The Regional Question, Subsidiarity and the Future of Europe

THE REGIONAL QUESTION, SUBSIDIARITY AND THE FUTURE OF EUROPE

John Loughlin[*]a Second Authorb

a First Author Affiliation, Street Address, City, Country, ,

b Second Author affiliation and address

Abstract

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1  The diversity of the regional question

The regional question, like the poor, is always with us and has been on the political agenda since the formation of the nation-state. This is simply because the nation-state, as a system of political organisation, involved the imposition of central control over territory and, in the process, aborbed entities – provinces, regions, cities, and even nations – within its territorial boundaries. Nation-state building involved both centralisation and peripheralisation, but, as Stein Rokkan has shown, the patterns of nation-state and centre-periphery relationships varied greatly across Europe. Without going into the details of Rokkan’s categorisations, we can retain the notion that European nation-states betray a great complexity in their origins and in the forms of organisations that they eventually adopted. The “regional question” is one element in this complex picture and can be seen as an aspect of peripheralisation.

First, there is a great deal of diversity in the territorial organisation of states. With regard to state forms, the classical distinction is between federal and unitary states. Theoretically, federal states give greater protection than unitary states to the position of regions. It is possible, however, to break down further these categories. Federal states may be centralised (Austria), decentralised (Belgium) and balanced (Germany) federal states. Unitary states may be centralised (Greece, Ireland, Portugal), decentralised (Scandinavian states and NL), and regionalised (Italy, Spain, France and, now, the UK) unitary states. This means that some federations (such as Austria) may diminish regional (Länder) autonomy than others (Belgium) where the federal state has almost become a mere residual state with many of its functions (including some European and international tasks) being taken over by the communities and regions. On the other hand, some the large unitary states (France, the UK, Italy and Spain) have strengthened the position of their regions albeit to differing extents while the smaller unitary states have been creating at least levels of regional administration.. The institutional picture is further complicated by the great diversity in the situation of local authorities and their relations with both regional and national levels of government. Patterns of local government organisation and intergovernmental relations vary between the north and south of Europe but also even within countries such as across the German Länder.

Second, the understanding of the regional question has varied in different historical periods. Since 1945, the question has been formulated in distinct ways:

a)  The period of les Trente Glorieuses (1945-1975), which saw the growth of the Welfare State in Europe when, under the impact of post-war reconstruction and the Marshall Plan, economies and states steadily expanded, has been interpreted as the final stage in the process of nation-state building which began around the time of the French Revolution. The key features of this period were centralisation in order to redistribute and growing bureaucratisation in order administer the burgeoning policy programmes. During this period, regions and subnational authorities were viewed within the context of participation in the processes of national solidarity and reducing the disparities between stronger and weaker territories. The policy instrument to bring about this convergence was regional policy whereby national governments would apply the same Keynesian and Beveridgian logic to territories as they did to weaker individuals and groups in social policy. We might call this assisted regionalism.

During this period, regional policy was essentially a competency of the nation-state, even in countries which were already members of the European Community. Although a European regional policy was implicit in the preamble to the Treaty of Rome, which speaks of “harmonious and balanced development” of the Community, it was not until until 1975 that the European Regional Development Fund was established. However, this was still little more than an attempt at coordinating national regional policies with a view to preventing market distortion across the member states of the community. A truly European policy did not emerge in fact until the mid-1980s and early 1990s when successive reforms revamped the ERDF and created the Structural Funds by the addition of social and agricultural funds. The reason for this tardiness is fairly clear: nation-states, during the period of their expansion during the Trente Glorieuses, did not feel in need of another layer of policy-making in this field.

This is not to say that there was no regional mobilisation from below. On the contrary, the 1970s and 1980s saw a signficant increase in such mobilisation. However, the context within which mobilisation occurred was still the national framework within which the regions were situated. Their demands were mainly on their national governments for even more assistance. A small but vociferous minority of regional activists in certain regions were more radical in their demands and sought the restructuring of these same states along federalist or regionalist lines and, occasionally, even sought secession from the state and used political violence to achieve this demand. Nevertheless, the nation-state remained the main frame of reference for these demands.

b)  The Welfare State model had been contested by various political tendencies on both the left and the right of the political spectrum. The “New Left” of the 1960s and early 1970s viewed the Welfare State as little more than a social democratic capitulation and rescue of the capitalist system. For this critique, as represented, for example, by the Frankfurt School of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, the Welfare State was a bureaucratic monstrosity which stifled the freedom and creativity of the individual and led to his alienation. However, it was the “New Right”, in philosophers such as Nozick, political scientists such as Niskanen and economists such as Von Hayek and Milton Friedman, which presented a more telling critique, a form of right-wing libertarianism, that is, which sought to reduce the role of the state as such. It was the New Right who were able to exploitate the crisis of the Keynesian and Beveridgian model of the state following the oil crisis of 1973 and the consequent economic difficulties which followed with the election to power of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Although Thatcher and Reagan did not dismantle the Welfare State their policy approaches did attempt to seriously reduce its significance and, at the very least, particularly in the UK, there was a slowing down of the increase in state expenditures on welfare policies. It is clear that Welfare States continued to exist and to provide welfare. However, what does seem to have changed is the basic underlying philosophy of the state in which the latter came to be conceived either as a hindrance to economic and individual development or, more recently, as less an interventionist state than as one which “enables” and “facilitates”. It “steers” rather than “rules”.

