“Municipalities are Key to EU Integration Success”

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Let me first express my thanks to the Netherlands Development Organisation and its BiH partners, the Directorate for European Integration and the associations of municipalities, for organising this conference.

Today’s discussion is about explaining and utilising the European integration process so that citizens experience the benefits of integration quickly and fully.

Among other things, the Netherlands Development Organisation will present its EU Reference Guide, which brings together information about the EU that is immediately relevant for municipalities and other local community groups and NGOs.

This is an important initiative because, while most citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina are perfectly clear that they want their country to join the European Union, there is less clarity about how to transform that desire into reality. Today’s practical discussion will help to bring clarity to this issue.

Key role of local government

The premise of today’s conference is that the 142 municipalities are key to the success of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s European integration effort.

This fact might come as a surprise to many policymakers and many citizens, because until now European integration has been handled almost entirely by the upper levels of government and administration. This is the wrong way round – not least because well over half of EU directives are implemented at the municipal level. In areas such as the environment, including water supply, municipal participation in implementing EU directives rises as high as 80 percent.

This means that municipalities are main actors with an important role in the EU integration process. It can be said that they have a central role. Yet, until now, municipalities have not been participating enough in preparing Bosnia and Herzegovina for EU accession.

This must change, and I welcome today’s conference because it can help to start that change.

The huge volume of EU directives that involve implementation at the local level is consistent with the subsidiarity principle that was first articulated in the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. This stresses the advantage, where appropriate, of making decisions as close to citizens as possible – and this means at the municipal level. In 2007 the Lisbon Treaty reiterated the centrality of local government in the EU’s administrative and political structure.

Practical benefits of EU integration

However, it’s important that we acknowledge realities on the ground – and many of the realities surrounding local government in Bosnia and Herzegovina today are not pleasant ones.

The tasks that municipalities have to carry out – from street lighting to waste management to investment promotion and job creation – are prodigious, but the means at their disposal to deal with these tasks are modest. It is, therefore, understandable that some municipal officials will be inclined to look at EU integration as something that is remote from their day-to-day concerns.

In fact, the opposite is true.

European integration offers huge opportunities to municipalities, and in many cases these opportunities can deliver benefits in the near and medium-term.  For one thing, they represent a natural conduit for delivering EU assistance programmes to citizens. For example, in Bulgaria and Romania, which joined the EU just less than two years ago, 400,000 project proposals from local councils are now being funded or are set to be funded by the European Union.

This is an important aspect of the accession process, and one that is too little understood.  Integration will have a direct and positive impact on the ability of municipalities to deliver services to citizens.

In this context it is important to assert another aspect of the experience of Bulgaria and Romania and that is that in the two countries the number of citizens living in absolute poverty has been cut by half since the beginning of the accession process. Much of that extraordinary improvement had already been achieved by the time they gained full EU membership in 2007.

Quick and dramatic progress

Because of the specific challenges associated with the EU accession process in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the prospect of this kind of quick and dramatic progress is often obscured. We have become accustomed to describing reforms as “painful”; we talk endlessly about EU “requirements”.

Unfortunately we don’t talk enough about the real and rapid benefits that EU integration can deliver to citizens.

The reasons for this are clear. Reforms in Bosnia and Herzegovina are often painful because they are often protracted and because they are customarily accompanied by acrimonious disagreements inside the political establishment. Implementation has tendency to be slow and incomplete and the result is that citizens routinely experience the pain and then have to wait much too long for the consequent gain.

This is why it is so important that we do a better job of communicating the whys and wherefore’s of integration – if citizens can see the point of reforms then a groundswell of popular support for change can be built up, and that is something which even a flawed political establishment will not be able to resist.

It is crucial that at the municipal level all of the advantages and benefits of integration are properly understood and effectively explained. In 2009 my office will work to facilitate partnerships between NGOs and municipal authorities in order to explain and help implement the EU agenda at the local level.

In coordination with the Czech EU Presidency, we will work to ensure that integration delivers tangible benefits to citizens. We believe that by creating a new EU model we can help to eliminate some of the entrenched political fault lines that have held up real progress in many municipalities in the recent past.

Our efforts will be carried out in conjunction with a broader European Commission project designed to promote partnerships between municipalities and NGOs that will also be launched in 2009.  

Bosnia and Herzegovina’s EU integration cannot proceed in a satisfactory way unless the municipalities are directly and significantly involved. They are going to have to do much of the work when it comes to implementing EU directives, and many of the benefits of integration are going to be delivered through them.

The largest winners of the B&H integration in to the EU will be citizens and municipalities to whom new possibilities will be open, from travel to EU accession funds.  It is therefore of paramount importance that the municipalities and other local community organisations make their voice be heard. So politicians and those at the state level, who are dealing directly with the EU, can act with the knowledge, support and detailed input of local communities. But not only that, if there is a halt on the way to EU integration, if there is a blockage in reforms required for it and if necessary, citizens, municipalities, NGOs, whose greatest interest and benefits lie in integration, are the ones that should pressure politicians. Pressure in order for acceleration of integration process and carrying out needed reforms.

I believe that today’s conference can play an important role in bringing in achieving aforementioned.

I wish you successful work.

Thank you.