The French Regions and the European Union: Policy Change and Institutional Stability

Abstract

The French state, like other European nation-states, has been confronted for some years by the dual pressure of European integration and the growing desire for autonomy on the part of sub-national political levels. On the economic front, the growing internationalization of the economy calls into question voluntarist policies of territorial planning, while the promise of a post-Fordist model of production based on the flexible specialization of local units of production suggests the necessity of reinforcing intermediate levels of government (Amin 1994). On the political level, ‘globalization’ has tended to accelerate European integration and, with it, the emergence of multi-level governance (Hooghe and Marks 2001; Le Galès and Lequesne 1997; Keating 1998). Since the mid-1980s, European regional policy has been identified as a key variable in the reorganization of public action at the territorial level within the European Union (EU). More generally, the process of ‘Europeanization’, i.e. the ‘processes of a) construction, b) diffusion and c) institutionalization of norms, beliefs, formal and informal rules, procedures, policy paradigms, styles, “ways of doing things” that are first defined and consolidated in the EU policy process and then incorporated in the logic of domestic (national and sub-national) discourse, political structures, and public policies’ (Radaelli 2003), has been analyzed as a new political opportunity structure, providing political and economic resources for regional actors to strengthen their positions vis à vis central administrations (Börzel 2002; Bukowski et al. 2003; Pasquier 2004a).