EUROPE

Autumn 2009

by Anna Terron i Cusi / Javier Sanchez

Involving local political leaders in EU decision making is a longstanding pledge that has yet to be fulfilled, say Anna Terrón and Javier Sánchez. They trace the steps now being taken to ensure that multi-level governance will soon become a reality

Scratch a local politician in most parts of Europe and increasingly you’ll find a eurosceptic, or at least a disillusioned europhile. Regional and local government actors, whether elected representatives or officials, are becoming more critical of European integration and of the EU political process. Although they may have very different responsibilities, work in different capacities and reflect different political traditions; many of them share the same feelings of estrangement and disaffection regarding EU politics.

It’s obviously hard to measure, yet easy to dismiss as no more than a reflection of a more general sense of europessimism currently being exacerbated by the economic recession. But in fact its significance is far greater. It is negative in terms of achieving the full efficacy of EU legislation, and is also very detrimental to the European project as a whole because EU member states need their local authorities to create and promote the whole concept of European citizenship.

Most attempts so far to enhance the participation of sub-state authorities in the EU political process have shared a number of common features. First and foremost, there has been the institutional approach, which began with the creation of the Committee of the Regions, and led on to EU treaty revisions. It is a trend that has seen the creation of various bodies and the development of greater institutional representation as the best solutions to the whole problem of increasing regional and local participation in EU decision making. Yet for all that, the drive for greater political representation of Europe’s elected grass-roots representatives has come up against major obstacles.

The principal barriers are the enormous differences between the regions themselves. They vary so much in size, economic development and even demographic make-up, and of course they also occupy very different administrative positions within their own country. This fragmentation makes their needs and interests so heterogeneous that it is very difficult indeed to conceive of a single solution for their political representation at the EU level. That’s the first major problem, and the second is that, although regions and large cities have long argued that EU’s own political legitimacy will ultimately depend on their having more say in the EU’s supra-national political system, the truth is that it’s a system that is much more sensitive to effective capacity than to the finer details of democratic representation.

Other initiatives aimed at resolving the problem have consisted of “tripartite agreements”, and “structured dialogues” that were aimed at taking a softer and more governance-based approach to increasing the level of regional or local government participation in EU politics. But all these initiatives have proved to be too weak, and some of them were before long “officially” discarded, as was the case with the tripartite agreements. In all these cases, the initiatives were not sustained with the energy needed to make them credible, nor were they made subject to reappraisal and continuous evaluation. And once again, none of these instruments took sufficiently into account the problem of the diversity and disparities between Europe’s many regions.

The upshot has been that the special knowledge and experience of different European regions has not been harnessed to the EU policymaking process. Instead, a highly standardised approach to EU governance has created a regional dimension to the legislative process, legitimised by widespread voter participation that creates the illusion of bringing it closer to the citizen, but which has not ensured that the special interests of different regions have a special place in the political system.

It is also true to say that a very real part of the problem of empowering Europe’s regions is that all these initiatives have been solely at EU level, without any strong ideas or recommendations having been introduced that would improve political cooperation within the EU member states. Yet for any serious initiative on improving multi-level governance in Europe to succeed, an essential element has to be present that so far have been largely missing. Although the EU has tried to accommodate regional interests by creating various “spaces” for political participation, it has never worried about the kinds of technical and political capacities it should be making available to help cities and regions participate effectively in the whole EU system of governance, including the key question of ensuring compliance with EU law.

The basic problem, therefore, is that the role of regional and even municipal administrations in furthering European integration has been neglected for far too long. When the Maastricht treaty came into force back in 1993, attention was indeed given to the regions. Their importance was recognised through the creation of the Committee of the Regions, and by enabling member states to involve their regions in the work of the Council of ministers. But in Spain, for instance, it took until 2004 before a sound system for involving the country’s autonomous communities in EU affairs was introduced. In the five years since then, Catalonia for one has made full use of the new means placed at its disposal, but along with the other regions of Spain that enjoy legislative powers, it is still aiming to achieve an even greater degree of participation that would be more in tune with the Spanish Constitution and the status granted under it by its Statute of Autonomy.

In the meantime, the EU institutions have themselves been seeking to establish more direct contact with citizens, at times by by-passing the regions and local authorities. For all that, it’s generally fair to say that EU policies have not quite succeeded in registering with citizens’ awareness. The key lesson to be learned from all this is that EU policies and those of member states too have to be brought closer to the people by local political figures, who in turn need to become more positively involved in the shaping of the future course of the European project.

In short, we need an action plan. This means creating consensus among the EU’s political institutions at both national and regional level. It would also involve developing sound guidelines and the solid knowledge base that has so far been signally lacking. This plan would need to adopt a flexible “test-and-error” approach.

Now the Committee of the Regions has adopted a White Paper on Multi-level Governance, with the aim of altering the ways in which European regions and major cities participate in EU affairs. Published in June 2009, it calls for the much greater involvement of regional and municipal authorities in the design and implementation of European policies.

It is an attempt to look realistically at the whole state of affairs in the context of the Lisbon treaty, and tries to project an ambitious new approach. The White Paper offers the means for the CoR to play a leading role in creating a whole new dimension to EU governance. The thinking is that once the necessary degree of institutional consensus is reached, the proposed Charter on Multi-level Governance can become an instrument to supervise and challenge not only other EU institutions but most of all the member states themselves.

This would clearly be a challenge to the present institutional set-up. And while it obviously should respect the present distribution of responsibilities and regional structures in EU member states, there can be little doubt it should also be quite assertive in the way it addresses the practices and existing relationships between the different tiers of national government that at present constitute the EU’s system of governance. The watchword for greater regional involvement in EU affairs will need to be on political cooperation if EU decision making is not to be made less efficient.

It is going to be equally important that this re-balancing of EU institutional competences should be accompanied by differentiation of the various regions. The EU should certainly not succumb to the pressures for political decentralisation, but decentralised bodies also have to act responsibly and coherently. Different regional cultures, responsibilities and capacities need to be given different levels of involvement in the process. In other words, subsidiarity implies co-responsibility; those who implement and transpose EU legislation must have ways to have a say in policymaking. If this type of new EU system is to work well, each region needs to be granted just the right level of responsibility, and this principle has to be both understood and properly implemented by the member states.

EU-level actors will of course have important parts to play in developing the whole concept of multi-level governance, especially in connection to impact assessment. The European Commission as well as the member states have already made it very clear that engaging the regional level in this will be essential, and the regions are for their part well aware that they need to organise themselves better if they are to participate effectively in impact assessment, and it seems clear that its technical coordination and organisation should become part of the CoR’s multi-level governance role.

At the beginning of next year, Spain takes over the revolving six-month presidency of the Council, hopefully with the Lisbon treaty firmly in place. The Spanish government has already expressed its will to give special attention to furthering the development of multi-level governance, and will be working hard on this during its presidency. The European project is clearly on the threshold of a new and important phase.