globalisation a direction, and I add a personal view, to fight against economic globalisation which risks destroying other forms of globalisation, and to invent and develop new forms of democracy better adapted to the resources of today.
How? We want to put forward the advantage of civil society: that is to say we think that civil society must develop greater force to debate the responsibility and organisation of nation-states, the institutions that govern our countries at different levels and the future of Europe. Hence the problem of knowing how to strengthen civil society and how to start organising concrete conditions for the possible contributions of this civil society.
These are the hypotheses we want to work on in our group.
I'm sure you understand that the four topics of our assembly are closely linked and we must succeed in preserving the whole at the end of our journey.
Very briefly, I would like to say that the idea of European unity sprang from need for peace, with the slogan "No more wars in Europe". The founding fathers of Europe gave pragmatic impetus to this idea, working step by step towards an initial structure. However, this approach is no longer enough, since they now represent steps backward. We have reached the point where we above all need the courage to make a cultural leap and get rid of the selfishness of States, regions and provinces all looking out for themselves. Two positions predominate in our already unified Europe: the traditional position of those who want to limit unification to markets and the economy and, on the contrary, those who want political union. Obviously, we take this second position, that of working for political union.
Consequently, we have chosen to limit ourselves in GOV to a few sub-topics that Elise will now present.

•	Elise Massicard, joint co-ordinator of the GOV topic 

I shall make a brief presentation of the five sub-topics on which we started work on the electronic forum:
- The first topic is the construction of European public opinion. We are confronted by one of the main contradictions of European construction, since on the one hand we have a European Parliament and institutions, while on the other hand political parties and elections are organised nationally, and unions and the media are national. Trans-European debate simply does not exist, neither on a continental scale nor on that of the Union. Likewise, very few organisations of civil society are genuinely European.
The absence of European public opinion is one of the major reasons for the weakness of current European construction. It is obvious that European public opinion cannot be built by decree and it requires much time.
This sub-topic includes different facets among which is how European citizenship is envisaged. What is a European citizen? Does it necessarily mean being a national of one the Union's member countries or of the Union itself? At present, we feel that civil society cannot take the place of representatives whose legitimacy is gained through elections. However, it could constitute a counterweight, express orientations and enter into debate with politicians and elected representatives. How can the different actors of civil society, such as the media, intellectuals, social movements, organisations, and unions become involved in this process? What can and should be the role of active citizens to stimulate other actors in this direction?
- The second subject is: What institutional form should European governance take? This subject covers a huge area, since apart from the reform required for European institutions, we are confronted with myriad levels of decision. The power of governments is declining with the transfer of authority to lower administrative levels, whether these be municipalities and different types of territorial councils, or different types of federal governments. So there are many levels of decision which tends to make procedures opaque rather than transparent, also leading to inefficiency. We think that one of the major stakes is to imagine how these different levels of decision and action can be linked in view to implementing active subsidiarity at every level, from municipal councils to federal governments. This trend towards an increased number of scales could result in greater democracy, though only in the framework of co-operative and unified subsidiarity. This trend has caused certain intellectuals and political scientists to speak of a Europe of regions, an idea that frightens the most centralised nation-states. However, we need to consider the hypothesis of a European federation composed of national and federal states, that do not necessarily conform to a single model but which, on the contrary, permit the distribution of power at several levels. 
- The third subject is that of European political union in the perspective of world governance. We cannot speak of the Europe we want without taking into account that it is part of a larger world and that, whatever the case, it will be shaped by new and changing trends. On the contrary, we must attempt to instil positive impetus to this evolution by asking ourselves how Europe could contribute towards achieving the necessary and urgent goal of world governance. This first entails reflection on the role of European unification, the traditional approaches of foreign policy and joint defence in view to operating independently from NATO. Secondly, and in a wider framework, this process should be seen as part of the innovative construction of world governance. And, finally, perhaps, how can we go beyond Western monopolisation and American hegemony. Can it be achieved by international organisations or by multilateral treaties. Thus it means working on the emergence of multi-centric world governance and the role of Europe within this constellation.
- The fourth subject is globalisation and political control over the economy. The power of governments has certainly been diminished by economic globalisation, and reflection is necessary on how to recover this lost authority to carry out public action in the face of the global economy, by building an intermediate level of government at regional and continental levels. Here we are speaking of control over speculative financial transactions and development aid.
- The fifth and final subject is a European constitution. The result of the discussions that took place on the electronic forum shows that the European constitution has two main dimensions. The first is the relationship between European and national rights. Clarification is needed of the rights that the European Union requires that each country respects and specific rights that complete and bolster national rights, since we are in an increasingly complex situation. This highlights the problem of ensuring that the rights are the same for every European citizen, while preserving the diversity of rights in member countries provided they are consistent with European law. Work on constitutional law could solve this problem. The second dimension is the importance of means to spur the participation of civil society in this process of reflection on Europe. There is a need for popular participation by aware citizens, actors in society, etc., to define the Europe we want. Furthermore, the aim of drafting a European Constitution, already on the European political agenda, could permit civil society and community movements to launch a wide-ranging debate on the Europe we want. Thus it requires community participation in defining the main elements to be included in the constitution.
Thank you for your attention. 

