THE ＧＬＯＢＡＬＩＺＡＴＩＯＮ ＆ ＧＯVＥＲＮＡＮＣＥ ＰＲＯＪＥCＴ， ＨＯＫＫＡＩＤＯ ＵＮＩＶＥＲＳＩＴＹＷＯＲＫＩＮＧ ＰＡＰＥＲ ＳＥＲＩＥＳ

Ｄｅｃｅｎｔｒａｌｉｓｔ Ｔｒｅｎｄｓ
ｉｎ Ｅｕｒｏｐeａｎ Ｄｅｍｏｃｒａｃｉｅｓ
Ⅳ−１１

Ｍｉｃhael Keating, European University Institute＊＊

Paper for the Workshop Local Governance in a Global Era –In Search ofConcrete Visions for a Multi-Level Governance, 7-8 December 2001
None of these papers should be cited without the author’s permission.

Decentralist Trends in European Democracies

Michael Keating
European University InstituteDepartment of Social and Political Sciences
European University Institute
Badia Fiesolana
50016 S. Domenico di Fiesole
Italy+39 055 4685 250
keating@iue.it
Conference on Governance and Globalisation, Advanced Institute for Law and Politics,
Hokkaido, Japan, 7-8 December 20011

Territorial Government and the European State
Western European democracies have a wide variety of systems of territorial government andit is not easy to classify them into tidy categories (Page, 1990). We can, however, identify
some ideal types, to which actual examples can be compared, and then examine common
trends affecting them over the years. First, there is the Napoleonic type, diffused from France
in the nineteenth century and closely tied to the needs of nation and state-building. This is a
unitary and centralizing model, with only one source of legitimate authority, the unitarynation. There are two levels of decentralization, the commune which is the basic unit of local
democracy and the department or province, which is less politicallly salient and also serves
as a basis for organizing the delivery of central services. In recent years, a regional level has
usually been added (see below). Centralization is assured through direct state provision of
key services like education and policing, and by the appointment of state officials (prefects)
to supervise the role of local government and coordinate government services on the ground.
In practice the aims of centralization and uniformity are invariably balanced new forms of
local power as local political elites, deprived of much functional autonomy locally, seek topenetrate the state apparatus and exert influence through it (Grémion, 1976). The territorial
bureaucracy, intended to control the localities, must make accommodations with local
influentials, while these in turn often accumulate office at both central and local levels,
allowing them to bypass the former. So centralization, historically aimed at reducing thepower of traditional local influentials, serves also to generate a new class of notables(notabili in Italy, caciques in Spain) whose power is a based precisely on their ability to link
local and state networks and distribute patronage.
The Germanic system is based on organic federalism, with power shared between the centre
and the federated units within a unified system of action. So the main feature of German
federalism is not the separation of competences between the Bund and the Länder but thesharing of functional fields, with the federal level making general laws and the Länder
carrying them out. Further integration is provided by the Bundesrat, the second chamber ofthe federal parliament, which represents the governments of the Länder and has wide powers
over legislation and finance. The system has been characterized as one of cooperative
federalism or Politkverflechtung in which the layers of government and interlinked withinpolicy fields. Each Land in turn determines its own system of local government
In the Scandinavian model, local government has broad functional competences over urban
planning, land use and welfare state matters and is responsible for raising a substantial part of
the tax burden. Local politics is an important part of public life and localities have a highdegree of functional autonomy. Yet this is contained within a broad national welfare
consensus so that there are not wide differences in service provision or policy.
Finally, the British model traditionally gives an important place to local self-government
based on the towns and counties. A range of welfare services (but excluding health and cashtransfers) are administered locally and local governments have a wide degree of autonomy
within broad national standards. In the course of the twentieth century, the traditional
notables were gradually displaced by the national political parties, firstly in the cities andthen in the counties, although the local and national elites have remained rather separate. In
Scotland and Wales there were separate ministries of the central government responsible for2

