Europeanization of sub-national governance in unitary states: Estonia and Finland

Abstract

The Europeanization of sub-national institutions has been on the research agenda for some time. There are arguments both for presuming a growing power of regional actors, a gradual weakening of the nation states, and for emphasizing the continuous importance and renewal capacity of the states. The mechanisms by which this process takes place are less well known and there is a scarcity of comparative empirical studies presenting evidence for either of the above arguments. In order to shed light on the influencing factors in the process, this article analyses and discusses the Europeanization process in two unitary member states, Estonia and Finland. The policy area in focus is regional policy. The results suggest that the Europeanization process is not straightforward, but is conditioned largely by domestic policy practices and institutional constellations. In the Estonian case, the brief period of independence has been characterized by institutional turbulence, which has eventually led to a centralized style of regional policymaking. In the case of Finland, the EU impact was accommodated by new institutional and processual practices, but these arrangements proved much too weak to challenge the domestic actors, who were not prepared to play the game by the European rules.

Keywords:

• Europeanization
• sub-national institutions
• regional policy
• governance

Notes

¹The term European Community (EC) refers to the body consisting of the three European Communities before the Maastricht Treaty. The EU refers to the body created by the Treaty on European Union, consisting of three pillars, with the European Communities flanked by the two intergovernmental pillars of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and Justice and Home Affairs (JHA).

²It is interesting to note that the concept of multi-level governance was first developed in the context of EU regional policy (Marks 1993).

³TACIS (Technical Assistance for the Commonwealth of Independent States) is a grant-financed technical assistance programme for 13 Eastern European and Central Asian countries, that aims at supporting the transition process in these countries.

⁴The importance of the legal and administrative infrastructure instead of just the ‘transposition’ of legislation was already stressed in the 1995 White Paper on regulatory alignment (Sedelmeier and Wallace 2000).

⁵In contrast to the situation in Estonia, in several Central and Eastern European countries institution-building at the regional level was far from being completed before the EU accession negotiations started (Keating and Hughes 2003).

⁶ http://www.riik.ee/et/valitsus/r3koalitsioon.htm#_Toc36494772, accessed 14 April 2004.