•	Hans Harms, co-ordinator of the WORK topic 

I am glad to see you here. I remember that during the meeting we had last year in preparation of the meeting of today, the idea was to organise cruises on North, West, Baltic and Mediterranean sees, but you can imagine what is the difficulty to find adequate such boats, so we gave it up. Finally we are here and I think it is a really good choice.
I think we have two obligations during these days within the working group Work and social organisation : as Dahrendoff said, we have to change the homo economicus to an homo ludens, so our first obligation is to have a good time.
But our second obligation, which is very important for the next generation, there is a lot of problems to solve and we cannot go on with a strategy of postponing them all. I think we really should start to work on them and to find concrete solutions, and this is our second obligation.
I think that the two most important problems are : 
One is democracy, that means that if our administrative, political system is not able to develop the right decisions on time, then how can we do anything, how can we change things ? And I think that is clear that the representative democracy is in crisis. We don’t trust our politicians, there is a big disconfidence ; and our politicians depend on the lobbies (the best example is the new president Bush who doesn’t sign Kyoto because his campaign was paid by some important enterprises and now he hasn’t the capacity to sign Kyoto when the majority of the population of United States would like this. So, I think it is clear that democracy is in crisis and we have to rethink democracy, we have to change things and experiment new things.
By the way this is what I do when, as professional, I am working with citizen participation model developed by a professor in Germany and I am working with this mainly in Spain but also in Belgium.
But the second important question is : how do we organise our societies ? And so far we depend on one unique mechanism to organise ourselves and that is work, or better said labour. Labour guaranties us an income, an access to social security, but it also defines our social role and our personal identification. And this mechanism is in crisis. Today labour is no longer the solution for all our social and economical problems, but it is the cause, it originated this problem. If you think about, not just unemployment, but also marginalisation, dualisation, poverty, the role of women and youth in our societies, the relations with third world countries, etc… all these things are directly related to work. We don’t work anymore to produce things we need but we produce things to guarantee employment, to guarantee work and labour.
And the question is : can we go on with this, should we come back to an economical growth which guarantees an employment for anybody, or should we rethink this mechanism and try to find other mechanisms, alternative mechanisms or at least complementary mechanisms ? I don’t say that work is out, is finished, end of work ; work would be an important part in our future as well, but a less important. So there is another question then if we dedicate less time to work, what are we going to do with the rest of the time ? If you read this book of Jeremy Rifkin, he reflects about it and he says we have two possibilities : one, we become just objects of the leisure industry, that means more television, more channels, more films, more leisure parks and so on…or to recover, to regain more civil society, that means more direct implication, participation in our neighbourhoods, in our municipalities, in the decision making processes and so on.
So in this sense, our meeting is an attempt to organise social society, on an European continental level, because we are all talking about Europe but the European society doesn’t exist, the European citizen doesn’t exist. All the decisions made by the European Commission or by the European administration are just negociations between national point of views, and everybody defends its national interest. There is no common point of view. I feel European but I think I am one of the few. I think this is one of the ideas to come here together, this is an attempt, a try to create a kind of European continental civil society. In this sense this is an experience and we should, at the end, evaluate if that’s really work. We have to evaluate if that kind of meeting between people from different countries, societies and cultures who think about the big important line of the future, of the development of this continent is efficient, and we have to ask to ourselves what do we want for the future of this continent, the future of our children. And this is a mechanism, an experience which is useful and could be used for other questions in the future.
That’s all for the moment, I don’t want to go too much into details about our working group ; I think we will present you our results better at the end. 
Thank you very much.

•	Philippe Cacciabue, co-ordinator of the RUR topic

Unfortunately, the beginning of his speech was not recorded.

