Regional governance in the EU or: what happened to the ‘Europe of the regions’?

Abstract

The European Union (EU) is perceived to be a ‘multilevel’ system. If ‘multi’ is to be more than two, logically, we have to consider not only the supranational EU and the national member state level in our analysis of EU governance, but also a third level, i.e. the subnational or regional level (Keating 2017a). We can, indeed, observe an increasing interest in the role of regions and the dynamics of territorial politics in Europe since the 1980s. The ‘rise of regional Europe’ (Harvie 1993) potentially leading to a development towards a ‘Europe of the regions’ (Borrás-Alomar et al. 1994; see also Hrbek and Weyand 1984) was an idea widely praised until the mid1990s. It was as much a ‘vision’ as an ‘incitement’ (Piattoni 2016: 68). This development has its roots in economic, political and cultural developments of the 1960s (see Piattoni in this volume); varying intensity and outcomes have actually led to ‘regionalisation in different shades’. Firstly, we can observe striking territorial dynamics leading to increasing regionalisation as decentralisation in many European countries (see, for many, Keating 2009; Hendriks et al. 2010; Scully and Wyn Jones 2010). This goes along with changes in the democratic fabric of states (Loughlin et al. 2010). This development is most interesting for comparative research on federations and federalism, but also has an impact on EU studies. Secondly, in 1966 Ipsen famously considered European integration to be ‘landesblind’ or ‘federal blind’ (quoted in Finck 2017: 5); this blindness has at least changed or diminished with stronger recognition of regions in the EU ‘constitutional’ order since the Maastricht Treaty. Thus, today the EU is rather ‘myopic’ (Tatham 2014: 42) than totally blind. Regions became aware of the changing opportunity structure restricted and simultaneously provided by the multilevel nature of European integration. For many this was connected to the chance to circumvent the nation state. A result of this activism was, for example, the establishment of the European Committee of the Regions (CoR) in 1994 (Piattoni and Schönlau 2015) or