A INTRODUCTION

The European Charter of Local Self-Government was opened for signature on 15 October 1985 but the process which led to that launch had begun much earlier. The Charter is a product of a dynamic within which, in the aftermath of World War II, European elites committed themselves to a rejection of all that had caused such chaos, destruction and loss of life in the previous decades and to the adoption of a new way forward. It was a period of commitment (or of recommitment) to democracy and human rights. The Charter was a child of those times.

But the Charter was not written on a clean slate. Its origins drew on the historical fact of the existence of systems of local government, as evidenced by all the municipalities and other forms of local authority, across Europe – a phenomenon recognised in the preamble to the Charter itself which recites that ‘local authorities are one of the main foundations of any democratic regime’ and that ‘the right of citizens to participate in the conduct of public affairs is one of the democratic principles that are shared by all member states of the Council of Europe’. Such local government had not, of course, in its origins been democratic but, by the twentieth century, a democratic basis had been broadly established, even if democracy might, in its liberal form, have been periodically eclipsed – notably in Western Europe prior to and during World War II, and in Central and Eastern Europe thereafter. In many countries, the phenomenon of local self-government achieved constitutional or special legal recognition but elsewhere, and even in a country such as the United Kingdom, it was accorded a legitimacy that attracted a normative status. Local self-government not only exists but ought to continue to exist. There might be no ultimate constitutional protection for local self-government and certainly not for any particular form of local self-government – in the United Kingdom it was (and is) comfortably within the formal competence of the sovereign Parliament to reorganise and even to abolish local government – but it was recognised nevertheless that local self-government had a strong claim to survive.