…However, it is difficult in global systems to understand our relations with others and with the biosphere and we feel that rural areas are good laboratories for relearning how to live. In the seventies we often heard the slogan "think globally, act locally". It's true but we feel that it is also important to think locally to act globally, which is what we shall probably do during these five days. 
I am a little overwhelmed since I shall probably never have a second occasion of finding myself with my group of 32 persons of 27 nationalities for five days. I am convinced that I cannot waste this occasion to learn to discuss with other Europeans. This means that there is a phenomenal challenge to succeed in sharing something during this time, because if we say "we must build European citizenship, a European point of view, build a project for civilisation, another", then we must do it together. Europe cannot be built without Europeans.
So we are here as if in a small laboratory where we will attempt to create a prototype of an assembly of Europeans. I am full of expectations. I believe that it will be a very rich experience. In our "rural world" group, we will try to do several things, the first of which is to share our concerns. I think we will spend some time in explaining why we are here, what spurs us, what we are working on, our hopes and worries. Secondly, we will try to work on the basis of proposals that have been formulated over several years and more recently on an electronic forum. These proposals are starting points that may help us to define systems of regulation and management of rural Europe and which we hope will contribute towards shaping a responsible, plural, united and sustainable world.
I shall pass the chair to Iain who will outline the four sub-topics that we propose for discussion during the next few days.
Thank you.

•	Iain Farquhar, joint co-ordinator of the RUR topic 

Je m’appelle Iain, je viens de Grande-Bretagne et je vais parler en anglais.
For us, it is a conference that is relatively more developped than the process which has lasted for four years in which we had a major conference in Valencia in 1999, which involved a large number of citizens, and at this conference four themes were identified as being important for the rural world. The first one is sustainable production systems. When the Common Agriculture Policy was conceived, back in 1957, the main concern was to increase production and to feed Europe in the post-war period. And new machinery was available, new technics, new technologies, new higher yielding varieties of the crops, and of course a number of associated agrochemicals which allowed the new varieties to be protected. The general approach that is or was developed in the post-war period involved a very careful and intensive use of technology. Its purpose was, in a sense, to control and to tame and to overcome nature so that we could get the maximum yields with the minimum of efforts, the minimum of labour. Back in 1957, it was impossible to foresee that there would be so many negative consequences of this approach, but today of course it is well known that this had very bad impact on soils, on the quality of water, on biodiversity and so on.
More recently, there’s been a growth in a new kind of scientific understanding and a realisation that it is not necessary to use technology against nature, but that it is possible to make much more subtle interventions using other kinds of technologies which allow us to get what we want from nature without actually destroying it in the process. And these new possibilities can offer us great hope. However, the problem is, that in a huge industry like the agriculture industry, there is an enormous inertia and there are considerable number of financial interests which resist change. So for us the key question here is : how can we turn the system around, so that river systems can be cleared up, so that soils which support the crops can be regenerated, so that the impact of agriculture on the quality of air can be improved and so that biodiversity can be reestablished.
We have a number of propositions which clearly I can’t discuss at this stage, hopefully you will become familiar with them at a later stage.
The second sub-theme is food safety and quality. There have been a series of incidences in the European Union which have led to an enormous loss of confidence in the food chain on the part of the European citizens. The most notorious or most well known of these incidents is perhaps the mad cow crisis, BSE, which occured in the United Kingdom. This itself is a good example of the way that an intrusive and badly conceived form of technology was used in order to achieve high levels of production. In this case, animal nutritionists and chemists and engineers became involved in delivering the nutrients for animal feed which would allow the best possible use of milk for cows. They looked for the cheapest sources of the food which were necessary to feed cows, and in the process they recycled the remains of cows and used them to feed cows, as we know. This is right efficient in terms of economics and also seems to be scientifically intelligent and rational, however the results, as we have seen with disaster, when the public heard that cows had been, as it were, forced to become carnassials, to eat their own flesh, the public were extremely shocked, and so were so many farmers, because in the food system, it is not necessary to label the origins of food for animals, it is only necessary to label what the feed contains in terms of proteins, fats, etc. So the farmers also were very shocked to find out what was happening. There have been other incidents in the EU : outbreaks of salmonella, for example, dioxine poisoning in Belgium, use of antifreeze in wine-making in Spain, and in some cases this is because of poorly designed systems, in some cases it was simply the result of corruption or greed.
However, behind these dramatic incidents there are some less acute but continuous causes for concern : food sprayed regularly and treated with a variety of chemical agents and the food which we eat which contains residues which are dangerous for our health.
There is also the problem of fast-food which contains high levels of sugar and salt for example and which can cause hyperacidity for children and obesity in later life.
In the internet forum which preceded this conference, it was suggested that consumers should take responsibilities for choosing their own food more carefully, and that this would put pressure on the food production system. However there is also the question of whether the EU itself has a responsibility to improve the systems of regulation.
The third theme is new contracts between agriculture and society. In the EU we pay three times for our food. We pay firstly at the supermarket, secondly we pay for the support of agriculture and thirdly we pay for the downstream costs of pollution from agriculture. So why should citizens pay to support an agriculture which gives them products that they don’t want and which produces problems in the environment ?
The outset of it is that if our support withdraws from European agriculture, it would collapse. It would be in direct competition with the very productivist regions of the United States for example which have no relationship with culture and which are not required to protect landscapes. If we went down this route we would face the same problems of desertification that are faced in the US and are now facing the European way of life.
Therefore European citizens should be made able to have mechanisms whereby they can choose what kind of agriculture, what kind of countryside and what kind of food they choose to support. And the third theme which deals with contracts between agriculture and society consists of the mechanisms through which citizens can be able to choose the kind of agriculture, landscape and food they want.
The final topic is the enlargement of the European Union. This is a very difficult area. And the European Commission itself is completely blocked at the moment. However, this offers us the great opportunity, as citizens, to come up with our own visions on what can be done and to influence a process for things to be decided by the power that be.
Thank you.