We might therefore speak of the post-Welfare State which has taken two forms. First, there have been attempts to apply a neo-liberal approach which favours the market over both the state and civil society. This approach has been particularly important in the US and the UK but has also influenced all other member states of the EU, the newly emerging democracies of the former Soviet Union and countries in Latin America. It is also influential in international organisatins such as OECD, the IMF and the World Bank. Second, there have been recent attempts to modify neo-liberalism through an attempt to reinject a societal element and to conceive the state in a more positive way. This approach is associated with Clinton’s reinventing government programme and has influenced Blair’s Third Way as well as attempts by Gerhard Shröder and Lionel Jospin to revise their forms of social democracy. In essence, this approach means that the neo-liberal emphasis on the market is retained but there is an attempt to modify it through a renewed emphasis on the social dimension. Thus, the state is seen as a facilitator which encourages “partnerships” between the public and private sectors, between different levels of government, and between business and civil society. It is interesting to note that, during this period of transition from the welfare to the post-welfare state, there was a renewed burst of European integration with the single market project and the revisions of the Treaties at Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice. This was accompanied by a reform of regional policy in the 1980s and a modest but, for regions, important increase in the funds available for regional development. It was also during this period that the Soviet Union collapsed and enlargement of the EU to the east became a real possibility. All of these developments began to feed into and reinforce each other.

During this period, (early 1980s – late 1990s) the regional question took on a particular character. First, under the impact of neo-liberal policy reforms, national regional policies were either seriously reduced or abolished outright (as in the UK). When this occurred at least some regions and local authorities found they had to reinvent themselves in a new situation of competitive regionalism, that is, they found their national governments where either unable or unwilling to help them with needed funds. On the other hand, “Brussels” was suddenly providing funds albeit modest ones. This combined with the diminishing of the centrality of national governments as policy actors to encourage at least some regional authorities to adopt strategies that were wider than their own nation-states. New models of regional development and notions such as subsidiarity and partnership were adopted by the EU itself in its reformed regional policies. Thus, the notion of collabortive regionalism developed alongside and co-existed with the competitive approach. There was during this period an important mobilisation of regions who formed various kinds of associations to try to influence the direction of events, and in particular the reforms of the EU, in their favour. It is true that the outcome, the Committee of the Regions, which was created by the Treaty on European Union, was something of a disappointment to the regions, particularly the German Länder who had been at the forefront of the movement. Nevertheless, even this modest step is an indicator that the regional question was on the agenda of European politics in a way that was new.

In each of our three periods, the EC/EU can be characterised in a particular way. During the early period, it was intergovernmentalist given the strength of the welfare state and the expanding economy. In the neo-liberal post-welfare period, it was marked by accelerated integration with a view to achieving the single market. In the subsequent post-welfare period, it was neo-federalist and constitutionalist. Figure 1 presents these features of the different periods. However, we should inject a note of caution by pointing out that the division between one period and the other is not always clear cut and that we are speaking of dominant tendencies in each period. These usually co-exist with the other approaches but these remain subordinate. For example, welfare and post-welfare approaches to policy co-exist but the configuration in which they co-exist changes. In the EU, intergovernmentalism co-exists with supranationalism and neo-federalism. Competitive regionalism co-exists with collaborative regionalism. It is this complexity of sometimes complementary, sometimes competing tendencies that we term governance.

Figure 1: Periodisation of Regionalism in Western Europe (1945-present)

1.1  Example of a subsection heading

1.1.1 Example of a subsubsection heading

The foregoing paragraphs have described the mobilisation of regions against the background of the evolution of the nation-state and the European Union. All three processes are clearly closely interlinked. The loosening of the rigidities of the traditional nation-state in the 1980s opened up opportunities for regions and local authorities to mobilise on a wider scale than hitherto. However, the setting up of the Committee of the Regions in 1994 seems to have somewhat deflated this mobilisation and led to a certain demobilisation as is evident by the fact that the regional question was largely absent at Amsterdam and Nice. Furthermore, in Joschka Fischer’s speech advocating a federal Europe given at Humboldt University, reference was made only to relations between the Member States and the EU institutions and not to the regions. The responses to this speech, as in the document drawn up by lawyers and political scientists at the European University Institute also ignored the regions. To some extent, this marginalisation of regions is a result of the renewed vigour of the nation-state whereby national governments have attempted to reassert their central position in the EU in the face of advances made by the Commission and the European Parliament. This tussle has largely excluded representatives of the regions, including the powerful German Länder.

On the other hand, this does not mean that the regional question has gone away. On the contrary, it is still very much present there is at present a new mobilisation but one which is rather different from the wide mobilisation of the 1980s and 1990s. In essence, the division between “strong” and “weak” regions, always present in the regional movement, has come to the fore once again with the formation of groups such as the Constitutional Regions and RegLeg, which represent regions with legislative powers.
a) Background

·  The Convention has been mainly an affair of the EU institutions and the Member States.