Romain Pasquier

The Europeanization of Regions as ‘Spaces for Politics' : A Research Agenda

Through its collective regulation, the European Union (EU) has institutionalized as a critical space for public action. Yet, frequently regions are considered ‘objects’ of EU politics, rather than ‘subjects’ of its daily government. Moving away from dominant narratives on the relationship between the ‘region’ and the ‘EU’, we propose a new research agenda which draws on sociological applications of the Europeanization literature and re-frames the problematic towards studying regions as ‘spaces for EU politics’. Significantly, this approach identifies actor political usages of social representations of ‘territory’ as critical in explaining regional actors’ transformation from ‘objects’ to ‘subjects’ of EU government.

Cognitive Europeanization and the territorial effects of Multilevel Policy Transfer : Local Development in French and Spanish Regions

This article explores the process of ‘cognitive Europeanization’ of territorial policies and how this process is impacting on multilevel governance. Over the last two decades, a number of European spatial programmes have developed similar norms of action at the local and regional level. Focusing on the interactive character of the Europeanization process, the author considers sub-national actors as key elements in the adaptation of domestic political systems to these European norms. Drawing on a comparative study of territorial policies in France and Spain, the article illustrates how the policy transfer of EU-level norms is producing structural changes in territorial governance. Socialized to a European model of local development, it is argued, both regional actors and regional institutions are Europeanizing their policies without EU legislation.

Introduction: Studying Regions as ‘Spaces for Politics’: Re-thinking Territory and Strategic Action

Transformations in global, European and domestic regulatory government have sparked debates about their effects on regions. Are regions becoming increasingly unbounded territories and/or passive actors in the face of political change? This Introduction argues for a political-sociological treatment of regions as ‘spaces for politics’ to answer these questions. This means first, conceiving regions as institutionalizing spaces, with power structures and logics of action; secondly, studying territory-linked arguments evoked by actors to legitimize the re-institutionalization of regional regulatory boundaries and spaces of public action; thirdly, studying regulatory strategies of individual and collective actors who act in the name of the region.

The Breton Model between convergence and capacity

Abstract Drawing upon mainly qualitative inquiry with political, associative and economic actors over a two-decade long period, the article seeks to provide answers to a key conundrum that challenges, in different ways, territorial politics scholars, as well as those working primarily on France. What are the conditions for a successful form of regional advocacy in a unitary state? The French region of Brittany has a specific mode of operation, one based on mixing identity and instrumental claims, and accessing a repertoire of responses that are not naturally open to other French regions. A related question follows logically from the first: Can a specific territorial model developed in one set of conditions adapt when circumstances change? The Breton case demonstrates limited evidence of endogenous change (a central tenet of discursive institutionalism), though it does admit a continuing capacity to filter external pressures in a way that makes sense to regional actors. Analytically, the article develops territorial political capacity as a part material, part constructed framework that can be used for comparing regions at a particular point in time, as well as for capturing the evolution over time of a specific region.

Political Trust in France’s multi-level government

Trust has long been identified as an essential component of social, economic and political life. Since the mid-1990s, there has been renewed interest in the concept driven by its perceived decline and reengagement with concepts of social capital. The article acknowledges these debates, especially the general context of decline in trust in western democracies, including in France, our country case. It is framed to answer a more parsimonious question, however. The analysis developed within the paper considers political trust within multiple layers of government at a single point and therefore provides a clearer picture of how citizens engage with complex governance arrangements where the primary responsibility for specific policy areas is often unclear. While attempts to measure or evaluate levels of political trust have generally been applied to the local or national level or, within the European context, the EU level, the article breaks new ground, by looking at how political trust varies within a multi-level governmental system. This article, which reports findings from a major nationwide survey of trust in France, concludes that distinct logics of institutional orders matter more for political trust than socio-demographic explanations.

Regions and European Governance

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).

