John Loughlin

Reconfiguring the State: Trends in Territorial Governance in European States

Abstract Multi-level governance appeared in the 1990s as a concept which sought to capture the changing relationships between different territorial levels of government in the EU. The concept was important as it drew to attention to important changes in territorial governance that were occurring at this time. This article steps back to analyse wider changes in the nature and form of the Welfare State, and the consequences of this for territorial governance. It argues that there are distinct trends in contemporary territorial governance: greater political as opposed to simple administrative decentralization; more asymmetry and diversity; a shift from a ‘principal-agent’ to a ‘choice’ model of central–local relations; great scope for experimentation; more non-hierarchical relations; new patterns of fiscal relations.

The ‘Hybrid’ State: Reconfiguring Territorial Governance in Western Europe

Abstract One of the central questions in contemporary social science is the fate of the nation-state. The nation-state reached its apogee during the period of post-war economic boom and expanding welfare states. European integration was a means of ‘rescuing’ nation-states during this period. Neo-liberalism mounted a serious challenge to the welfare version of the nation-state following a series of political, economic and social crises in the 1970s. The nation-state survived albeit in a form different from the previous version. It is now more characterized by a combination of centralist interventionism and ‘choice’ in its territorial organization and policy approaches. This may be seen in patterns of central–local relations, public administration and fiscal relations. This we have called the ‘hybrid state’.

Paying For It All

Political decentralization and administrative deconcentration are meaningless and will not lead to genuine local autonomy unless local authorities possess the resources necessary to exercise the responsibilities assigned to them. Financial resources are a key element among the different kinds of resources that are necessary and which also include constitutional, legal and human resources. Article 9 of the European Charter for Local Selfgovernment1 states that ‘Local authorities shall be entitled, within national economic policy, to adequate financial resources of their own, of which they may dispose freely within the framework of their powers’ and that ‘Local authorities’ financial resources shall be commensurate with the responsibilities provided for by the constitution and the law’. The same article stipulates that the majority of the local authorities’ financial resources should come from local resources and that, when they come in the form of central government grants, these should be general or ‘block’ grants rather than earmarked for specific purposes. All of this is designed to enhance the local authorities’ autonomy as the basis of the exercise of political and administrative autonomy. Although France has signed but is the only one among the large member states of the Council of Europe not to have ratified the Charter,2 it does actually put into practice some of these stipulations. Furthermore, some of its provisions3 have been incorporated into the French Constitution with the 2003 constitutional revision.

The ‘Meso’ Level: The Region vs. the Département

While most unitary states have at the most one level of intermediate or ‘meso’ government,1 France has two: the department, created at the time of the French Revolution, and its great rival, the region, which has emerged from the shadows of the French institutional labyrinth only with great difficulty. Each institution has its partisans: ‘departmentalists’ and ‘regionalists’ — each is founded in a particular understanding of the French state and how its territory should be organized. The ‘departmentalists’ are firm Jacobins and believe in the unity and indivisibility of the Republic, while the ‘regionalists’ are more like the Girondins and believe it necessary to recognize the diversity of France. It is not surprising that geographers such as Jean-Francois Gravier or historians such as Fernand Braudel should be among the regionalists, while national politicians such as Francois Mitterrand on the left or Jacques Chirac on the right should favour the department. But the region slowly asserted itself throughout the second half of the 20th century in the form of indirectly elected agencies of regional development, and this slow emergence came to fruition with the creation of elected regional councils by the 1982 decentralization reforms.

Administering Territorial Governance: The State Strikes Back?

Thus far in this book we have examined the historical, institutional and political dimensions of French subnational government. But none of this can work without the administrative dimension. In this area too there have been significant transformations in France over the past 50 years as the state has found itself forced to adapt, first to the demands of the Welfare State during the Trente Glorieuses, and then to the challenges posed by the neo-liberal vogue of the 1980s and then to the new international developments with the acceleration of European integration and globalization during the 1990s. But before describing in some detail the recent changes to the system, it is first necessary to provide a historical context in order to assess the degree of change that has occurred. It is the prefectoral system which is the administrative nexus between local society and the French state and it will be useful to begin by examining this venerable institution.

The Municipality (Commune): Between Local Democracy and Effective Governance

The municipality is the oldest of the French units of local government and, in its modern form, was officially created during the early months of the French Revolution by a decree of 14 December 1789. Its origins, however, go back much further than this as the municipal boundaries corresponded closely to the old church parishes of the Middle Ages and the origins of these may even lie with administrative units traced out when much of present-day France was Gaul, a province of the Roman Empire. At the time of the French Revolution, and, indeed, until the middle of the 20th century, most French people lived in the countryside in small villages and hamlets. The municipality was the political and institutional expression of this rural and villageois way of life and, despite the rural exodus and urbanization of the past 50 years, French people retain a strong attachment to it. This is one of the reasons why it has been so difficult to reduce the huge number of small municipalities in France — about 36 000, or more than all the municipalities combined of the member states of the old EU15. Today, the French authorities seem to have accepted that it is impossible to reduce the number of municipalities by diktat from above, as was the case in countries such as the UK, Germany and Sweden, but that a more voluntary bottom-up approach is required in shape of voluntary and incentive-driven municipal co-operation. This chapter will outline these recent approaches to municipal reform but, before doing so, it will present new ways by which French planners have conceptualized urban space and then how the municipalities function in practice.

