Regions and European Governance

Abstract

This chapter deals with the potential congruence between the processes of European integration and those of regionalisation. This is not really a new question: from the end of the 1980s European public policy, particularly cohesion policy, has been identified as a key factor in the reconfiguration of territories and public policy in western Europe. European integration is analysed as a political opportunity structure and as a process for creating new resources likely to strengthen the position of regional actors in their confrontations with the political and administrative apparatus of the long-established nation-states. However, analyses of the types of changes occurring have evolved: in the 1990s, for example, a striking number of scholars concluded that the European variable played a key role in the construction of multi-level governance (Marks 1996) and/or in the emergence of a neo-regionalism in western Europe (Keating 1998). More recently, work has been published focusing on the impact of Europeanisation on domestic political systems (Brzel 2002; Bourne 2003; Gualini 2004) which describe a more complex reality in which changes of scale, when they happen, are more to be found in regional society, in the transformation of relations between the centre and the periphery, or in the dynamics of economic globalisation than in a European ‘big bang’ (Bukowski et al. 2003; Pasquier 2004).