Speech to the 55th Liberal International Congress

Speech by Graham Watson on Sat 17th May 2008

I come from the UK and I work in the European Parliament, so I speak from a European perspective. I am sometimes struck by how different our perspectives are. We are all created and enslaved by our histories.

Those here from China had the most advanced civilisation on earth over 2,000 years before - in the Middle East - started to develop what became European civilisation. Much more recently, China sent a fleet of 800 massive ships which circumnavigated and mapped the globe seventy years before Columbus set sail in his three rickety, rat-infested caravelles.

Indian delegates here know that the great Mughal emperor Iqbal was codifying a bill of rights while in Europe Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for being a heretic.

North America had the world's most powerful economy and was confidently looking outward across much of the twentieth century while the tribes of Europe engaged in an eighty year rage of self-mutilation from 1914 to 1994.

If I can claim some good for European civilisation in the last fifty years it is that we have built the European Union. Phase I was the achievement and the anchoring of peace; phase II the building of a strong economy with a powerful single currency. Phase III must now be the projection of our values through the medium of soft power as a force for good in the world.

Moreover we built the EU on a model of supranational co-operation which might have a wider application. European countries recognised that they are small and medium-sized nations in a world in which the major challenges are supranational. World population growth and migration, climate change and energy security, internationally organised crime and terrorism are all supranational challenges requiring supranational solutions. We developed a supranational approach which accommodates national diversity. We learned too we can only find the answers if we proceed with humility; if we concede that conversation is more constructive than conversion or assimilation.

One of those global challenges is climate change. One third of living species have been rendered extinct in the last 35 years due to human activity: that's 1% a year! We are de-stabilising the oceans with nitrogen and filling the atmosphere with CO2. There are currently 440 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere and average global temperatures have risen by 0.7 degrees centigrade. Some models estimate that even at this level of CO2 concentration there is a 70% chance of temperatures rising by 2 degrees. With 6.7 billion people on the planet and population rising we have probably reached a tipping point. We need to act fast.

Science shows us how. (Unlike some environmentalists, Liberals have no problems with scientific advance.) Our scientists tell us that solar thermal high voltage energy production through trough or mirror or dish-engine systems in North Africa, combined with wind and wave power from northern Europe, could be harnessed in a grid which would supply all the energy needs of Europe and North Africa if we could summon the conviction and the courage, the determination and the diplomacy, the guts and the grit to make the switch from oil. That is why Liberal Democrats in the Group I lead are working flat out in the European Parliament to put the package of proposals from the European Commission - designed to limit climate change - onto the statute book by 2009. And running a campaign to let people know about it, as outlined yesterday by my colleague Magor Csibi MEP.

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It is a pleasure to be here in Belfast in 2008, ten years on. The significance of the site should not escape us. This city was built on mud and wrath; on the theology of rifle butts and executions. It was a place where the spirit dies.

I know. I was born barely thirty miles from here, across the water, on an island in the mouth of the River Clyde. When I taste the tang of salt air from Belfast Lough or fill my field of vision with the clear northern light I feel near home. I feel too the guilt of the complicity of my countrymen in the vicious inter-denominational conflict which wracked this province. Shared hatreds, which hastened money and weapons and harboured criminals.

That conflict is past. Now, in the new society - to quote the Irish poet Tom Paulin - we see 'the mixers churning cement / the new bricks rising on their foundations / - a factual idealism - / a mummified Bentham should flourish / and unfold an order that's unaggressively civilian / where taps gush water into stainless sinks / and there's a smell of fresh paint in sunlit kitchens'.

John [Lord Alderdice], thank you for bringing us here to see how much you've achieved. And how your answers might be applied elsewhere.

It's good to be here too because it is essential for Liberals to forge links, to knit networks, to foster friendships to promote and defend Liberalism's universal values. It is especially important today. Rarely has a political ideology been so unjustly vilified and demonised. Misconceptions, cliches, intellectually dishonest attacks aim at - and too often succeed in - undermining the vision of society proven to be pre-eminent in promoting well-being, freedom and democracy. Our enemies have succeeded in labelling Liberalism a purely economic creed.