services that in England were provided by functional departments and in Scotland there has
always been a separate system of law and of local government. Since 1999 thesearrangements have been replaced by an elected Scottish Parliament and Executive and anelected National Assembly for Wales. Northern Irleland is different again. In the last thirty
years British terrritorial government has gone through a radical series of changes, with adrastic reduction of the autonomy, powers and financial discretion of local government.
Although I have illustrated these types with some examples, they are still best seen as ideal
types, and there is a tendency for one system to borrow from others. So the British system of
local self-government has been widely admired and imitated, even while it has been
disappearing in Great Britain. The German experience has influenced the Spanish system ofregions (autonomous communities) and both have influenced devolution in Scotland andWales. The Napoleonic system has not only influenced countries such as Spain, Italy, Greeceand Poland, but recent reforms in France have been taken up elsewhere.
Modernization and Territorial Government
Since the 1960s, all the countries of Europe have sought to reform their systems of territorial
government in the interests of ‘modernization’, a concept that covers a multitude of issues
and has been interpreted rather differently in different places. There are four principal
considerations. The first is that of efficiency which, in the 1960s and 1970s, in imitation ofprivate business and received management wisdom, was seen to require consolidation intolarger units able to exploit economies of scale in service provision. This received wisdom has
in turn come under challenge since the 1980s with the emphasis on flexibility, differentiationand competition in the ‘new public management’. The second consideration is the need forplanning, infrastructure provision and the promotion of economic development. Modern
planning was seen to require larger units corresponding to functional criteria such as
employment basins or economic regions and including cities and their hinterlands. Economic
development was seen to require a greater strategic capacity on the part of decision makers
and less emphasis on details of service delivery. Closely linked to this and sometimes
explicity articulated, was a desire to displace traditional local political elites, tied to thepolitics of distribution and often of clientelism, with new elites committed to an agenda ofdevelopment and growth. In France, rising new elites were described as the forces vives,
while in Britain commentators and official reports lamented the exit of business people fromlocal politics in the twentieth century and sought to bring them back in.
Third was the issue of democratization and citizen participation. Local democracy was said
to be in decline, because of falling electoral participation (notably in Britain), elite
domination and the long incumbency of local leaders. There was also a stress on the need for
citizen particpation outside of the electoral cycle, in planning exercises and in service
provision. A fourth consideration was the need to relieve central government of the politicaland administrative burden of centralization. French centralization had been described as long
ago as the nineteenth century as a situation of apoplexy and the centre and paralysis at the
periphery. Modernizing officials in central government began to realize that detailed control
could be counter-productive, merely bringing local micro-politics into the ministries,
encouraging local notables to seek exceptions and allowing them to blame the centre for all3

failures. Decentralization therefore might be a way of enhancing goal achievement as well as
forcing local notables to take responsibility for their own decisions.
The problem is that these four goals were not always explicitly stated and were not always
consistent with each other. The managerialist emphasis on efficiency was in constant tension
with the commitment to democratizaton and local participation. Governments might insist
that they wanted citizen participation on the broad issues of policy, rather than on theminutiae of administration, which could be left to officials. Local government, however, ismainly about service delivery and this is the focus of citizens’ concerns so that is was alwaysnaïve, if not disingenuous to imagine that ‘policy’ and ‘administration’ could so easily beseparated. There was equally a tension between modernization in an effort to get local
government to fulfill national goals, and decentralization to allow localities to make theirown choices. The distinction was merely hidden by assurances that the goal was ‘strong’
local government, since this could mean either local government that was functionally strong
enough to fufill its responsibilities or local government that was strong enough to stand up to
the centre. 1
Consolidation vs. fragmentation
In the 1960s and 1970s these considerations led western European countries, with the notable
exception of France, to consolidate their local government systems, drastically reducing thenumber of units as illustrated in Table 1.
Table 1 reduction in number of municipal governments in some European states
1945
2001
Great Britain
1, 730440
Sweden2, 500284
Denmark
1, 300275
Western Germany
24, 282
8, 504Italy
8. 100Spain
9, 2678, 083
France38, 000
36, 000

The result is a varied picture, with France still retaining a large number of mostly verysmall communes, while Scotland has the largest average population of all the countries
in the OECD.

1This struck me when I worked as a parliamentary assistant in the reform of local government in
Scotland in 1973 (Keating, 1975). Later a senior Scottish Office official who had worked on the reformconfessed that they had wanted ‘local governments strong enough to do what we told them to’ (Ross,
1980).

4

Table 2 Average population size of smallest unit of local government, 2001
Country
FranceSwitzerland
Austria
Spain
CanadaUSA
Italy
Germany
NorwayFinland
Belgium
Netherlands
Denmark
Australia
SwedenPortugal
Ireland
New ZealandEngland
Wales
ScotlandAverage population
1560
2122
3000
4700
5594
6600
7019
8845
9421
10770
16740
17860
18811
19114
30249
34180
41190
46729
135600136300156250

