Thank you very much, Ms Czymoch, for getting our seminar off to a good start.
Welcome, everyone. I shall, by way of introduction, share a few thoughts with you. I dare say that my
views are not mine alone but are shared by many of my colleagues in the European Economic and
Social Committee, if not by everyone.
In my opinion, development means having a vision of distributing the proceeds of development and
ensuring that development is balanced – in other words, fair distribution. I often quote my ancestors,
so to speak – I am referring to the ancient Greeks – but it was our wonderful colleague Alan Jones
who found this particular quotation from Plutarch, who, 25 centuries ago, wrote these words, which
are still salient today: "An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all
republics". Indeed, democracy, the republic, is certainly the best and most beautiful system, the
system for which many of us have fought. But it also has shortcomings that we must put right;
democracy, by definition, is supposed to be able to make improvements where required.
Poverty has many guises: it goes beyond not having enough to eat or not having money in your
pocket. Poverty is also an absence, a lack of various possibilities. For example, not having access to
education, not having access to health care, not having a job that guarantees an income, not having
decent housing, not enjoying equality of opportunity – not only between men and women but among
all people – but also not having a secure future.
Nobody denies that poverty is a global issue, and it is a particular problem for developing countries.
But this does not mean that our countries are unaffected, for poverty does exist in our countries. And
by "our countries" I mean the 28 EU Member States.
It is politically – and, above all, morally – unacceptable that more than one billion men and women in
this world have to try to live on an income of one euro per day. And this figure is just an average. It is
equally unacceptable that millions of men, women and children do not have enough food and have no
access to clean drinking water, education or essential health care.
No-one would argue with statistics showing that we Europeans – the Member States and the European
Union – contribute proportionally more development aid than Japan or the US. But it would be
unreasonable to say that this is enough.
As early as 2002 then-Commissioner Nielson said that "the development model championed by the
rich is economically, socially and environmentally unsustainable". He also said that the gap between
rich and poor was constantly widening.
In 2000, two years before Nielson's speech, the world had agreed on the Millennium Goals. This year
we will assess to what extent they have succeeded or failed. However, we already know that despite
the progress that has been made, we are still a very long way from our goal.
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Just two months ago, 193 heads of state and government agreed on the sustainability goals, which
represents a new level of maturity and ambition. And COP21 is about to get under way, which in my
view simply must be a success. If it is not possible to sign a far-reaching and binding agreement in
Paris, we – and even more so our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and the world's poorest
countries – will have to pay the very highest price for this failure. A much higher price than the cost
of transforming our economies into sustainable economies.
This is all connected with development policy because development has many elements: it is not just
about charity, but also about altering behaviour and economic investment.
Development policy should aim to strengthen developing countries' economies so that they can
generate sufficient revenue and create jobs, improve health standards, provide children and adults
with education, and prevent marginalisation.
Development aid is a form of investment: it is investment in the future of developing and developed
countries. And as development aid is so universal and so globally important, it needs to have the right
communication strategy.
This leads me to stress how important this seminar is. It has become fashionable to call our era the
information age, but I don't think this is entirely accurate. As a non-expert, I would say that we are
living in the "communication age", which is why communication has become absolutely vital.
I could mention some very clever ways of getting messages across, such as Barack Obama and his
"Yes we can" slogan or, to take a European example, François Mitterrand's great slogan from 1981:
"Oui au changement" (yes to change). It was communication specialists who came up with this
slogan, which was effective and therefore went on to be frequently reused. Other American presidents
have also used this way of communicating. Communication is of paramount importance.
Personally, I could never welcome or support communication that might mislead people. However, I
regret the fact that a lack of means or expertise means that the public never learns about certain
excellent initiatives. We in the Committee have had the opportunity – and the strength, too – to
conduct an occasionally very difficult but also constructive dialogue between the three groups and
then to come up with some very specific and significant proposals regarding the future of our Union. I
wouldn't say that the public was entirely unaware of these proposals, but they did go largely
unnoticed. Fortunately, some months or even years later, policy-makers, in particular the European
Commission, used them to draft proposals, and the Parliament and Council took them up – without
mentioning that they came from the European Economic and Social Committee – and brought them to
fruition. It is not that we want to advertise ourselves, but I am sure that it would benefit the EU if we
were able to spread the word about the good work that we do. We are not only supposed to represent
and express the views of organised civil society; we also act as a reservoir of knowledge, as our
proposals are the result of a constructive dialogue, which is sometimes difficult but very often
extremely effective.
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Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, I don't want to tire you out with a long speech. I would like to
thank the moderator and the speakers for coming to Luxembourg to share their knowledge and
experience. I would also like to thank the European Investment Bank for hosting us; we are safe and
sound here, and it is very kind of the presidency of the Bank to accommodate us here. A big thank
you to the Luxembourg Presidency and the Luxembourg Economic and Social Council, as well as to
the European Commission for their valuable support, and – last but not least – to my colleagues at the
EESC who organised this event under the supervision of Peter Lindvald-Nielsen. Finally, I would like
to express my thanks to the members of the European Economic and Social Committee and to the
presidents of the groups: Gabriele Bischoff, President of the Workers' Group, Lucas Jahier, President
of the Various Interests Group, and Jacek Krawczyk, President of the Employers' Group, who is not
yet here.
I wish all of you success: success in communicating effectively, in leading a communication
revolution if need be, but above all in using communication to enable a better world to flourish, one
strongly rooted in sustainable development! Finally, I would like to ask you to think about
development and the distribution of wealth, as well as the distribution of available work, because we
are living through an economic crisis and many millions of people are unemployed. According to
official figures, there are nearly 20 million unemployed people in the European Union. Is it not time
to think about a different distribution of available work? For at least five decades, productivity has
been increasing and wealth produced has also been increasing – yet inequality is worsening. This
shows that something is not working properly. We could send a message to policy-makers to
encourage them to seriously tackle these issues.
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