Regionalisation and Policies of Territorial Justice

This chapter aims to show that, since the First World War, the process of institutionalising the regions of France has been carried out via the implementation of a series of territorial justice policies. From the middle of the nineteenth century, a devolutionary and modernising impetus developed within the French administration and contributed to rehabilitating the regional scale as an appropriate level for public policy. Whereas up until the Second World War, the region embodied anti-republican reaction or the risk of separatism, in the 1950s and 1960s, with the invention of territorial planning and development, it became the locus of implementation of public policy for a planning and modernising state. Regional political and economic elites then played a major role in the co-production of French regionalisation, particularly in Brittany and Alsace, at a point when regional economies were developing. Far from being simply the target of technocratic centralised policy-making, regional actors played an active role in defining and implementing policy in the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, after which point, driven by the Gaullist administration, an increasingly centralising force came to bear on the political dynamic.

Conclusion: Regional Power and Territorial Differentiation

Mobilisation, decentralisation and governance: these have been the three central ideas which encapsulate the aim of this book, which is to describe the emergence and the dynamics of the region as an entity, using France as a case study. The region-as-entity here stands in for the whole of society, in that, over the long history of state-nation building, it has assumed a wide variety of cultural, economic, social and political realities. These realities take the form of specific identities, of socio-economic cleavages, cultural movements, political organisations, democratic demands, elected institutions and instruments of public policy. The theoretical and methodological challenge for social sciences lies in developing tools which enable us to understand and articulate this range of realities. This book has therefore analysed regions as being loose and flexible political spaces, in which institutionalisation is far from being a one-way process. A variety of actors contribute to the upward, downward and horizontal dynamics which make up such spaces. Institutionalising regional space comprises three dimensions: institutionalisation as a result of cultural, social and political mobilisation; via the implementation of policies for territorial justice and decentralisation; and finally via the deployment of a system of regional governance. Far from this being a static analysis, it is one which allows us to identify the main parameters of public policy change and sketch out a typology of territorial governance models in relation to the ways in which regional power is structured.

Regions and Territorial Governance

Local and regional government currently represents over 70% of public investment in France. The institutionalisation of the regions thus also — perhaps primarily — plays out through public action, which in concrete terms means regional public policy (Barone 2008; Jouve Spenlehauer and Warin 2000). This legitimisation of the regions via public policy is all the more important given that they don’t enjoy the long-standing institutional anchorage of the departments and communes, but owe their emergence instead to territorial planning and economic development issues. Regional public policy is today one of the main vehicles for institutionalising regional space in Europe. Several questions arise from this: what shape does regional public policy take? How do we identify the influence of a regional player in public policy sequences which are necessarily interlinked? Regional power in France is a specific power which operates in the gaps in multi-level inter-organisational public policy. We recognise it both in its capacity to regionalise certain sectoral policies, and in the existence of long-standing regional coalitions in certain territories. But this rise in regional power is not simply a functional adjustment by the state bureaucracy; in France it goes hand-in-hand with increasingly conflictual relations between the centre and the periphery, with a central state which, despite the difficulties it faces, intends to continue governing its territories at a distance. Regional power thus directly challenges the paradoxical figure of the state in France. Although its capacity to manage collective problems is in question, regional power continues to embody territorial solidarity which is the guarantee of national unity.

Regionalisation and Territorial State Reforms

In France, as elsewhere in Europe, territorial reorganisation of the state constitutes a key feature of the institutionalisation of regional space. In response to the twin challenges of the split between the centre and the periphery and the increasingly regional nature of public policy, over the last 30 years the move to decentralise and devolve has become an overwhelming trend within territorial dynamics in Europe (Keating 1998; Le Gales 1999; Pasquier 2004). Decentralisation involves transferring state power, as well as the corresponding financial, fiscal and administrative support, to elected local and regional authorities. Instigated at the beginning of the 1980s by Gaston Deferre, this move to decentralise completed the process of regional institutionalisation in France. From being merely the locus of territorial planning, with the introduction of direct universal suffrage to elect regional councils in 1986, the regions instead became spaces of political representation where decisions were made. By conferring on the regions the status of local authorities, decentralisation bestowed dual legitimacy: the legitimacy to act (via public policy) and democratic legitimacy (via political representation).