The Politics of French Territorial Governance

The expression ‘territorial politics’ refers to the way in which territory relates to the political system, how different political ideologies interpret this relationship, and how political parties and movements put their interpretations into practice. Of course, ideological discourse may be simply rhetoric and far removed from actual practice. From the analysis presented so far in this book, it is clear, nevertheless, that different, competing models of territorial politics have co-existed throughout French history since the Revolution and, indeed, to some extent, already existed in the tensions between a centralizing monarchy and powerful fiefdoms in the possession of the nobility. The dominant model has been towards centralization initiated by the monarchs, continued by the Jacobins and completed, at least in its political and administrative outline by Napoleon I. To this centralizing thrust the Jacobin and Napoleonic heritage added at least the aspiration towards the standardization of political and administrative structures but also of culture and society. While political and administrative standardization became a reality by the early years of the Third Republic, cultural and societal standardization would take much longer. The second major tradition of thinking about territorial politics questioned whether this degree of standardization was even desirable. This is what we have called the Girondin tradition, from the revolutionary faction which did not question the gains of the Revolution nor indeed the advent of the Republic but which proposed a decentralized and even federalist organization of the new state regime precisely to accommodate the great diversity of France. The French political debate on territorial organization has oscillated between these two positions. As we shall see in this chapter, the pendulum has for a number of reasons swung back in recent years to the Girondin conception.

Introduction: The International Context of French Subnational Governance

France has often prided itself on being an ‘exception’ in Europe, whether this was in relation to its political history, its type of political system or its system of local government — or even with regard to its intellectual and literary brilliance. Undoubtedly, all national states like to think of themselves in these terms as a way of justifying their national identity which is first of all defined in negative terms — as an Irish, Scots or Welsh person. I am first of all not English; as an English person, I am not French or German; and so on. These self-descriptions probably hide more than they reveal and, in many ways, Europeans share a great deal in common with their fellow Europeans even if there remain also important differences among us.1 But one area where the notion of ‘l’exception francaise’ does seem to make sense is in its system of local politics and government. France is unique among western states in holding on to its more than 36 000 municipalities. No other state comes close to this. But, in other respects, France is like other states and has undergone many of the same influences which have so much modified systems of governance over the past twenty years or so. In fact, one important change is that France is no longer the self-contained political system that it was in the past, precisely as a result of the wider changes such as globalization and the increasing integration of the European Union which have made the country more amenable to outside influences.

The ‘Trente Glorieuses’ (1945–1975) and their Aftermath

France developed a set of political institutions at both national and subnational levels to express the idea of the one and indivisible nation-state. The dominant state ideology and tradition between the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century and the period following the Second World War emphasized centralization, standardization and uniformity.1 This has been true, with some nuances, until 1982, whatever the regime in place: restored monarchy (1814–1818), Second Republic (1848–1852), Second Empire (1852–1870), Third Republic (1870–1940), Vichy Regime (1940–1945), Fourth Republic (1946–1958), and the current Fifth Republic (1958–). The obsessive insistence on political and administrative centralization on the part of French political leaders, particularly those in the radical, republican and socialist traditions, however, betrays a deep-seated unease within the political class that is related to the continuing diversity of French society. Eugen Weber’s classic work Peasants into Frenchmen shows how, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, the task of creating a culturally and sociologically homogeneous French people was still far from accomplished despite the adherence of the majority of these same French people to the institutions of the Republic. Even today, France is still characterized by its great cultural, economic, social and cultural diversity. To a large extent, the centralizing institutions that have been in place for almost 200 years were an attempt to overcome this. The more extreme Jacobins such as Emile Combes were terrified that the great diversity, associated with provincial reactionary forces such as the Church and the nobility, would rise up and destroy the gains of the Revolution and the secular republic (la Republique laique). But, underneath the institutions, French society continued to exist as it had done for centuries, since the bulk of its population were peasants living the same lives as their forebears.

The Decentralization Programme: An Overview (1982–2006)

Decentralization,1 ‘la grande affaire du septennat’, was to be the socialists’ flagship policy and, ultimately, was to have a more lasting impact than the other more traditionally socialist reforms such as nationalization, the introduction of labour legislation (including, for example, the reduction of working hours) and more generous social welfare provisions. The latter reforms were the socialists’ attempt, in the early 1980s, to promote ‘Keynesianism in one country’ — France — in an international context where other countries were, by contrast, adopting the neo-liberal, market-based approaches pioneered by the US President Ronald Reagan and the UK Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. This approach, designed to increase welfare state provision in France, was severely punished by the international markets and by the flight of capital from France. By 1983, the socialist government, under Prime Minister Laurent Fabius, changed tack and fell into line with the other countries of Europe, returning to a modified version of the liberal policy approach which had been followed by Giscard d’Estaing. The decentralization reforms, on the other hand, proved to have a longer-lasting impact, although there is still a sense, 20 years or so after they were first initiated, that they are still incomplete.2