A INTRODUCTION

In October 2010, the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of Europe celebrated the twenty-fifth birthday of its child, the European Charter of Local Self-Government. And, in September 2013, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Charter's coming into force was similarly noted. These celebrations were rather muted in comparison with the bolder ceremonies at the Lisbon Conference held to mark the twentieth anniversary in 2005 but that restraint might be largely explained by the impact of the global financial crisis.

The purpose of this chapter and Chapter 7 is to offer not a further celebration of the Charter but, more soberly, a more objective assessment of the significance of its contribution. In this chapter, the focus remains close to the declared purposes of the Charter and addresses the question of how the Charter has contributed to local autonomy in the Council of Europe member countries while, in Chapter 7, the emphasis will be on the Charter's own qualities as an extraordinary treaty in international law and the ways in which it has contributed to the making of other international agreements. These include the events that led to the formulation in 2009, not of a Charter of Regional Self-Government, though there was once an ambition to achieve such a Charter, but of the Council of Europe's Reference Framework on Regional Democracy and the aspiration for a World Charter of Local Self- Government. That chapter concludes with an assessment of the Charter's input to relationships between the institutions of the Council of Europe.

Looking first, in this chapter, to the Charter's impact on local selfgovernment in the Council of Europe's member states, it may be useful to divide these into two broad groups – with the United Kingdom considered separately at the end. In the first category may be placed the pre-1985 members of the Council of Europe minus Cyprus, Malta, and Turkey. These are the twenty states of western Europe which were members by 1985 and participated (or had the opportunity to participate) in the negotiation of the Charter's text.