The Europeanization of Regions in Eastern and Western Europe: Theoretical Perspectives

Abstract

Today we witness the process of Europeanization of subnational regions in the 2004 pre-enlargement EU countries and in the new member states. This article reflects on our knowledge about this phenomenon, especially with regard to an East – West comparison. It asks: which promising theoretical approaches have been developed so far for the analysis of (a) the institutional options the Europeanization process provides for the regions and (b) the Europeanization of policy-making in the regions. It points outs that current research is in danger of overestimating formal institutional convergence when comparing the Europeanization of regions, and of underestimating and/or overlooking the consequences of institutional reform for the future fabric of societies and regional political exchange. For the Europeanization of regional policy-making as well as for the impact of Europeanization on regional societies a theoretical framework is developed here.

Keywords:

• Europeanization
• accession countries
• policy-making
• institutions
• regionalization

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the VW-foundation for its generous support of our research project, ‘The Europeanization of Regions in Central and Eastern Europe: A Comparative Study of Hungary, Poland and Romania’.

Notes

¹The authors  research project ‘The Europeanization of Regions in Central and Eastern Europe. A Comparative Study of Hungary, Poland and Romania.’ puts special emphasis on this problem. The comparative analysis of Poland (regional tradition), Hungary (searching for a role of regions) and Romania (strong connection between ethnic divisions and regions) allows us to investigate different challenges to the mobilization and survival of regional civil societies.

²The literature on Europeanization is growing fast. For a report on the state-of-the-art see Featherstone, 2003 and Mair 2004. See also Sturm and Pehle, 2005 and Dyson and Götz, 2003a.

³For the distinction between ‘deconcentration’ and ‘decentralization’ see the French example (Nay, 2002: 131.)

⁴For a theoretical concept see Sturm, 2003. Here the approaches to policy research, which can be discussed in this article only relatively briefly, are explained in greater detail.