Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,

This is a great day for me. To stand here in the Scottish Parliament, in my capacity as chairman of the Nordic cooperation ministers and the Nordic cooperation, and address you on a subject that is close to my heart – my deep-seated commitment to the West Nordic sphere and the Nordic countries’ western neighbours. In order to make myself quite clear, I should say that by the West Nordic sphere I mean Greenland, the Faeroes, Iceland and parts of the Norwegian coast. By the Nordic countries’ western neighbours I mean Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland and the eastern provinces of Canada.

In the last ten years the Nordic countries have focused strongly on developments on their eastern borders, by which I mean the Baltic countries and northwestern Russia. Giving these areas priority has been the right and logical thing to do.

However, during my time in the Norwegian parliament and as a member of the Nordic Council, I have always pointed out that we must not forget the western part of the Nordic region and the opportunities offered by closer cooperation with our neighbours in the west.

Thus, I maintain that it is important for the Nordic countries to look west, and here this seminar will make a valuable contribution.

I grew up on an island off the town of Tromsø in north Norway, an island that faces out over the North Sea and the North Atlantic. This has naturally influenced my way of thinking, and is one of the reasons why I am so concerned that we who work with Nordic cooperation should do more to examine and follow up the opportunities for closer cooperation with the Nordic countries’ western neighbours.

And we are indeed neighbours, bordering as we do on the same ocean. I have been reading the report on the debate in this parliament on the Nordic Council and Nordic cooperation on 30 October, and I was struck by how much those taking part in the debate felt that they had strong ties with the Nordic region – historical ties, a sense of fellowship with the Nordic peoples, and the fact that our societies are facing the same domestic problems. I agree with Mr. MacAskill that it is an absurdity that Scotland's links with the Nordic nations were greater centuries ago than they are now. As Ms. Scanlon said, in Nordic terms Scotland is pretty central. And Mr. Grimond is probably not the only person who can answer “Bergen” when The Times asks for the name of their nearest railway station.

Ladies and gentlemen,

At its session in Copenhagen in 2001 the Nordic Council discussed future Nordic cooperation. In preparation for the meeting the Nordic cooperation ministers drew up a number of overall strategic goals for cooperation in the years ahead. New goals were adopted for five areas, all of which are of strategic importance for development in the Nordic region, both separately and together.

These five areas are as follows:

• Technological advances, especially issues relating to the information society and cutting-edge research in the Nordic countries
• Welfare, including the rights of Nordic citizens and their right to live, work and study in another Nordic country, and also demographic and migration issues
• The Nordic internal market, including the cooperation on eliminating border barriers
• The environment and sustainable development
• Cooperation with neighbouring countries and regions

In the rest of my talk I intend to concentrate on the last of these: Nordic cooperation with neighbouring countries and regions.

As I said at the beginning, it has been both right and important for the Nordic Council of Ministers and the Nordic Council to concentrate neighbourhood cooperation on the Baltic countries and northwestern Russia. The main goal of this cooperation has been to contribute to security and stability, strengthen democracy, encourage the community of values between these countries and the Nordic region and promote the development of a market economy and closer economic cooperation in the region. In addition to making contacts, our activities have been carried out within the framework of information offices, scholarship and exchange programmes, and projects in the fields of democracy building, cultural promotion and sustainable resource development. As the Baltic countries become closer to the EU, we will be giving more priority to northwestern Russia.

Ever since I first became involved in the work on Nordic cooperation I have considered it important that our eastward focus should not make us forget the western part of the region and the opportunities for cooperation with our western neighbours. In connection with the debate at the Nordic Council’s session in 2001, the cooperation ministers agreed that the Council of Ministers would consider projects involving cooperation with the coastal areas of our western neighbours within the framework of joint Nordic priorities. I fully support this decision, and this year, when Norway holds the chairmanship of the Council of Ministers, I have done my best to follow it up.

The Nordic cooperation ministers have now initiated a process for evaluating the various options open to us. Earlier this year I asked the Council of Ministers’ secretariat to compile an overview of joint Nordic activities that particularly concern the West Nordic sphere and its neighbouring areas. The overview is a comprehensive one and provides a good picture of the place occupied by this region in Nordic cooperation. It also shows that most of the projects relating to our western neighbours are in the cultural field.

As Secretary General Søren Christensen explained earlier today, a wide-ranging cultural project was carried out in 2002 targeted at our western neighbours, especially Scotland, Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Culture is an important tool for building bridges between countries, but I feel that we would also benefit from closer cooperation in other fields as well. The Nordic cooperation ministers have therefore appointed a working group of senior officials who by June 2003 will submit a report that systematically examines the following areas:

• Cooperation in the West Nordic sphere within the framework of the Helsinki Agreement
• Cooperation between the Nordic Council of Ministers and Nordic neighbours to the west
• Specifically west Nordic cooperation with neighbouring areas to the west

The group’s terms of reference were approved by the cooperation ministers in October. They include a mandate to identify relevant areas where the Nordic region has strategic interests in cooperation with our western neighbours, such as Scotland and northeastern Canada, and if necessary give higher priority to Nordic efforts to follow up the EU’s Northern Dimension and the Arctic Window.

