Convener, honourable members of the European and External Relations Committee and dear colleagues from Québec, on behalf of the State Minister for European Affairs and International Relations in the Bavarian State Chancellery, Mrs Beate Merk, I thank you very much for your kind invitation to give evidence to the committee on Bavaria’s international relations strategy.
It is a great honour and pleasure for me to be here today in the Scottish Parliament, which, when it was created in the devolution process, proved to be the key driver for closer Scottish-Bavarian relations. I remember many a Scottish delegation visiting the Bavarian Landtag—the Parliament—in Munich to learn more about how a sub-national Parliament works and how it can make itself heard at a European level, and I hope that your interest in Bavaria will help to revitalise the 2003 co-operation agreement between Scotland and Bavaria.
In outlining the main features of Bavaria’s international relations policy, I want to emphasise at the start that conducting external relations is a constitutional right of the German Länder. Although article 32(1) of the basic law reserves foreign affairs to the federal state, article 32(3) allows individual states within their sphere of competence, which includes culture, education, media, security, health and environmental protection, and in agreement with the federal Government, to negotiate and conclude treaties with foreign countries. Bavaria has always made use of that constitutional right and has thereby maintained diplomatic relations below the level of foreign policy. As a current example, we are preparing a memorandum of understanding to be signed with the French Republic—the République française.
While relations with Berlin are more or less harmonious, there is a strong element of competition with other Länder governments, and Bavaria is very successful in that environment. Its institutional model of international relations is decentralised and is based on loose co-ordination between different state ministries. The key actor is the Minister-President, who has the right to set out the Government’s priorities. Those priorities are then implemented by ministries and Government agencies in their areas of competence; in other words, the Bavarian state ministries are free to conduct their own external relations within the Minister-President’s priorities and guidelines. The Bavarian State Chancellery, where I work, is responsible for overall co-ordination—its own budget for international projects is rather small—and the Minister for European Affairs and International Relations in the Chancellery plays the role of Bavaria’s foreign minister.
Let me give you a few facts and figures. Bavaria is geographically at the heart of Europe and is Germany’s largest and oldest state. It was originally and has historically remained a state—it was not artificially created after the second world war—but it is very important to note that, although it is often called the Free State, it has no more powers and competencies than the 15 other Länder. Its 12.6 million inhabitants represent 16 per cent of the German population and, with 20 per cent of the federal territory, it is Germany’s largest state. Its state budget is 47 billion euros, 10 per cent of which has to be paid to other Länder under the famous financial equalisation scheme that you might have heard about and which in German is known as the Finanzausgleich.
In an almost 1,000-year-old tradition, Bavaria and the Bavarian state Government have always cultivated good relations with foreign countries. For a highly advanced state such as Bavaria, it is impossible to imagine sound future development without its being embedded in an international framework.
Bavaria’s partners are countries and regions not only in its immediate vicinity—what we call cross-border co-operation—but in the rest of Europe and, indeed, all over the world. The state Government acts as an opener of doors and a partner wherever there are close connections with immediate neighbours, such as the Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland; where there are historical and cultural ties, particularly with the central-eastern and south-eastern European countries, but also with France, Italy and the USA; and wherever there is an opportunity to have greater access to world markets such as China, India, South America and Brazil. The state Government helps to promote Bavaria’s innovation, competitiveness and cultural identity and, by building bridges between cultures, increases the location’s attractiveness.
Bavaria’s international co-operation covers a wide variety of fields that can be summarised under three thematic headings: politics and administration; business, science, technology and the environment, with a focus on the internationalisation of science and research and our universities; and education, culture and society. Recently, against the background of current problems arising from the worldwide movements of refugees triggered by crises such as the Syrian civil war, Ebola and dramatic climate change, we have added a new sphere of activity: development policy. In that field, we have started to co-operate with Tunisia, Turkey and Lebanon.
Bavaria has six essential tools at its disposal for cultivating its international relations, the first of which is the international contacts of the members of the state Government. In 2014 alone, the Bavarian Minister-President visited the Vatican, where he met the Pope; France, where he met M Hollande; the Czech Republic, where he met Mr Necas; and China, where he met Premier Li Keqiang, and he was received by the respective leaders. Conversely, Bavaria receives guests and high-profile dialogue partners from society, politics and businesses. All in all, there are one to two meetings a week between state ministers and foreign Governments, and around 20 foreign trips a year are organised by the State Chancellery, not to speak of our state ministries’ other foreign travel trips.
The second tool is our 12 intergovernmental commissions and working groups, which support close co-operation on specific projects between Bavaria’s partners and the state Government at the bilateral and multilateral levels. At the European level, I should also mention Bavaria’s input to the European Danube strategy since 2009 and the European alpine strategy, which is currently being developed.
A special tool that I would like to stress in this respect is the regional leaders conference. In our opinion, the future belongs to strong regions, and the very best compete with each other. That is why Bavaria created the so-called power regions group. Biennial summits of the group involve the leaders of Bavaria, Québec, São Paulo, Upper Austria, Shandong, the Western Cape and Georgia in the USA, and its guiding principle of close co-operation among strong partners on four continents has led to numerous joint projects in research, technology, education, the arts and the media.
The third tool is Bavarian representation offices abroad. The committee might be surprised to learn that we have more than 20 representative offices, but only three of them—the offices in Brussels, Montreal and, indeed, Prague, which opened only a few months ago—are political ones. The other roughly 20 offices are commercial in nature, and they are currently being revised with the objective of improving efficiency, because we think that 20 offices on four continents around the world might be a bit too many. The heads of the offices often have two or three hats; they might also work for, say, the German chamber of commerce, foreign trade or a bank. As that approach might not be efficient, we are reviewing the offices.
The fourth tool is agencies in Bavaria that have an international focus. We have created an agency called Bayern International, which promotes Bavaria abroad at trade fairs, and in the context of internationalising our universities, we also have several Bavarian university centres for co-operation with eastern and central Europe, France, the USA, Québec, China, Latin America and India. Bavaria is a prime venue for hosting internationally renowned forums for dialogue and negotiations, such as the Munich security conference every February. We are also looking forward to hosting the G7 summit in southern Bavaria this year.
The fifth tool is co-operation with the consular corps. With more than 110 consular representations, Bavaria has the largest number of consulates outside Berlin.
The sixth tool is specific support for individual projects, which gives me most of my work. Projects are submitted by scientists, students, representatives of associations, civil society and organisations, and 30 to 50 of them are agreed to and implemented by the intergovernmental commissions.
Those are the practical results of international co-operation at the operational level. Germany’s federal structure leaves ample room for Bavaria and the Deutsche Länder to conduct their own international relations. We think that a federal state is well suited to guarantee regional diversity and meet the nation’s and regions’ demands for the widest possible flexibility and influence, but we are well aware that the German model of federalism is not the only one possible. Every state must take into consideration its country’s peculiarities and regional characteristics.
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That is what I wanted to say about Bavaria’s external relations policy, which will be reviewed soon. I am grateful to be at this meeting, as I will perhaps hear about other approaches to the subject. Thank you for inviting me, and I will be pleased to answer your questions.