DECLARE:

• After twenty years of democracy there is still no solution to the articulation of the Spanish State as a multi-national state.

• In this period we have suffered a lack of juridical-political recognition and even the social and cultural acceptance of our respective national realities within the State.

• This recognition, apart from being just and democratic, is absolutely necessary within a Europe in the process of an economic and political articulation and which, furthermore, points towards a redistribution of political power amongst the different instances and levels, in the medium term. A Europe the Union of which must be based on respect and vertebrating the different peoples and cultures included within it.

• This is also so in a world which is more and more inter-dependent and where the threat of uniformity exists.

Due to this we believe that a new stage has to be opened in which the State and Europe should produce the recognition of our national realities, obtaining sufficient political power to be able to offer our own responses to the challenges of the 21st century.

AND WE HAVE AGREED:

• To call upon Spanish society to share and enter into a dialogue concerning a new political culture in agreement with this understanding of the State and to promote a collective consciousness reinforcing the idea of its multi-nationality.

• Offer to Europe and the rest of the world our proposals in defence of diversity. To lead the policy of the identities and the positive and creative cohabitation.

• To organize in a systematic manner the exchange of information, opinions and collaboration between the persons and sectors of the citizens active in the intellectual, educational, cultural, professional and business areas in order promote a dialogue about our proposals and to disseminate them.

• To set up a work schedule within our respective organizations concerning: language and culture; taxation and public finance; symbols and institutions, our presence within the European Union and any other questions which we might agree upon.

To achieve all this we shall set up a stable and permanent relationship between our three political forces: an open structure enabling us to carry out the co-ordinated actions required by the stated and agreed objectives.

Finally, we promise to keep on working and developing the matters which we have started to deal with in this first three-party meeting, in the meetings to be held in Bilbao in September of this year and in Santiago in October.


Barcelona, 16th July 1998.