I am looking forward to reading the report. Without anticipating the working group’s conclusions, I would like to say that I hope the report will provide a basis for greater cooperation with our western neighbours, although under the terms of reference no new formal cooperation structures or separate budget programmes are to be established specifically for the West Nordic sphere.

Until the Council of Ministers has discussed the conclusions of the report, the views I am presenting here reflect my own personal vision.

What I think we should aim at are cooperation projects consisting of measures designed to respond to the region’s particular needs. This cooperation will naturally be of a quite different nature from that with the Baltic countries and northwestern Russia, which has aimed at ensuring democratic development. Our westward cooperation should consist of coordinated efforts between a broad range of North Atlantic coastal states in areas of common interest, such as the North Atlantic marine environment, regional policy issues, cultural exchanges and trade relations.

In June last year I was one of the parliamentarians attending a Nordic conference in the Faeroes on the protection of the sea and the sustainable utilization of living marine resources in the North Atlantic. The conference declaration stated that the optimal utilization of marine resources is not in opposition to the protection of these resources and the marine environment – on the contrary it is vital for all of us who are working hard for the implementation of strategies for sustainable development. As a minister responsible for an important source of food I fully agree with this.

Fisheries and aquaculture have great development potential and will be able to ensure that settlement patterns are maintained and good living conditions upheld in communities along our coasts. We are competitors in the markets for fish and other marine products, but we have a common interest in protecting the marine environment and ensuring sustainable management of living marine resources. This is something we can join together in supporting in broader international fora. We can make joint efforts to protect our marine and aquatic environments and emphasize the responsibility that the whole world has for doing this.

We who earn a living from natural resources are interested in a policy that ensures that future generations will also be able to exploit the rich resources of the sea. We cannot take this for granted. There are many trends and developments today that could prevent us from achieving this goal.

Our researchers have given us new knowledge of how vulnerable our marine and coastal environments are. This means that we must act on the precautionary principle and base ourselves on nature’s tolerance limits. Our policy must take account of national and international challenges, and must ensure that our national environmental protection efforts are in line with international cooperation.

And cooperation is vital. To take just one example, 90 per cent of Norwegian catches of fish are from stocks that we share with other countries. Cooperation with close and less close neighbours is therefore essential if we are to achieve our goals.

“Regionalization” has been a major topic in the debate on development that has been going on in Europe in the last few years. As a political process, regionalization means that power and authority are transferred from the central government authorities in the capitals to regional bodies. More and more countries are re-organizing their regional policy activities because they realize that decentralization and delegating decision-making powers and resources to the regional and local level can be more effective and provide better control. The EU is using the principle of subsidiarity to an increasing extent in the organization of its regional support schemes, and the OECD is making similar recommendations.

In the western part of the Nordic region, the North Atlantic Cooperation, NORA, has been established between Iceland, the Faeroes, Greenland and western Norway. The overall aim is to cooperate on promoting economic development, and the main task is to strengthen regional and business policy ties in the West Nordic sphere by means of concrete cooperation projects between at least two of the countries in the region. Support is given to development and pilot projects in priority areas such as marine resources and aquaculture, tourism, agriculture, transport and communications, and trade and industry.

We are currently promoting cooperation between NORA and the Interreg Northern Periphery Programme. This programme is headed by Scotland and includes Sweden, Finland, Norway and to some extent Iceland. In this connection we have already established cooperation between Norway and Scotland on regional policy. This cooperation is now entering a new phase, with a more systematic subdivision of projects into those to be directly channelled into the bilateral cooperation, those to be included in the Northern Periphery Programme, and those to be dealt with in some other way.

Successful cooperation in the Arctic is also of great importance for our countries. In my opinion Arctic cooperation should not be limited to the eastern Arctic areas and the interests and problems of the indigenous peoples. There are other issues that affect the living conditions of many of the other inhabitants of our northern areas, with their harsh climate and scattered populations. Here I would like to mention some examples of activities under the auspices of the Council of Ministers that are directly relevant for this seminar.

In the agricultural sector a project is currently being planned to examine whether there is an interest in or need for cooperation between parts of the North Atlantic area that have historical and cultural links with the Nordic countries. This includes northern Scotland and the Islands, Ireland and the eastern Canadian provinces.

The Council of Ministers has also initiated a number of research programmes. For example, there is a programme on the West Nordic ocean climate, which aims to describe the major ocean currents in the North Atlantic, changes in these currents and the impact of these changes on plant and animal life in the area. This is a programme that should be of great interest to all the coastal states in the North Atlantic area.

Another area of the North Atlantic Cooperation with a good deal of potential is culture-based tourism.

Ladies and gentlemen,

We have a lot in common. Everyday politics in the Nordic countries and Scotland are concerned with more or less the same challenges: public sector reform, especially perhaps the health sector, education, crime, transport and communications, energy supplies, etc. Our climates are very similar. The ties between Ireland, Scotland and the Islands, and the Nordic countries used to be strong. Trade and cultural exchanges used to flourish between our countries.

Let us resume these ties! Let us reforge these links for the benefit of all our peoples!

Thank you for your attention.