Another trend was to the establishment of metropolitan governments, based on the concept ofthe ‘city-region’, a functionally interdependent territory consisting of a city and its hinterland.
There has been variety of types of metropolitan government in western Europe. Perhaps thestrongest was in the Strathclyde region of Scotland, where an elected council was establishedcovering a wide area taking in Glasgow and its entire functional area, with a strategicplanning role, powers over the detailed plans of the lower tier municipalities, and major
infrastructure and service provision responsibilities. Another celebrated example was the
Rijnmond in the Netherlands. Elsewhere, metropolitan governments were weaker, as
entrenched local elites were able to resist change. So in France urban communities(communautés urbaines) were formed as federations of communes. Usually, the upper tier
was given only weak powers, often it was indirectly elected and in many cases metropolitan
boundaries were tightly drawn. All this weakened the potential of the metropolitan model andmade it an easy target for opposition.
By the 1980s the impetus had gone from the creation of metropolitan governments. Strategicplanning had been weakened in the wake of the economic instability provoked by the oilcrises of the 1970s, and by the rise of neo-liberal ideology. Central governments remained
wary of transferring real power, and municipal politicians in many countries resented the
intrusion of another layer above them with the result that metropolitan councils often lacked
precisely the powers needed to make their plans effective. So metropolitan consolidation was5halted and even reversed, with the abolition of the English metropolitan counties, the Scottish
regions (as late as 1996), the Rijnmond and the Metropolitan Barcelona authority. By the
1990s, however, the tide was turning again as governments reacted to the rapid urban
expansion of the late 1980s and the need to plan major infrastructure projects. The opening ofEuropean markets and the increased competition among metropolitan regions in the newEurope focused attention on the need for stronger units to control wasteful intra-metropolitan
competition and encourage collaboration in infrastructure development and capital attraction.
These considerations stimulated a return to metropolitan issues. A new French law provided
for the establishment of communautés de villes in those places where urban communities had
not already been established. A new strategic authority was introduced in the Greater
Rotterdam area, replacing the defunct Rijnmond. New provisions encouraged Italian cities toform metropolitan governments and in 1999 a new elected strategic authority was established
for Greater London.
The return to a concern with strategic planning, however, was a counterpoint to a generaltrend in the 1990s towards and more competitive and differentiated type of local government
system. Efficiency, rather than being associated with consolidaton and economies of scale is,in the ‘new public management’ linked to individual responsibility, flexibility, looser formsof organization, and competition among service providers. The influence of the ‘public
choice’ school, while less pervasive than in North America, can be felt here.
Intergovernmental relations in federal and devolved systems of government, too, have tended
to more from co-operation and integration to competition, whether for resources andinvestment, or in policy innovation.
The rise of regions
One of the most striking features of territorial government in the modern European state is
the rise of the regional or ‘meso’ level, institutonalized for the first time in some states andstrengthened in others. This is a response to a complex set of factors which can besummarized under the headings of functional change and political demands.
The most important functional change involves the relationship between territory andeconomic development, and the strategies of states in managing their territorial
economies. Following the Second World War, governments, faced with problems ofunderdevelopment in some regions and obsolescence in others (notably in the older
industrial areas of the United Kingdom), put in place ever more elaborate mechanisms
to manage their spatial economies by diverting investment to areas of need. At a time ofoverall full employment, this was presented as a zero-sum policy, in which the needy
areas would benefit from added investment, the booming areas from the relief ofpressure, and the national economy from mobilizing resources in peripheral areas thatwould otherwise remain idle. The broad aim was to reintegrate declining areas into
national economies, while preparing to face European competition and the opening of
global markets. Policies, initially based on fiscal incentives and grants and on planning
controls, gradually became more sophisticated as governments engaged in spatialplanning (especially in France, Scandinavia and the Netherlands) and sought to build'growth poles' around key sectors. Policy was overwhelmingly top-down, aimed at
integrating the regions into the national economy but, as strategies became more6

elaborate, governments sought partners on the ground, among local political andeconomic elites. In France, Italy, Belgium and the United Kingdom, regional
development councils were established to engage in concerted action and integrate
central and local efforts. These were not generally a great success, caught as they were
between central demands and local needs but did succeed in politicizing what was until
then a rather technical exercise. In France, Italy and Belgium, regional planningcouncils gave way over time to elected regional government, while in the United
Kingdom they atrophied until their abolition in 1979, but were revived in a new form in
England in 1999. In Germany, there was a less corporatist approach to regional
development, which was handled intergovernmentally though the Joint Tasks
Framework between the federal government and the Länder.
Centralized regional policies increasingly came into question after the oil crisis of the
1970s. With the end of full employment, the consensus on diversionary policy collapsed
and regions had to compete for development. Some of the large developments
sponsored by governments failed to take root or to spark self-sustaining growtharound them, giving rise to the jibe that they were 'cathedrals in the desert'. It Italy, thesystem of regional development had been captured by the partitocrazia andsubordinated to a clientelistic logic of divisible benefits, with projects being broken up
into small pieces and losing their critical mass. With the opening of markets andincreased capital mobility, governments were unable to prevent firms locating in boom
areas since they would otherwise flee the country altogether. Regional policy thus lostits economic rationale and was sustained only for social and political reasons. This led
to a change of focus from large regions and into smaller scale local and urban
initiatives.
At the same time, there has been a change in academic thinking about regional and local
development, which has supported the move away from top-down planning and towards
more locally-based approaches. There is a new emphasis on place, considered as morethan mere location but as a complex of social relationships, norms, institutions andunderstandings so that economic development is more than about merely assembling
factors of production in a physical space (Bagnasco and Trigilia, 1993). The social
structure of places is important, so that parachuting an investment into an inappropriate
locale is unlikely to lead to success. To the traded dependencies of traditional
industrial districts have been added untraded interdependencies arising from the 'milieu'
or informal patterns of cooperation and support, and the proximity of innovators,
research facilities and associations within a region (Storper, 1995; Scott, 1998). Thesesustain networks and foster the associational economy which combines market
competition with social cooperation and learning (Cooke and Morgan, 1998).
Economies of scale are achieved not within the firm, as in conventional theory, but atthe level of the local system of production. Such economies are particularly importantfor small and medium sized firms based on flexible specialization.
So the locality, from being a mere space in which market forces operate, becomes a
production system itself. The old idea of comparative advantage under which every
region had a place in the national and international division of labour, and which
underlay traditional regional policy, has given way to absolute or competitive advantage

