Tina Sommer ESBA President

It is a great honour to introduce you to our new webpages as President of ESBA for the first time. I have been a member of the Board since 2002 and held the position of Honorary Secretary for the last two years. During these years I have learned that the activities of a pan-European voluntary membership organisation are extremely important.

Visiting Brussels, you realise that the Capital of Europe has a high concentration of interest groups. Not only do we have business organisations here on national and pan-European levels, but also associations for small and big business as well as industry related groupings. That is just the business side: on the whole, there are about 350 pan-European organisations officially registered, as well as 4,000 lobbyists. An estimated 10,000 people try to make their voices heard at any given time.

In other words, there is massive competition and the representatives of the Institutions in Brussels - MEPs, Commission and Council officials - are already overwhelmed. For this reason they are interested in speaking to pan-European organisations to get a view from several different countries in one hit. This is why most national organisations are also members of pan-European organisations.

But why ESBA and not any other pan-European organisation? Because, unlike other European small business organisations, ESBA has a clear and unequivocal founding principle : voluntary membership based on common interest and member activities from all industries.

This principle does not apply to all pan-European business organisations. Because statutory membership has been prevalent in France, Austria, Germany and other EU Member States, many pan-European organisations are dominated by statutory membership organisations.

ESBA is against the principle of statutory membership, which we regard as a 'license to trade'. We value the participation of the selfemployed and entrepreneurs in activities shaping our advocacy goals. Compulsory membership however, is not conducive to enthusiastic activism by the Members and is therefore limited to representation by hired staff.

Therefore, to conclude, ESBA's objectives are twofold:

• First, to represent the interests of small businesses and the self-employed in the context of all European Union policies and initiatives with direct or indirect impact on our business environment.

• But secondly, and this is important, to ensure that our model of business representations will prevail in the future. This model was developed so well in the UK Federation of Small Businesses, and is now increasingly adopted across other EU nations. That's the reason why we are creating activities to exchange best practice between national member organisations built on the same principles and sharing the same philosophy.