Friday, March 14, 2014
Cabinet (Omni Shoreham)
The slogan "Europe of the Regions" indicates the ideal of a Europe-wide system of rule based not on nation-states, but on regions defined as economic, cultural, political and/or geographic areas (Keating 1998). Research into European integration has traditionally been divided over causes, dynamics and potential outcomes into functionalism, inter-governmentalism and federalism, but regionalism has not received adequate coverage as a distinct template for continental political system-building. This is all the more regrettable as one of the first contemporary Europeanists, Denis de Rougemont, already in 1947 called for overcoming what political scientists have later dubbed "methodological nationalism": our exclusive focus on the nation-state has blinded us to see what is going on within, below and between them. This paper is animated by a normative thought but adds empirical evidence to it. First, regionalisation is theoretically shown to be the only viable answer to the triple EU crisis of identity (lack of trust and political disenchantment), legitimacy (autonomism and secessionism) and efficiency (the fiscal crisis, lower spending, higher taxes etc.), because only regions can maintain inter-personal solidarity at a sufficiently large territorial scale to still produce legitimate and viable policy outputs. Second, drawing on examples from three dimensions of regionalism – intra-state: growing regional authority as such; supra-state: regional parliamentary empowerment through the early warning system; and inter-state: more and more cross-border regional cooperation – the paper provides evidence that, in de Rougemont's words (2012 [1947]: 96), Europe "is already much more united than it thinks."