7

(Scott, 1998), in which regions, not just firms, compete for investment, markets andtechnology. This has radical implications for politics, since it postulates a common
regional interest in competition, over-riding other solidarities of class, sector, gender,
age or ethnicity. It encourages a neo-mercantilist form of politics, in which politicians
can portray the region as pitched into ceaseless competition for market advantage. How
much such political appeals are based on hard economic reality and how much on thepolitical interpretation of it, is another question.
Regional development policy has been refocused. It is more decentralized, to theregional or local level where the capacity for horizontal integration and knowledge ofproblems is greatest. It places less emphasis now physical infrastructure and more on
human resources development. Training policies have widely been decentralized tocomplement other instruments of intervention and education has often been tied into
economic policy in a more direct way than before. There is also a strong emphasis on
research, development and technology transfer through networks and linkages amongfirms and between them, universities, research centres and governments. There is lessemphasis on synoptic planning or large scale intervention and more on ‘steering’ andselective intervention to remedy market failures. There is a focus on the need todetermine the region’s niche in the global economy and to foster clusters of industries
that can exploit this best and sustain each other. Endogenous and self-sustaining growthis the new formula for success.
State restructuring more generally, away from centralized and uniform policies, towards
differentiation and complex forms of organization, strengthens these trends (Loughlin,
2000). European integration has fuirther reinforced the tendency, as leaders ofregional development coalitions have sought to position the region not only within thenational economy but within an increasingly competitive European economic andpolitical space. European initiatives, notably through the Structural Funds, have soughtto draw regions into the EU policy process and have become a focus for regional
mobilization (Hooghe, 1996).
At the same time, regions have emerged in some places as significant political placesand demands have arisen for political autonomy. This is most obvious and pronounced
in historic ‘stateless nations’ where a tradition of distinct identity has long survived,such as in Catalonia, the Basque Country, Scotland, Wales or Brittany (Keating, 2001a).
In other places, existing cultural cleavages have intersected with economic cleavages
and institutional change to produce new forms of territorial movement. So in Flanders amovement of cultural defence has evolved into a form of cultural-territorial nationalism
comparable to the British or Spanish cases. Competitive regionalism, by stimulating
regional actors to situate themselves within European space, has led to a questioning ofinternal fiscal transfers and this in turn has produced political movements. Sucheconomically based regionalism is found both in poorer regions, complaining about
their neglect by the state and by Europe, and in rich regions, complaining about theburden of fiscal transfers to their poorer compatriots, which they see as a handicap in
European competition. Italy’s Lega Nord, which started out as such a revolt of the rich,has sought to fit itself out with a distinct culture, identity and history to match the
British and Spanish cases, with a limited degree of success (Biorcio, 1997). Demands

8

for a revision of fiscal equalization provisions have also been made in Spain (notably by
Catalonia), in Germany (the southern Länder), in Belgium (Flanders) and in the United
Kingdom (from both the rich south and the poor north of England).
Regionalism has also been fostered by democratizing impulses, seeking to move powerout of centralized states, but also to democratize systems of corporatist ‘governance’that have emerged at the regional level around themes of economic development.
Regional development coalitions tend to be dominated by business interests and public
officials concerned with economic development in a rather narrow sense. This may leadto a neglect of distributional issues and social solidarity, as well as environmental andcultural questions. So oppositional forces will seek to democratize regional institutions
in order to open them to a wider range of interests. More generally, there has been acertain demystification of the nation state and a growing disenchantment with its
democratic performance. New spaces of democratic deliberation are opening up, manyof them territorially based, whether in regions, cities or neighbourhoods. In the statelessnations, this has led to a rediscovery of non-state histories, a questioning of state
teleology and the revival of doctrines of mixed and shared sovereignty which, alongwith European integration, have the potential radically to question the normative
foundations and legitimacy of the state itself (MacCormick, 1999; Keating, 2001b).
Regions and European integration
European integration has had profound effects on the spatial economic and politicalorder of Europe. Market integration has impacted unevenly on different territories,
producing winners and losers. In the early years, there was a tendency for the more
peripheral regions to consider themselves further marginalized by the move of power toBrussels and the tendency of development to concentrate in the centre, a tendency stillvisible in the Nordic countries. Elsewhere, peripheral regions have learnt to play theEuropean game, encouraged by the Structural Funds and increased opportunities to be
involved in European policies, and have come to see Europe in a positive light as acounterpoint to their own states. Studies of European economic geography have
replaced the old image of the golden triangle in the centre and increased poverty at the
periphery with more complex image of winners and losers,2 showing that opportunities
exist in many parts of Europe. Politically, the European Community was initially seen
as a problem for regions, given its intergovernmental nature which allowed national
governments, meeting as the Council of Ministers, to take decisions on matters fallingunder regional jurisdiction. The German Länder were the first to complain about thisand progressively sought more engagement in European policy making, culminating in
the provision of the Treaty on European Union (Maastricht Treaty) allowing regions torepresent the state when matters of regional competence are at issue. This clause has
been used by Germany, Austria, Belgium and the United Kingdom. Regions have also
been given recognition in the partnership arrangements for the Stuctural Funds, which
since the late 1980s have represented the second biggest item of expenditure (after
agriculture) in the Community budget, and in the Committee of the Regions. These2