Friends, we must repeat the message: Liberalism is not savage, free market, uncaring casino capitalism!

Let me to say to our West African friends, in the context of development aid, there has been some confusion over the Economic Partnership Agreements proposed by the EU. These are Liberal agreements. They are very different from the Lome and Cotonou conventions of the last 30 years. Lome gave unilateral trade preferences to Europe's former colonies but not to other developing countries; it allowed ACP countries to protect their markets from EU competition. It placed the emphasis on aid and dependency. It was clearly open to attack, from other developing countries and from the World Trade Organisation. Cotonou foresaw negotiations from 2002 on a new trade framework and an agreement by 2008. It spoke of 'the removal of barriers on substantially all trade over a reasonable period of time'. By January this year, the Caribbean states had signed a full EPA and 20 others had signed interim agreements ending tariffs on 80% of imports over a fifteen year period.

43 countries have not signed. I understand their concerns about competitiveness and loss of income. But EPAs are designed to ease market opening and boost South-South trade. In development aid policy they emphasise development over aid. I spoke yesterday to President Wade of Senegal about his concerns in this area. I will take those concerns to President Barroso; and I will host in the autumn a conference bringing African and European Liberals together in Brussels to debate these agreements with Commissioner Michel.

Why do Liberals believe in the market? Because the market economy is the most powerful tool known to humankind to lift people out of poverty, pronto. Look at Asia's tiger economies, or even at the Republic of Ireland. Also because where there is no market freedom there is rarely, if ever, political freedom. Freedom is indivisible.

But the market is not an end in itself. We know that markets can fail. That is why Liberals have always said there is a legitimate role for national government intervention where the gains from remedying market failure - for the environment, for consumers or for the workforce - outweigh the cost of such intervention. In the new global market, where the contours of globalisation are drawn in the computer campuses of west coast America, in the call centres of India and the factories of China and a Nokia phone may contain parts from 34 different countries, we need a new global social contract. Perhaps the most important challenge of our time is to create what some have called 'the global eco-social market economy'.

Liberals can lead the way. The strength of Liberalism is that it is a formula, not a blueprint. Policy outcomes are not necessarily the same when applying Liberal ideas to Europe as when they are applied to Africa or Asia. Not necessarily the same in North America as in South America. In developing countries more economic freedom is often needed to create wealth; but more State too, to provide social cohesion. Liberalism and capitalism may intertwine, like honeysuckle and bindweed, but - as European Commissioner Louis Michel has said - capitalism will never be an object of affection.

Many hold Liberalism to be around 300 years old, a product of anglo-saxon protestant capitalism. I do not. I commend to you two recent books. Philippe Nemo's "Histoire du Liberalisme en Europe", which traces the roots of continental Liberalism back over five hundred years: and Paul Seabright's "The company of strangers", which sees its origins 10,000 years ago when man gave up the itinerant hunting and gathering lifestyle to found farms and villages and later cities and had to learn to live and trade with strangers and to trust them. Modern society is built on institutions and habits which allow us to treat strangers as honorary friends. It means we recognise that while they may not share our language or religion they may in crucial respects behave just like us. That is why Liberalism developed under Islam and Christianity and other religions.

It is an honour to be here among Liberals, the heirs to such a noble creed. Among people whose beliefs beget the building - with the bricks of effort and the mortar of persistence - of Liberal spirit in their communities. People who know it is no good looking for "the Leader" or "the Answer" because we have to find these things in ourselves. Who recognise that development is about the transfer of competence and experience; and that helping others develop is the best way to develop ourselves.

Occasionally this weekend I've detected a little despondency about lack of electoral success. Friends, Liberalism is most feared not for the size of its political presence but for the strength of its ideas. Liberal ideas about effective global governance, about common purpose respectful of diversity, reflect the strongest aspirations of humanity today. So let us look forward, with the french philosopher Victor Hugo, to the day when the only battlefields will be those of markets open for business and the human spirit open for ideas. Or, more poetically, with Ireland's poet Seamus Heaney 'to the time when hope and history will rhyme'.