Europe enters the age of regions

Date: 30/05/1996

AFTER centuries of ever-increasing political and cultural dominance by their power-hungry national capitals, the provinces of Europe are finally fighting back.

Over the past decade, from Scotland to northern Italy, a flurry of regional movements which put local interests above those of the nation have emerged as major political forces, battling for a return of some of the powers they lost to central administration and the 19th century's concept of modernity.

For years, regionalism as a political force seemed to concentrate on efforts to resuscitate local languages, dialects and customs, attempts which - with a few notable exceptions such as Catalonia - rarely moved beyond the realm of folklore revival.

But an increasing disaffection with the national political establishment, observed throughout western Europe since the end of the Cold War, has led large numbers of voters in countries as diverse as Italy and the UK to switch their electoral allegiance to regional leaders who a few years ago would have been dismissed as hopeless mavericks.

The most spectacular example of this new political trend in the European Union is undoubtedly Italy, where the Lombard politician Umberto Bossi has led his openly separatist Lega Nord to become one of the country's major political forces.

And while few observers credit Bossi's bid for the independence of northern Italy (which he bizarrely calls Padania) with much chance of success, the Lega Nord has become enough of a threat to prompt Italy's new Prime Minister Romano Prodi to opt for constitutional reform and announce the introduction of a strong dose of federalism in the unitarian Italian state.

For Europe's highly-centralised nation states - in which centuries of sometimes bloody battle and cultural warfare against their restive provinces had seemingly left central governments in total control of national territories - the political strength of the regionalist challenge has come as an unwelcome surprise.

Its astonishing dynamism became most apparent in the unstable world of post-Cold War Central and Eastern Europe, where regionalism led to the break-up of federal states such as Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, despite the western powers' initial efforts to prevent it.

But while few expect regionalism to have similarly dramatic consequences anywhere in the EU (with bilingual Belgium sometimes cited as the only potential candidate for a break-up), there is a growing awareness that the political slogan of a “Europe of Regions” might gradually become more than just a buzz-word.

Indeed, in their fight for greater autonomy, the regions of Europe have seized on the Union and its process of gradual integration as a powerful ally.

The decision of the EU's nation states increasingly to pool sovereignty over a number of economic and political matters in Brussels has been turned into a powerful argument for devolving other competences to regional authorities, amid warnings that a failure to do this would lead to more and more decision-making being dangerously disconnected from the perception and the understanding of ordinary citizens.

At the same time, national governments' self-acknowledged inability to deal single-handedly with cross-border issues such as ecology, the economy and defence is giving increasing credit to the notion that central government does not always know best.

This new perception is influencing even parties with a long history of allegiance to centralisation such as the Spanish Conservatives, whose readiness and ability to achieve compromise with their old foe, the Catalan leader Jordi Pujol, after the last election took many observers by surprise.

Attempts to defuse tensions with restive regions by at least partially acceding to their demands has led a number of EU member states to consider switching to a more federal constitutional structure, frequently citing the strongly federal Germany as the example they want to follow.

When Prodi announced such a move in a German news magazine soon after his electoral success in March, he was following in the footsteps of his Belgian colleague Jean-Luc Dehaene, who introduced federalism in Belgium in 1993, regarding it as the best bet for keeping the two halves of the country together.

Without venturing quite so far, the leadership of the UK's opposition Labour Party, which is widely tipped to win the next British general election, has promised to embark on unprecedented constitutional reform, creating a Scottish national parliament endowed with some of the rights hitherto jealously guarded by Westminster.

This new Labour flexibility is undoubtedly related to the growing success of the Scottish National Party, which officially battles for full Scottish independence and is welcoming the EU as a de facto ally in moves towards the devolution of power from Whitehall and Westminster.

At the institutional level, the growing self-awareness of Europe's regions, fuelled by the necessity to compete for jobs and public hand-outs, has led to an increasing number of regional representations being opened in Brussels.

Not surprisingly, the most spectacular and perhaps most efficient regional presence has been established by Germany's Länder, all of which have set up sometimes sumptuous liaison offices in the Euro-capital with staff and budgets which can easily compete with those of a small country's fully-fledged embassy.

All in all, some 80 regional bodies have established representations in Brussels to lobby for their specific local interests, a development which has been observed with great suspicion by national governments.

In one dramatic example, when the German-speaking Italian province of Alto Adige decided to share offices with its neighbouring Austrian province Tyrol, the national government decided to step in and prevent it from carrying out its intention, citing as justification an Italian law banning the country's provinces from creating their own institutional links with the outside world.

The onslaught of the regions has also led to the establishment of the eponymous Committee, a comparatively new EU institution set up in March 1994 which has been struggling ever since against its own lack of homogeneity and formal powers to establish a significant presence in Brussels.

And in perhaps the most spectacular development of all, regions of the most federal-minded EU member states have started to force open the gates of the one European institution long considered the exclusive domain of national governments - the Council of Ministers.

After a legal battle against the federal government in Bonn, the German Länder won the right to send a representative to all Council meetings directly affecting their constitutional prerogatives in areas as diverse as culture, education and health.

Meanwhile, Belgium's often feuding regions have agreed on a rotating system of Council representation, equally sharing out their right to sit in on Council deliberations which affect their constitutional powers.

The growing weight of the regions in Brussels should not, however, disguise the fact that true political power in the Union continues to reside with national governments and legislatures.

The regions' attempts to participate, at least in an observer capacity, in the Intergovernmental Conference on EU reform, and their bid to seize on the Maastricht Treaty's revision to strengthen the role of the Committee of Regions, has been firmly rebuffed by EU member state governments.

But the regions may well have history on their side. With the transfer of power from the national to the European level set to be boosted both through the IGC negotiations and the advent of economic and monetary union, the pressure for more subsidiarity in Europe is unlikely to decrease.