A famous one is the ‘blue banana’ produced by French economists showing the area of greatest
prosperity to be an arc from southern England, through the valleys of the Rhine and Rhone, down tonorthern Italy.

9

developments have ensured that Europe plays a central part in the construction ofregions in most countries, with region-building elites using it as a framework for their
aspirations. A Europe of the Regions, in which the region operates as a ‘third level’ of
government alongside states and the European Union, is, however, still a rather remote
prospect.

Regions as political space and regional identity
Regions have thus emerged across Europe in different forms. They are a level ofgovernment in the federal states of Germany, Austria and Belgium as well as theregionalized states of France, Italy, Spain and (partially) the United Kingdom. The
varieties of regional government are discussed in the next section. The regional level
may also provide the frame for civil society in the form of business, trade union andvoluntary groups and self-regulating activities across the policy spectrum. Scotland andCatalonia, for example, stand out for the degree of distinctiveness of their civil societies
from that of the host state, a factor that is much less marked in the French regions.
Regions may also, as discussed above, be seen as functional units, notably in relation toeconomic development but also potentially in relation to culture or social solidarity.
Generally regions have been seen primarily in economic terms, but in the right politicalconditions they may also become spaces for social solidarity – there is some evidence
that this is happening in Scotland. Regions may also be political spaces, in the sense thatpolitical issues are framed by the territory and interpreted by their impact on the
territory, there is a political debate focused on the territory, and citizens regard theterritory as an appropriate level at which to make binding decisions.
There may or may not be a sense of regional identity. This is a difficult and complex
issue, since identity is a problematic concept and can take on different meanings.
Survey data on regional identity exist but the questions asked differ from one country toanother and, even when identical questions are asked, as in the Eurobarometer surveys,
there are differences in meaning according to national context. Some surveys ask people
to rate their identities according to territorial level all the way from the locality toEurope and these tend to show rather strong senses of local identity, probably as anartefact of the research design. Others give people the choice of exclusive or mixed
identities, with a similar unsurprising tendency for people to go for the mixed identity
and intermediate categories, except in the most strongly nationalist regions such as
Scotland and the Basque Country. Only a few surveys, especially in France and Spain,
seek to probe just what people mean by the region or regional identity, which might go
all the way from appreciating the landscape or the cuisine to seeing the region as theprime focus of political legitimacy. To interpret the findings, we can perhaps identify
two types of regionalist citizen in Europe. can therefore make a tentative distinction
between ‘regional traditionalists’, largely depoliticized or conservative in orientation
and resembling nineteenth-century conservative regionalisms, and new or modern
regionalists found in the more educated sections of the population, and interested in theregion as an element in modernization and the construction of Europe (Keating, 1998).
Regional traditionalists may be uninterested in regional autonomy, seeing the region ina purely cultural or topographic perspective, and preferring traditional mechanisms of10

