A new era of cross-border relations

Cross-border cooperation is a long haul. That is why the Franco-Spanish Barcelona summit of 17 October is to be welcomed as a major step forward.

For years now, regional and local authorities across the Pyrenees have been forging many kinds of relations, at all levels and in various areas: our three border regions, most of the French departments, some local administrations and the Bayonne-Anglet-Biarritz Urban Community have formed partnerships with their trans-Pyrenean counterparts. In 1995, the Bayonne Treaty gave new impetus to these efforts by introducing a minor legal revolution into our highly Jacobin national legislation: French local authorities can now take part in groupings of local authorities governed by Spanish law; this has allowed Hendaye to join Irún and Hondarribia in the ‘consorcio’ of Txingudi. More recently, the Working Community of the Pyrenees, whose members are regional bodies, has chosen that same status of ‘consorcio’.

Yet progress remains very slow and the local councillors (of whom there are still too few) who resolutely embarked on this road all too often felt they were fighting a lost cause. It was not for lack of political will. What we lack is the ability to organise ourselves effectively to promote common projects in fundamentally different political, legal, administrative and cultural contexts. The problem is one of organisation or, as we now call it, of ‘governance’. That reminds me of the letter that appeared a few years ago in the agony column of a major French women’s journal: ‘I love him. He loves me. Our parents agree. What should I do?’

Having been tasked by the government to evaluate all the French land borders, I reached the conclusion that the only way to overcome the major stumbling blocks was to introduce procedures through which governments would be obliged to tackle, at their level, those issues requiring them to take a decision. It so happens that for some years now France has been organising six-monthly summits with each of its major neighbours, Germany, Italy and Spain: why not use that existing framework to put cross-border projects on the agenda from time to time, involving representatives from the local authorities concerned with those projects? Since our Spanish neighbours reached the same conclusion, a trial summit of a new type was organised on 17 October.

Its findings confirms that the analysis was justified and the idea useful. True, on both sides regional leaders hostile to their national government expressed disappointment that no substantive decision was taken; but if such decisions had been taken, those same leaders would have protested loudly that they had been faced with a fait accompli without having had a chance to put their views beforehand. The aim of the meeting was not to take decisions but to draw up a list of the projects of all the parties concerned and to reach agreement on how to consider them jointly. Following the Bayonne Treaty, that is another quiet, minor revolution, this time in the system of governance.

Let us take the most burning question: transport infrastructure. Up to now, that question has been handled in a quite disparate manner, with some actors talking among themselves, then with others, sometimes in Franco-French, sometimes in Hispano-Spanish, sometimes between governments that knew nothing about the local actors, sometimes between regions with no government involvement. On 17 October, for the first time, all the actors concerned sat around a table. The timetables of the studies announced by the two governments included nothing new, but it was the first time they were binding on everybody. Above all, it became clear, as might have been suspected, that it is one thing to list all the various projects, but it is another to choose between them and to decide whether some should be higher up the list than others. In the case of high-speed trains, there is objective competition between Bordeaux-Hendaye, which is Aquitaine’s priority, Bordeaux-Toulouse, supported by Midi-Pyrénées, and Perpignan-Nîmes, favoured by Languedoc-Roussillon. Moreover, the north-south axes are in competition with the east-west axes, which in turn compete with each other: Bordeaux-Montpellier-Barcelona, supported by the French regions, and Bilbao-Barcelona, strongly supported by Catalonia, Aragón and Navarra. The action plan adopted on 17 October will force each of them to take their responsibilities seriously and will make it necessary for the governments to decide promptly so that the vital European funding does not go to countries quicker to make a decision.

Another major advance is that a permanent follow-up procedure has been introduced in order to consider, aside from these major projects, local cooperation projects, in which local authorities are primarily involved. Here again, surely there is no reason to invent new institutions. The Bayonne Treaty provided for regular meetings of the bi-national committee, which could eventually set up subcommittees for the relevant regions. In fact, the two governments had never seen any reason to convene that committee. In the Basque Country, we will finally have the political framework we needed in order to cooperate effectively with Euskadi and with Navarra, and the same will apply to all the natural partners of Aragón and Catalonia. Surely no one could complain?

Finally, let me welcome the agreement between the two governments and the autonomous communities to draft a text that will set out the legal framework vital to the development of health and hospital cooperation. That will reward the pioneering efforts of associations, doctors and hospital executives in the Basque Country over the past decade.

True, as yet no decisions have been taken. But at least we are finally giving ourselves the means to take them. Citizens can then judge us by our actions.

Alain Lamassoure, 21 October 2005