REGIONALISATION AND ITS EFFECTS ON LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT Report by the Steering Committee on Local and Regional Authorities (CDLR) prepared with the collaboration of Professor Gérard Marcou Local and regional authorities in Europe, No. 64 Council of Europe Publishing 3 CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................................. 5 I. REGIONALISATION AND REGIONS............................................................................... 9 1. Definitions................................................................................................................................ 9 2. Classification of forms of regionalisation............................................................................... 11 A. Regionalising without creating a regional level.......................................................... 11 B. Regional decentralisation............................................................................................ 17 C. Political regionalisation (institutional regionalism)..................................................... 18 D. Federal states and regionalisation............................................................................... 20 3. The context of regionalisation................................................................................................. 22 A. The aims of regionalisation......................................................................................... 22 B. Obstacles to regionalisation........................................................................................ 25 II. THE CONSEQUENCES OF REGIONALISATION ........................................................ 28 1. Relations between the state and the regions and interregional relations ............................................................................................................. 28 A. Co-ordination and co-operation.................................................................................. 28 B. Regional finances, solidarity and equalisation............................................................ 34 2. Local self-government and the regions ................................................................................... 37 A. Infraregional local authorities and regionalisation in the unitary state .............................................................................. 37 B. Infraregional authorities and political regionalisation............................................................................................................ 39 C. Local authorities in the federal state ........................................................................... 42 CONCLUSIONS OF THE CDLR................................................................................................... 44 APPENDIX: National reports on regionalisation and its effects on local self-government ............................................................................................ 53 5 INTRODUCTION This report deals with the importance of regionalisation in the political and administrative organisation of European states, particularly from the angle of its relations with local self-government. The popularity of the theme of regionalisation and the concept of the region contrasts with the elusiveness of a satisfactory definition of regionalisation and the region. The traditional concept of the region originates in human geography: it refers to an area defined by a number of physical, climatic and human features showing some degree of temporal stability. As a political or administrative unit, on the other hand, it is a relatively recent concept, if one considers that the 19th century regionalist movements were backward-looking and had no immediate successors. Italy was long the only country whose constitution provided for the institution of regions (although the "ordinary-status" regions were only introduced in 1970), while in France the region was merely a geographical area delimited for the purposes of implementing the government's regional development policy. Most European states were unitary, with local authorities which had some degree of autonomy within the limits established by law. The few federal states (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) were exceptions 1. Nowadays, the regionalisation theme has become so familiar that sometimes the peculiarity and ambiguity of the regional institution are overlooked. It is completely absent from the legal systems and institutions of many countries, and other states implement such widely diverging conceptions that it would seem virtually impossible to squeeze them all into one category. Lastly, there is the question of the relationship between regions and federalism: can federate states be equated with regions? It was apparently the reforms attempted or implemented in the 1970s which shifted regionalisation to the centre of political debate2 by casting it as a manifestation of the "crisis" in the nation-state inherited from the 19th century, of which France was the archetype. This decade saw the implementation of regionalisation in Italy (1970), the emergence in the United Kingdom of the plan for devolved regional assemblies in Scotland and Wales, which was finally rejected in the 1979 referendum, the beginning of Belgian regionalisation with the constitutional reforms of 1970 and 1980, which introduced the language communities and two regions, the French regionalisation process of 1972, which had supplanted a more ambitious project rejected in the April 1969 referendum, and the establishment of the Autonomous Communities in Spain under the 1978 Constitution. The accumulation of these reforms, against very different political and institutional backgrounds, alerted the public more to the apparent massive spread of the regional phenomenon than to the differences among the reforms. As a result of this development and in view of the already existing federal states, the traditional unitary state seemed henceforth to be the exception, and progress in European construction seemed to confirm their obsolescence. 1 The eastern European federal states (USSR, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia from 1969 onwards) are deliberately left aside, as they no longer exist and should be discussed in a different context. 2 See the introduction by Yves Meny (pp. 5-21) to: Meny, Y. (ed.) (1982) Dix ans de régionalisation en Europe. Bilan et perspectives 1970-1980, Cujas, Paris. 6 Yet none of these reforms could be seen as part of the process of European construction. In addition to the fact that the European treaties disregarded sub-national entities, whatever their legal status, all the attempts at "regionalisation" were responses to problems and situations peculiar to each of the countries in question1: the language problem in Belgium, the response to the electoral successes of the Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties in the United Kingdom, the attempt to break the deadlock in the Italian political system at cental level as an indirect consequence of the crisis in the late 1960s, and the response to the need for decentralisation in France. However, the process of European integration soon began to play a major role in revitalising the region concept. With the introduction of the European regional policy in 1975, Community construction could be directly implemented at the local and regional levels, and the rapid growth of structural funds stimulated local and regional authority interest in Europe. The Commission divided up the territory into statistical areas in order to assess regional economic situations (the NUTS I, II and III nomenclatures). Since Community policy in this area was aimed at remedying or preventing regional imbalance and therefore helping economically handicapped regions, it allowed the regions (and in fact any authority capable of representing the areas in question) to promote regional interests. Community regional policy triggered the setting up of all the current associations of regions, aimed at lobbying the Brussels Commission. From 1980 onwards the Community's budgetary crisis led to a decrease in the relative size of the Common Agricultural Policy within the EEC budget, while the accession of Spain, Portugal and Greece caused an increase in the overall budget earmarked for regional policy, and eventually led to its confirmation in the Treaty on the occasion of the 1987 Single European Act. However, the successive reforms of regional policy and the structural funds in 1979, 1985 and 1988 not only resulted in an increase in their budgets2, but they also considerably increased the Commission's assessing and decision-making powers as compared with the national governments3. This development stimulated competition not only between states but also between regions or groups of regions for the apportionment of regional policy resources. The regions, or the authorities in charge of regional interests, established offices in Brussels; increasing numbers of associations of regions were set up (peripheral maritime regions, traditional industrial regions, central Alpine regions, western Alps regions, wine-growing regions, national capital regions, etc.); this culminated in a demand for participation in the institutions, to which the Maastricht Treaty responded by setting up the Committee of the Regions. 1 See Portelli, H. (1993) "Aux origines de la décentralisation dans les Etats européens: l'absence de prospective européenne" (The origins of decentralisation in