representation in central and local government, including partisan and clientelistic
networks. Modern regionalists will be more outward-looking and see the region as adynamic force for economic and social change. These are generalizations, since themeaning of regionalism is shaped by the historical and contemporary politics ofindividual states, and by the character of regional institutions.
In some places, there is a conflict of identities, where historically the region (or statelessnation) has been pitted against an integrative state. Elsewhere, regionalism hashistorically been compatible with belonging to the nation, and may even be an
important component of this. In some places, regionalism is merely an extension of
localism.3 In other places, the regional level is identified quite distinctly. In themultinational states of Spain, the United Kingdom and Belgium, regional identity isoften juxtaposed to national identity while in France and Germany, being a regionalist
does not imply being any less French or German.
Region-building elites, as we have seen increasingly place their project in a European
context. Surveys show some mixed evidence that this link is being made at thegrassroots level. There is a growth of multiple identity, with the region, the state andeven Europe (Grivel, 1994), above all in the most educated sections of the population,
but the region-Europe or region-global link is mediated by other factors. Catalans andmoderate Catalan nationalists tend to be very pro-European and this is true also ofmoderate Flemish nationalists and supporters of the moderately nationalist Social
Democratic and Labour Party in Northern Ireland. Scottish voters are at least lesshostile to Europe than those in England. A more general link between Europeanism andregionalism has been detected in analyses of Eurobarometer and other surveys(Schmidberger, 1997). At the tame times, a differentiation of values is not necessary
for a region to develop its own identity so that regionalism is ever less incompatible
with transnational integration. What is required is that it become the framework forappraising political and social issues. Indeed, it may be that territorial identity increases
precisely as value differentiation declines, with the sub-state level taking over as theframework for expressing and operationalizing universal values.
Regional government
There is a rather generalized new regionalism across western Europe but its institutional
expression varies greatly from one state to another and even within states. The weakest
form is functional regionalism, where regions are confined to specific tasks rather thanhave a general regulatory authority. This is the case in France, where regions are mainly
charged with economic planning and investment programming. It has also been thecase in Italy, despite the intention that regions should be a level of general government,
because the management of the health service has overwhelmed their other activities. In
England there is a form of functional regionalism around the needs of economic
development but, as yet, this has not given birth to elected regional institutions. The
same is true of other states where, under pressure from the European Commission,
3

The Eurobarometer surveys of 1991 and 1995 paradoxically show greatest support for regionalism in
the three states that do not have regions, Ireland, Portugal and Greece. It would seem that these surveys
are really tapping a diffuse sense of localism.

11

states have put in place mechanisms for regional planning and administration of
Structural Funds but have been reluctant to establish a rival level of political power.
A stronger form of regionalization is devolution, in which governments are establishedwith broad powers of social and economic regulation but are still in important respects
subordinate to the state. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have elected institutions
whose powers vary among them but which, especially in Scotland and Northern Ireland,
are broadly drawn. Indeed, many of the powers of the Scottish Parliament are exclusive
since no London ministry plays any role in their exercise. On the other hand,Westminster still officially insists that these powers are merely devolved from thecentre, which could take them back any time it chose.4 Devolution, or home rule as it issometimes called, is a response to the multinational state, in which there are strong
demands for autonomy in some parts but not in others, and where the state is unwilllingto undergo full federalization. Spain’s system of autonomous communities might also
be seen as a form of devolution since powers were transferred from the centre, the state
is not federalized, and it was the intention at the outset to confine autonomy to thishistoric nationalties and keep the state otherwise centralised. In practice, the autonomy
movement spread and, unlike the position in the United Kingdom, the competences ofthe devolved bodies are constitutionally protected, leading some to characterize Spain
as a federation in the making (Moreno, 1997). The model of devolution has been widely
discussed for Italy, given the tensions between a centralizing tradition and demands forautonomy.
The strongest form of autonomy exists in federal systems, where each level ofgovernment has its own guaranteed powers and neither level is permitted to intrude in
the other’s domain. Europe’s only federal states are Germany, Austria and, since 1993,
Belgium. These are very different cases, since Austria has a rather weak form offederalism while Germany has a strong one. Also the context is very different sincefederalism in Belgium was instituted to overcome powerful centrifugal tendencies,
which do not exist in the other two cases.
Functions, competences and territory
It is very difficult to generalize about the functions and competences of the various
levels of government in European countries. Regions have often been designed, as wehave seen, as a response to specific functional problems to do with planning andeconomic development, and this is a concern in all cases. They are also an importantlevel for social concertation over development issues, a meeting place for the social
partners even, or especially, where there is not an elected regional government. In
federal or devolved systems of government, they have wider responsibilities for social
regulation and service provision. In Germany and Austria, functions are generally
shared between the federal and regional level, with a high degree of co-operation andmost legislation coming from the federal parliament. In Belgium, the federated units areof two types, territorial regions and language communities. Flanders has merged the two
institutions for most purposes, but in Brussels and in Wallonia they are separate. The
4

The political reality – and even the legal doctrine – in Scotland is very different and this issue will no
doubt be tested in due course.

