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Abstract
There is now a wealth of literature discussing how regional development and spatial planning practices in Central Eastern Europe have been shaped through the alignment with EU policy frameworks. However, scholars have tended to study governance dynamics in terms of adaptation and learning, paying thus little attention to how spatial policy change is inherently interlinked with the political contestation of nation-state spaces. This paper proposes to address this lack by combining insights from political economic work on state spatial restructuring and discourse theory. From this perspective, the institutionalization of spatial policies is examined as a political process in which particular understandings of space become seen legitimate and stabilized depending on how well they fit existing discourses. The paper demonstrates the added value of this approach through a case study of spatial policy change in post-1990 Hungary, and argues that the approach is more generally applicable to examine shifts in spatial policies and to address concerns with the increase in uneven development at different scales.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank to Harald Pieper for redrawing Figure 2.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
This paper is partly based on work funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research [NWO, grant number 450-04-142].
Notes
1 By referring to EUrope, this paper wishes to emphasize that Europe cannot be simply equated with the EU.
2 This title was accorded by Parliament to towns with more than 50,000 inhabitants. Subsequently, the 1994 modification granted the title also to county seats with less than 50,000 inhabitants.
3 It should be noted here that the Act is regulating land use only at the supra-local level.
4 In fact, this was Hungary's National Strategic Reference Framework, elaborated for the last years of the programming period during which Hungary was already member of the EU.
5 Somewhat misleadingly, the official English designation of the Ministry was Ministry of Agriculture and Regional Development.
6 Speeches in parliamentary debates were retrieved from the homepage of the Hungarian Parliament, www.parlament.hu and are referenced hereafter as follows: name of deputy, date/number of the speech.
7 The ROP in its final form did not contain the development objectives of regions; it was ‘regional’ only in the sense that projects were to be selected on a regional basis.
8 ‘Település', literally ‘settlement’ is commonly used in combination with the words ‘structure’, ‘network' or ‘development’ (policy) in Hungarian scholarly and policy literature.
9 In 2001, from a total population of about 10 million, nearly 2 million lived in Budapest. Only 8 cities had more than 100,000 inhabitants, with Debrecen (210,000) being second to the capital (OECD, Citation2001).
10 Next to the above-mentioned five, Székesfehérvár and Veszprém were selected as partner centres in the Central Transdanubian Region. Budapest was designated as ‘priority pole’.
11 EU candidate countries were precluded from the option of opt-outs by the Amsterdam Treaty of 1997 and committed to join the Monetary Union. The European Council asked the Hungarian government to work out an adjusted convergence programme update by 1 September 2006, demonstrating the economic measures the country will take to ensure price stability, sound public finances and strong sustainable growth conducive to employment creation.
12 Vidék, literally meaning ‘surroundings’ or ‘environment’, signifies also ‘the rest of the country’ (as opposed to Budapest), that is, the ‘countryside’ and provincial cities. At the same time, provincial (vidéki) cities have their own vidék, in the sense of their hinterland. Considering this richness of meaning, we have not translated the Hungarian term.
13 The party's name was Fidesz–Hungarian Civic Party from 1995.
14 The EU funds covered by the Common Strategic Framework (CSF), that is, the European Regional Development Fund, the European Social Fund, the Cohesion Fund, the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development and the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund.
15 According to Mendez et al.’s (Citation2013) comparative overview of the Commission's Position Papers covering all Member States, this relative neglect of the territorial dimension can be observed more generally.
16 To compare, in the programming period 2007–2013, 23% of the funding allocated through OPs co-financed by the EU was dedicated to the (7) regional OPs.