Читать книгу My Secret Brexit Diary - Michel Barnier - Страница 33

Our little team, professional as ever, arrives in Slovenia in good spirits. Leaving Ljubljana airport I have a strange impression of déjà vu: the nearby mountains and the neatly arranged houses along the roads in these villages remind me of Savoie.

Prime Minister Miro Cerar assures us that his country has no specific concerns about Brexit, and expresses his confidence in us: ‘We’ll be with you!’

Before meeting the Prime Minister, we share a meal with State Secretary for Foreign Affairs Sanja Štiglic, who welcomes us into a cottage on the edge of a large lake. It is cold and sunny. A wood fire crackles in the fireplace. It’s a moment of great warmth, and I pick up the thread of a longstanding relationship with this country, the first to emerge from the former Yugoslavia.

It was back in 1993, when I was the newly appointed Minister of the Environment in Édouard Balladur’s government, that I was charged with re-establishing dialogue and trust in the Upper Bearn region, which was in revolt against the state and its authoritarian creation of ‘bear reserves’. Apart from a few ecologists with support back in Paris, and the militant ecologist Éric Petetin, all the elected Pyrenean representatives, hunters and shepherds were at the time united in their resistance against the capital. Through visits, listening and dialogue, we managed to restore calm, and the Upper Bearn Heritage Institution was created.

Hunters and shepherds, reassured of their importance and now listened to and respected, accepted the reintroduction of a few bears, re-establishing a chain of biodiversity in the French Pyrenees that was about to become extinct. And that is how the bears of Slovenia – whose habitat is most similar to those of the Pyrenees – entered the EU in 1994, ten years before the rest of their country.