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Mister President, Prime Ministers, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen
Opening the Davos Symposium is becoming every year an ever more difficult task,
in the sense that every year the Symposium is welcoming more personalities from the around the globe
But the Symposium of 1983 exceeds everything we have seen until now.
We are meeting at a critical time for Europe and the world.
I had warned last year at this same stage about certain optimistic predictions.
I don't think I was wrong at that time:
the year 1982 was not a good one.
Let me state a few facts.
Despite all the nice GATT treaties, conventions and international agreements
we detect strong tendency to bilateral agreements and point of views.
These agreements, Ladies and Gentlemen, are not only made between states or countries
but they are made between subsidiairy and headquarters and vice versa.
The burgeoning Green movement in Germany, the Third World, Peace and Women's movements,
as well as the alternative groupings around Bremen and Hamburg.
but not only in the Federal Republic of Germany but also in Europe, the United States, Canada and also Japan
have started to change, not only theoretical but practival change.
Change with the fact that parallel to the dominant economic and production methods
there are alternative Self-help networks such as autonomous youth centres, independent women shelters
and alternative prodzuction and conversion methods in some comapnies.
We stand for, and this is very important, for peaceful protest
against the uncontrolled exploitation of the natural and social environment by a live-threating industrial complex
an industrial complex which has taken on a life of its own against the needs of the people
and we are for a decentralisation and critical control and limitation of technological progress.
As Albert Schweitzer once rightly said: 'Who allowed to allow?'