EU conference of regions aims to give power to the people

EIGHTY young people in the old Finnish industrial city of Tampere are this week in the final stages of rehearsing a rock opera called Virgo. Their wages are being paid by the local authority and the EU.

In this town of 20,000 unemployed, victims of the decline of traditional manufacturing, a remarkable new success story is now being told. In the past two years some 4,000 new jobs have been created by one of the experimental flagships of European regional policy, territorial employment pacts (TEPs).

The idea, passionately championed in Ireland by the Minister of State for local development, Mr Gay Mitchell, is to create local partnerships of small and big business, local authorities, communities, training establishments and the EU, to identify opportunities for job creation and targeting gaps in the local market through special training or other programmes.

Approval for 80 such projects, four of them in Ireland (in Dublin, Limerick, Dundalk/Drogheda, and Westmeath) will be announced in Amsterdam at the EU summit next month, a key part of the EU's contribution to the fight for jobs.

The TEPs represent the essence of what the EU's first conference of regions and cities on Thursday and Friday in Amsterdam was about. The challenge is to reconcile globalisation with bringing power back to communities. "Think globally, but act locally" was the motto offered to the conference by the Dutch Prime Minister, Mr Wim Kok, opening the meeting of some 300 heads of regions and local authorities.

The summit in the old Amsterdam stock exchange building was organised by the EU's Committee of the Regions (COR), the three year old Cinderella of EU institutions.

Their message was straightforward, as Mr Tony McKenna, head of the Irish delegation, a Fianna Fail Co Tipperary county councillor, explained where the EU has been most successful it is because it has reached down to tap the energy and capacities of local communities.

The challenge, he believes, is to refocus the EU, to empower people from the bottom up. That means empowering local authorities in their search for jobs and in the detailed management of structural funds, a theme taken up in the proposed reform of the funds by both Commissioners responsible, Ms Monika WulfMathies and Mr Padraig Flynn.

In a message of support to the summit the Italian Prime Minister, Mr Romano Prodi, spoke of the history of Europe as not just a history of nation states but one of cities and regions.

"We are those who govern closest to the people," the president of the COR, Barcelona's Socialist Mayor, Mr Pasquall Maragalli Mira, claimed, staking the COR's claim to democratic legitimacy and an enhanced consultative status in the EU.

The COR wants to be put on the same footing as the other institutions a nightmare to many Brussels based diplomats and officials who scarcely conceal their contempt for the organisation and see the prospect as yet another decision making hurdle in an already over complex system although they do not dare say so in public.

The committee and the summit bring together the most extraordinary range of interests large and small communities, powerful authorities and the toothless peripheral and central, rich and poor, urban and rural, from left to right.

Seated alongside each other are the prime ministers of huge German hinder, who wield substantial local autonomy on behalf of millions, and county councillors like Mr McKenna.

They all march ostensibly under the same banner - "subsidiarity", the demand that all decisions should be taken as close to the people affected as possible. But scratch the surface of the definition and major differences emerge.

The powerful and deeply conservative Premier of Bavaria Dr Edmund Stoiber, joint author of the summit conclusions, spoke of the concept as the "vision of the future" implying the need to roll back the legal competences of Brussels to create "a slim but fit EU, free from unnecessary ballast."

Behind the scenes, Mr Stoiber was even opposed to references in the summit conclusions to an EU role in job creation, arguing that this is a matter for governments and regions but not the EU.

His coauthor, Mr Fernando Gomes, the Socialist Mayor of Porto, insisted that his meaning was that Europe "must not back track ... we want more Europe, but better Europe". The regions, he argued, must be the "counter weight" to Brussels. His emphasis is on wrenching back from Brussels and national governments a greater share in the administration of structural funding.

And just as the COR is a reflection less of grievances against Brussels and more of the inevitable tussles for authority between regions and local authorities and the next tier up in the power hierarchy, national governments, so the same tensions are manifest here between regions and their own cities, or differently in the struggle for resources between cities and rural areas.

The Dublin Labour city councillor, Ms Mary Freehill, spent much of the conference agitating successfully behind the scenes for the insertion of the word "cities" in a key section of the final document. It had been omitted because the regions are only too aware that more power for cities is likely to come at their expense.

And the chair of the Dublin Regional Authority, Fianna Fail's Ms Betty Coffey, in her speech joined other city leaders in demanding a greater emphasis on urban areas in the reform of structural funds. She also let off a broadside at "over centralised states like my own".

Ireland almost certainly has the least devolved system of local and regional authorities in the EU.

The summit finished with an appeal to the treaty changing Inter Governmental Conference to extend the areas in which the COR will have the legal right to be consulted over legislation, to separate it administratively from the increasingly moribund Economic and Social Committee, and to require delegates to have some form of elective mandate.

On all these relatively unambitious fronts the COR is likely to make progress at the summit. On the more controversial demand, for the COR or the regions individually to have the right to go to the European Court of Justice when they believe the principle of subsidiarity is being ignored, they haven't a snowball's chance in Hell.

Although the German and Austrian lander may have a role in the national delegations at the Amsterdam summit, unlike other regions, the only votes cast at Amsterdam will be those of heads of governments. And, like turkeys, they are unlikely to vote for Christmas.