12Belgium system is in principle one of exclusive competences, derived from alongstanding political conflict, although in practice there is a need for cooperation,
especially in Europe. The division of competences in Spain is rather unclear, consistingof three lists, powers that must be devolved to regions, powers that can be devolved,
and powers that must be retained at the centre. While the central state still sets general
norms in devolved matters and, even where it is supposed to have vacated policy fields
devolved to the autonomous communities, it maintains the relevant central ministries
and even field services. In the United Kingdom, Wales has only administrative powers,
relying on laws passed at Westminster and mainly covering England and Wales together.
Scotland, and Northern Ireland, on the other hand, have full legislative andadministrative control of all competences not expressly reserved for the centre. Thismeans that the centre’s laws and administration in these fields are effectively restricted
to England and Wales or England, giving it no tutellary power over Scotland andNorthern Ireland. To put it slightly differently, in fields like education, local
government, housing and social services, there is no ‘centre’ at all in the United
Kingdom, merely a set of territorial policy systems.
Local governments also have a range of responsibilities varying from one state toanother. Generally they are responsible for local planning issues and urban development
and have important roles in social integration. In many countries, they are the basis for
local democracy, allowing them to express local views on issues beyond their statutory
scope. The mayor in France or Italy for example is an important community figure andinterlocutor with the state, even while he or she may lack major autonomous powers.
The mayor may also be at the centre of local policy networks, the individual best placed
to pull together powers and funding from diverse agencies. In the United Kingdom, on
the other hand, local government has steadily declined in status and powers following
successive reorganizations and centralizing measures and no longer has a central role inlocal communities. In Scandinavia, the local level remains the basic unit foradministering the welfare state, giving it a role unmatched elsewhere.
There remains in most countries an intermediate level between region and locality,
corresponding to the province, département or Kreise. This has historically developed
as a level of state administration, which has progressively been democratized but isoften criticized for not corresponding either to the functional needs of modern
government, or to citizen identity. There has been talk of abolishing this level incountries like France, Italy and Spain, which have established regional government, but
it remains a power base for local politicians and central bureaucratic elites. In GreatBritain, there were efforts to move to a single tier system of local government in the
1990s but this was applied only in Scotland, Wales and some of the English cities. In
much of England, especially in the south, a two tier system of counties survived.5 The
provincial level has a variety of functions that vary from one state to another.

5

Northern Ireland has a single tier system of districts with very limited powers. Most of the functions
undertaken elsewhere in the United Kingdom by local government are handled by appointed boards. The
reason why the Conservative government was able to reorganize local government in Scotland and Walesso easily is that it had almost no presence in the existing system and so faced no internal party opposition.

13

Trends in territorial government
The experience of individual countries in the reorganization of territorial government
continues to differ but some common trends can be discerned. One is the rise of theregion as a new or revitalized level of political representation and policy making.
Another is the increased focus on economic development in competition with otherregions and cities. This has had profound effects on local and regional politics,
sometimes producing a form of neo-mercantilism in which each territory is portrayed as
being pitched into competition with others for limited resources in investment, markets
and technology. Whether this reflects the reality of globalization and European
integration or is a spin put on these by politicians in order to mobilize voters andinterests behind them is an open question, whose answer may vary from case to case.
Another trend is towards asymmetry in territorial government. The most asymmetricalcase is the United Kingdom whose four constituent parts have radically different formsof territorial government which even bring into question the nature of the centre. Spain
has powerful pressures towards asymmetry on the part of certain regions, balanced out
by the habit of the centre of resisting these or, when it has to concede, applying theconcessions to the whole state. Local government systems now encompass a variety offorms as states have permitted different models within their territory, or different formsof consortia of local authorities. Even where a state has remained constitutionallysymmetrical, there are tendencies to differentiation, with some localities adopting very
active strategies of civic or regional promotion, or putting together development
coalitions of actors, while others are more passive. French regions differ considerablyfrom each other in this respect. European integration has exposed cities and regions togreater competition for investment, markets and technology, reinforcing the effects ofglobalization. Yet it has also provided new opportunities for political activism inEuropean political space and, with qualifications, additional resources beyond theirlocal tax bases.6 Again, localities differ greatly in the extent to which they are playing
the European game. The level at which competitive development coalitions are put
together also varies, with some focused on large regions and others on cities. In othercases again, there is a rivalry between a regional and a city-based system of action, as in
the relationship between Catalonia and Barcelona.
Local and regional governments have also seen changes in their relationships witheconomic and social actors. The competitive development imperative, together with the
influence of the new public management, has pushed them into closer partnership withthe private sector, in a manner long familiar in the United States. These public private
partnerships have had important effects on local governance (Pierre, 1998) and havecome under some criticism for their potentially corrosive effect on local democracy(Keating, 1998). Under the influence of Anglo-Saxon intellectuals and politicians, there
has been a move towards privatization and private involvement in the provision of local
services and planning, first in the United Kingdom (Barnekov, Boyle and Rich, 1989)
and later elsewhere in Europe. For many this represents a new paradigm in which

6

The European Structural Funds in principle provide money for development of regions and localities
but in practice national governments have maintained a high degree of control of their distribution and insome cases have simply kept the moneys for themselves.

