Leader, Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe

It is an enormous pleasure to be able to welcome you to this ALDE - CALD Parliamentary Conference. Let me welcome you formally not just to the ALDE group, but to the European Parliament itself.

The British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once said that understanding the East is a career in itself. And I have no doubt that our politics are sometimes fairly strange to you. For all of the ways in which the modern world has made our lives the same, politics remains, much as it always has been, a local practice.

However similar the challanges we face - and my expectation is that we will come away from these two days of talks with a strengthened sense that as Liberals and Democrats we face the same challenges and we share the same ambitions - but however similar those challenges are, we remain the representatives of local people and local priorities and local politics. We need to bridge that space in whatever ways we can.

In an era of unprecedented globalisation, we often struggle to globalise the voice of the people we represent. Too often, in a world where the voices of government or finance can be heard in seconds and around the world, the voices of the men and women who elect us remain local, much as people have always been. But local or not, the reality of globalisation is that we are all neighbours now. And strangers make bad neighbours. If we cannot find a way to bridge the local and the global, our politics will not be ready for a century of global challenges.

This Parliament is an unique attempt to bring the local and the global together. It represents 450 million Europeans and it is the only directly elected international Parliament in the world. In the EU the nation state is far from dead, but it is forced to share the stage with a practical and powerful prototype of international democracy. It can and should be a model for liberals everywhere.

That is why forums like this matter. Bringing Parliamentarians together - be it in the WTO Parliamentary forum or the Asia Europe Parliamentary Forum or any one of the growing number of interparliamentary assemblies - bringing Parliamentarians together is an important way of creating an alternative political network to that offered by national diplomacy. That we can speak openly with each other, even to the discomfort of our nation states, is a vital part of a healthy international civil society.

This week will also help us stregthen our network as Liberals and Democrats. We are a growing international family, and need to build the links that will sustain that growth. For ALDE, this is also a chance to deepen our strong engagement with Asia and Asian Liberal Democracy.

In general, Europeans live in a very Atlantic world. The palpable hope that existed in Europe for a Kerry Presidency only underlines the extent to which Europeans still look to the United States as a cousin civilisation - if one we sometimes do not completely understand. Yet globally this century will belong to Asia.

Given the extraordinary changes in the Asia-Pacific region it is important for Europeans to build stronger links with your region and to understand better the changes that are transforming it. Until Europeans know as much of the geopolitics of the South China Sea as they do of their own Atlantic, they will be seeing the world with one eye closed. Unless they grasp what is at stake on the Korean Peninsula or across the Taiwan Strait they will fail to understand the mood of this new Asian century.

Europe must continue to strive for a broad policy of engagement in the Asia-Pacific region. It has aspired to be a leading provider of development assistance and a friend in East Timor, Cambodia, and on the Korean Peninsula. Increasingly it seeks to build similar mutual links with the region's new and maturing democracies. The European Commission has worked to build a deeper trading and investing relationship between the EU and the Asia Pacific Region. New EU delegations in the region will be established in Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia, Laos and Nepal.

The European Parliament plays its own role in the development of these policies and works hard to ensure they are shaped by our voices as elected representatives. The European Parliament's Foreign Affair's Committee has consistently insisted that Europe's relationship with the Asia-Pacific Region be founded not on the potential commercial value of these connections but on a deep and durable mutual respect for human rights and democracy. In the last Parliament ALDE Rapporteur Jules Maaten produced an influential blueprint for a new European engagement with Asia based on shared political values and mutual respect for human rights. Our group continues to be deeply involved with EU-Asia relations. Your job over these two days is to show us how we could be better engaged, or how we could do more.

Nowhere is this more important than in the Peoples Republic of China. Simply by virtue of its size, China remains key to Asia's future. The Canadian Premier Pierre Trudeau once said that living next to America is like sharing a bed with an elephant. Even its smallest movements were likely to keep you awake at night. Well, China is your elephant. From Europe the scale of this change is sometimes poorly understood, but in Asia it must both impress and unnerve you. We need to hear your perspectives and strategies.

You are also fighting your own war against terrorism; in Indonesia and the Phillipines, in Thailand and elsewhere. Like Europe you are working to find a peacful road to religious and ideological diversity. In a region where Buddhist lives alongside Christian and Muslim and atheist you will have your own experience with the Liberal mission to teach and to demand tolerance.

One of the intentions of this meeting is to allow us to have parallel discussions on the challenges that Liberals and Democrats face in Asia and Europe. My expectation is that we will leave this meeting with a sense of common challenges and common goals.

Liberals and Democrats in Asia and Europe are united by their shared belief in democracy and the rule of law; human rights and tolerance of diversity. Asia and Europe are both societies of astounding diversity, jostled by political change.

Three months ago I had the privilege of addressing the Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats in Penang. At the time, I spoke about applied liberalism. I argued that if the nineteenth century had marked liberalism's move from political philosophy to political practice, then the twenty first century should mark liberalism's coming of age as an international political movement.

One of the lessons we learn from working alongside liberal democrat colleagues in Europe and meeting liberal colleagues throughout Asia and North America is that liberalism is a formula, not a blueprint. Liberals are always trying to balance freedom and fairness to achieve the greatest measure of freedom and opportunity for each individual, and this can mean different things in different places. That is the challenge of applied liberalism.

Colleagues, testing our liberal principles in the world of practical politics shows us that there are many ways to a liberal society: as many as there are free people in charge of their own political futures.

What I know we will be reminded of this afternoon is that there are many common threads to our beliefs that run through our work. The first is a consistent and unwavering defence of the irreducible liberty of the individual in the face of power of all kinds. Liberals have always believed that power is dangerous, and must be contained by rules and systems of shared values. Liberals designed and built the United Nations and European Union to do just that.

The second thread is the need to see people and the political challenges that bring us together, rather than the states that keep us apart. I could name global warming, international terrorism and the global gap between the rich and the poor, but there are many others.

The best work we can do this week is to get to know each other better, and learn a little more about the people we each represent. In a time of unprecedented international uncertainty, a better understanding of each other - a better awareness of our common goals - is perhaps the greatest guarantee of our security. That is the real purpose of our work today and tomorrow: to close the gap between us and recognise the challenges that unite us not as Asians and Europeans but as fellow citizens of a small planet.