Transition, Enlargement and Regionalization: a Comparison of Hungary and Poland

Abstract

During the initial post-communist transition years in most CEECs the issue of local government reform was high on the political agenda as a central theme of democratic state-building. As discussed in Chapter 2 most countries introduced democratizing and decentralizing changes to the structure of local government (see Table 2.1). In formulating these reforms domestic policy-makers looked to their historical legacies of pre-communist experiences, to the transferability of systems of local government in Western Europe and beyond, as well as to the ‘model(s)’ promoted by the Commission and its actors. The framing of regional reform had normative and functional dimensions. As discussed in Chapter 2 some of the CEECs were formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and thus had experience of a system of self-government and autonomy dating from the mid-nineteenth century and enduring in some cases until the 1930s. The functional legacy of communist-era planning regions provided a geographic template for the NUTS regionalization. The policy issue of whether to opt for political or statistical regionalization was also subject to an important territorial and functional constraint in that the former was most obviously relevant to big countries rather than to smaller countries such as Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.