14

government gives way to ‘governance’ or the traditional local government ceases to bea service provider and becomes an ‘enabler’ allowing other agencies to do the job.
Together these influences are changing the role and status of local and regional
government. Previously territorial politics could be understood as a dyadic relationshipin which centre and localities exchanged powers and resources. Central states protected
localities from the international market and provided resources in exchange for politicalsupport, for the regime or the government in power. In an integrating Europe andglobalizing economy, these old bargains no longer hold so easily. Regions and localities
face a complex pattern of dependencies, on the state, on the private sector, on theinternational market, and on European institutions. Autonomy no longer means what it
did under the old dispensation. Now if a city or region becomes more autonomous fromthe central state, it risks becoming a prisoner of the international market, unless it cancompensate through access to Europe. Self-government becomes less a matter ofasserting autonomy than of managing interdepencies. Some cities and regions are better
equipped economically and politically to do this than others, and may find themselvesin a good position to play the new game, while the others are reduced to new forms ofdependency.
This is a complex political order, comparable, although not identical to, the pre-state
European order of overlapping and underlapping sovereignties, different types ofauthority in the state, the economy and civil society, and competing forms of legitimacy.
Despite loose talk of a neo-medievalism, or analogies with the Holy Roman Empire,
however, it is distinctly modern in that it coexists with universal norms of liberal
democracy. Political scientists, seeking to make sense of it, have come up with aplethora of new concepts and neologisms, none of which quite fits the bill. What isneeded is a set of concepts that allows us to place the new order in its historical context,
to analyse its dynamics, to assess the distribution of power and resources. They must
enable us to compare different times and places to identify their distinguishing features.
We also need normative concepts to enable us to judge the new dispensation and its
relationship with shared ideas of democracy, accountability and justice.
Perhaps the most widespread notion in contemporary analysis is that of ‘governance’.
This is a broad term, for which at least six different meanings have been identified(Rhodes, 1996) but the basic idea is that government, identified with the traditional
hierarchical state form, has given way to a world of diffused authority in which theboundaries between public and private are blurred. Governance seems to refer to theregulatory capacity of the whole gamut of organizations in the public sphere, including
governments at all levels, private firms, and associations. Applied to local and regional
restructuring, this takes the form of ‘multilevel governance’ in which the state shares
power with emerging bodies above and below it as well as with the institutions ofmarket and civil society. There are a number of problems with this concept. In the firstplace, it relies heavily on a mythical view of a past in which authority was monopolized
by a centralized state which, in turn, was the only actor in the international system. At
best, this describes an aspiration of European states from the mid-nineteenth century
until the late twentieth century, not the historical experience of European space. Even in
the archetypal centralized, hierarchical state, France, researchers for over thirty years

15have emphasized the complex dispersal of power and the need for continuous
negotiation. Students of federalism, especially in Germany, have long recognized theinterdependence of tiers of government and the complex patterns of cooperation andcompetition that this produces. In the minority nations of Europe the legitimacy of thestate has always been seen as somewhat conditional and resting on a range of explicit
and implicit concessions. In other words, there is nothing new about territorial politics.
More seriously, concept of multilevel governance (and governance generally) is
impossible to operationalize. It is never clear, in fact, whether it is meant to be an
operational theory or a general comment on the state of the world. It does not seem tobe possible to contrast instances of multilevel governance with instances where it isabsent, or to calibrate degrees of multilevel governance. If multilevel governance iseverything, then perhaps it is nothing – or maybe no more than a descriptive metaphor.
The concept is loosely pluralistic, in its emphasis on the dispersal of authority and, likeso much pluralist theory, suffers from a severe level of analysis problem. At some levelof analysis, every social phenomenon is plural, since we can go on disaggregating until
we come down to the level of the individual. This is very easy since the state, the region,
Europe, social class or gender are no more than abstract concepts. What is moredifficult in the social sciences is to choose appropriate levels of reaggregation. This is
the work of theory. Theories of governance, which have their origins in organization
theory, tend to take the organization as the unit of analysis. This in turn has a number ofeffects. It fillets out of the analysis other social aggregates like class, gender, residential
location, which undergird much of the struggle over power and resources in society.
This in turn confirms the pluralist analysis, since organizations are easily disaggregatedand pluralistic theory becomes self-confirming. Eventually, disaggregation takes us
down to the individual actor, yet theories of social action built purely from an individual
basis are notoriously unreliable. So pluralism, and multilevel governance with it,
becomes no more than an artefact of methodology; if you look for it anywhere at all,you will find it.7 It also introduces a rather insidious conservative bias, since we are
deprived of those very social aggregates needed to form normative judgements. Perhaps
more generously, it sustains a ‘third way’ type of politics in which there are no left andright, no two sides of industry, no north and south, no country and city (to name a few
of the critical social cleavages that Tony Blair has denied in the last couple of years). It
is a form of social science designed for a post-ideological age.
The task for social science is therefore not merely to explore new constellations offunctional competence and networks of influence but to think anew about the place of
territorial government in a liberal democracy.
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7This is exactly what happened to the debate between pluralists and elitists about community power inthe 1960s.

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