A question of balance

If a week is a long time in politics, looking back sixty years gives you a powerful sense of perspective in international affairs. The Congress of Europe in The Hague in 1948 gave birth to the Council of Europe. In those sixty years it has grown to an important and flourishing organisation. It is worth looking at how it all started, why the devastated Europe of that time needed it, and why contemporary Europe – and the wider world - needs it still.

Close to a thousand delegates came to The Hague in May 1948 at the invitation of International Committee of the Movements for European Unity, a temporary coalition of political and regional organisations which emerged across the continent after the war, often from resistance groups. They invited Winston Churchill, then leader of the opposition in the UK, to chair the three day Congress, where major public figures – Adenauer, Macmillan, Mitterrand, Spaak, Spinelli – pressed the case for the political, economic and monetary union of Europe. Within this larger case for continental union they argued for a Council of Europe.

There was a sense of urgency about the Congress. All around them, the delegates saw Europe in ruins. Half the continent lay under Soviet domination, and from the dying embers of World War II, ideological conflict between East and West was fanning an ever more threatening Cold War. As the Political Resolution adopted by The Hague Congress put it, Europe was torn “between great peril and great hope”.

The post-war political instability and economic devastation was the spur to action. And action offered hope. The Political Resolution called for a Charter of Human Rights to ensure basic democratic values, and a Supreme Court to provide redress against abuse of human rights by states. Within a year ten countries – Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the UK - signed the Treaty of London which created the Council of Europe.

The structure of the Council of Europe reflected the political debate between intergovernmental and supranational models of international government which marked debates at the Congress in The Hague. The new organisation was given a powerful intergovernmental Committee of Ministers directly representing the signatory states and a Parliamentary Assembly which while not expressly supranational, gave direct expression to political forces represented in the parliaments of member states, going beyond governments to include opposition voices.

And this balance has worked remarkably well over sixty years. The Council of Europe has gone on to establish its Court to enforce the European Convention on Human Rights, the Congress of Local Authorities to spread democracy at the level of local government and the office of the Commissioner for Human Rights to investigate behaviour by public authorities. The Council of Europe has become Europe’s guardian of the values of democracy, human rights and the rule of law – the values which are the basis of a tolerant and civilised society and are indispensable for stability and social cohesion.

Building on the Convention on Human Rights, the Council of Europe has also elaborated the European Social Charter, the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and the Framework Convention on the Protection of National Minorities. Over two hundred Conventions tie the member states closely together in a network of reciprocal observance of agreed legal norms of behaviour in areas ranging from the protection of cultural heritage to the practice of international adoption. The Council of Europe is the prime exemplar of a Europe of common values.

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the Soviet Union was dissolved two years later, one of the first acts of newly independent states of Central and Eastern Europe was to apply to join the Council of Europe. Membership confirmed their democratic credentials and served as an endorsement of their commitment to a community of European values with universal application. Now with 47 member states including Russia, the Council of Europe represents a continent which stretches – in the words of De Gaulle in another context - from the Atlantic to the Urals and beyond. Only Belarus is not a member, and this is because it fails to observe the democratic and human rights standards set by the Council of Europe.

The final clause of the Political Resolution of the Hague Congress spoke of Europe and its values setting an example to the world and serving as a model for better governance at global level.  As the UN enters a period of serious discussion of reform, the Council of Europe may serve the purpose which those delegates, assembled sixty years ago at The Hague amidst a Europe in ruins, thought its example might provide on the wider world stage.

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