•	Karine Boyer, co-ordinator of the MIG topic

I am going to co-ordinate the workshop on migrations and intercultural citizenship. Obviously, I am delighted to be here today with you in the forum where citizens can express themselves, since the topics and sub-topics on which we have decided to work are crucial for the future of the European Union and the rest of the world. It has been less than ten years since public opinion has become aware of Europe's declining demography, with a corresponding shortage of labour that affects certain sectors and has now become a very serious problem. Therefore in this new economic and demographic context, there is fairly widespread acceptance that the policy known as zero immigration, or that most commonly linked with the image of a fortress Europe, is incapable of dealing with real problems. In parallel, the European Community, which cannot alone presume to speak for the whole of Europe, cannot conceive of its future without the rest of the world. An integrated approach to immigration cannot fail to take into account the consequences on the immigrants' countries and on the immigrants themselves. During our work, we will deal with three topics stemming from the discussions we had in the forums.
The first topic will be co-development, an approach that can help weaker economies to grow by promoting bi- and multilateral co-operation, in view to increasing these countries' wealth. But, contrary to an often commonly shared opinion in European political circles, co-development cannot cancel the phenomenon of migration, though it does relieve some pressure. Consequently, the main challenge for co-development is to invent another type of development for third world countries capable of satisfying the needs of sustainable development free of influence from the West. So we shall attempt to answer the following basic questions: What definition of development should we uphold? How can the human potential of the immigrant's home countries be transformed into genuine prosperity? And, Is modernising lifestyles vital for development?
The second sub-topic is that of opening up borders. It will be approached from the basis of three observations: pressure from migration exists and will continue, though without reaching invasion levels; it is unrealistic to attempt to control these flows and doing so cannot work without violation of basic human rights; and lastly, it harms fluid movements, generating clandestine immigration. Under these conditions, debate is needed on the feasibility of this policy of opening up borders. Obviously, it cannot be achieved by eliminating all controls, limitless access or by ending constitutional laws. So the question we must try to solve is what policy of open borders should be implemented in the place of closed ones?
The third sub-topic is integration policies, since the real challenge for the populations of the host country is learning to live together. Difficulties of integration between long installed immigrant populations and so-called clandestine populations must be seen from a different viewpoint. The first suffer more from job and accommodation discrimination since they are poorly qualified and live in urban ghettos. So we have decided to divide this topic into two, on the basis of integration policies. Initially, this entails reflection on equal rights for immigrant populations so they can play their role of citizens to the full. Thinking in a second group will focus on the conditions for creating an intercultural society rather than a cultural one. The concept of multiculturalism is unclear about relations between people of different cultures and does give enough emphasis to them. The notion of intercultural citizenship is much more interesting when thinking about real interaction between these people. The aim of our work here is to focus on the measures to be implemented so that both new and more established immigrant populations can live better together.
To conclude, migration policy in Europe singularly lacks imagination. We must be a match for these challenges and open up paths in order to set free the spirit of innovation required to give birth to a new political vision for Europe. This is what we, in our workshop, and I am sure all of you in yours, will be trying to do over the next few days.
Thank you.