Macro-regional strategies of the European Union, Russia and multilevel governance in northern Europe

Introduction

When the first macro-regional strategy of the European Union (EU) – the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR) – was launched in 2009, the then Commissioner for Regional Policy, Paweł Samecki, described it as a ‘new animal,’ presenting something entirely different and allowing the EU to coordinate its policies in the region in a ‘new modern way’ (quoted by Joenniemi 2010, 33). His successor, Johannes Hahn, went even one step further and argued that the EUSBSR was designed to serve as a ‘new model for co-operation’ and aimed ‘to inspire other regions’ (Hahn 2010, 2) in Europe. Hahn’s successor in office, Corina Creţu, eventually was again more prosaic by describing the Strategy’s raison d’être as a way for EU member states ‘to pool their resources together and find joint solution to common challenges’ (Creţu 2015, 4). Still, since the endorsement of the EUSBSR, other ‘macro-regions’ have started to self-identify and are currently at different stages of development. The European Council – the Union’s gathering of heads of states and governments – has since endorsed the EU Strategies for the Danube and Adriatic–Ionian regions in 2011 and 2014, respectively; the EU’s Strategy for the Alpine Region was finally approved in 2015. As a consequence of this ‘macro-regional fever’ (Dühr 2011, 3), all but nine EU member states – Belgium, Cyprus, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom – are engaged in a ‘macro-regional adventure’ of sorts – some countries even in three, such as Slovenia and Germany – together with a significant number of non-EU partner countries that are considered part of a given macro-region (see Gänzle and Kern 2016 for a comprehensive overview).

While the EU Strategies for the Danube and Adriatic–Ionian regions include a large number of non-EU countries (such as Ukraine and Moldova in the Danube, and Montenegro and Albania in the Adriatic–Ionian), the view of the initiators of the EUSBSR was ‘that Russia should only be informed and associated through existing institutional structures, in particular the so-called ‘Northern Dimension’’ (Ahner 2016, ix). The ‘Northern Dimension’ is an EU initiative that was launched in 1999 with the aim of reconciling EU regional and external policies in northeastern Europe and constructing a framework for multilateral cooperation including, in particular, the Russian Federation; eventually, in 2006, it was decided to turn the ‘Northern Dimension’ into a common policy of the EU, Iceland, Norway, and the Russian Federation (Gänzle 2011, 3). The EUSBSR, however, primarily includes EU member states – several of which nourish an ambiguous, if not reluctant attitude vis-à-vis Russia, such as the three Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) – and has thus been conceived as an EU-internal strategy.

The concept of a ‘macro-region’ is well established in political economy and geography as well as in international relations (IR) and spatial planning (see McMasters and van der Zwet 2016; Gänzle 2016). Since the inception of EU macro-regional strategies, however, the idea has gained considerable prominence at the intersection of these disciplines, in particular (political) geography, spatial planning, and political science/IR (see Chilla et al. 2017). A ‘macro-region’ – according to the definition put forth by Paweł Samecki – comprises ‘an area including territory from a number of different countries or regions associated with one or more common features or challenges’ (European Commission 2009, 1, original in bold). Conceptually, a macro-region is perhaps best conceived of as an intermediate level or ‘meso-structure’ (Christiansen 1997) between the EU and (sub)national level of governance territorially, sharing some common needs and challenges functionally. The management of common pool resources, such as a common sea or a river system (see Ostrom 1990), calls for some form of cooperation (or conflict management for that matter) to master threats and challenges among ‘stakeholders’ – such as countries, cities, and regions located on the shores or international organizations and civil society. The Baltic Sea region, for example, includes one of the most vulnerable maritime ecosystems and numbers among the most threatened seas on the globe (Pyhälä 2012). With a view to the number of stakeholders engaged – in particular, the nine governments of the Baltic rim countries: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Russia – problems of collective action are almost inevitable. While governments and other authorities may be able to agree on some basic need for cooperation, varying problem perceptions and degrees of affectedness endure and the availability of resources continues to complicate functional or need-driven cooperation quite significantly. This involves the management and balancing of objectives that often conflict across different sectors and levels of governance, as is necessary, for example, in the fields of tourism, the preservation of eco-systems, or the maintenance of an economically viable navigation route. These examples all need to be reconciled either within a single country or between countries for any given macro-region to function and simultaneously address potential free riding. Differing problem perceptions and awareness may also be underpinned by varying degrees of a shared identity and a common sense of ‘region-ness’ (Hettne and Söderbaum (2000). Given its well-established track record in terms of breadth and depth of regional cooperation, it is certainly fair to describe the Baltic Sea region as a poster child for collaboration involving a wide range of regional actors from the local to the inter-state levels.

It is important to note that there is no ‘macro-regional policy’ as such in place. It is rather a strategic plan designed together with stakeholders of the macro-region with a goal to achieve several objectives in a comprehensive manner. Often these goals are under conditions of uncertainty, hence the term ‘strategy.’ Many of these goals, as we saw earlier, are not easily reconcilable, but need to be brought into a comprehensive design capable of mitigating possible conflicts between them. This is a source for misinterpreting the rationale of macro-regional strategies that still causes some frustration. Various stakeholders have expected that the strategies would soon be underwritten by financial, if not even legislative and institutional capacities in their own right. In fact, the question of budget-lines reserved for macro-regional strategies regularly appears in some discussions involving member states. However, since the inception of the first EU macro-regional strategy, the EU has subscribed to a principle that became renowned as the ‘Three No’s’ (no new institutions, no new funding, no new legislation) which means that the creation of any new or additional EU funding, institutional structures or legislation associated with macro-regions are being ruled out. Still, EU macro-regional strategies have achieved some results. As we shall see, a rather dynamic ‘macro-regional governance architecture’ has been developed involving particular national contact points, policy (area) coordinators, horizontal (actions) coordinators, flagship project managers at the national level, and a high-level group at the level of the EU Council. The inception of macro-regional strategies has certainly had considerable effects on the way European Structural and Investment Funds are being constructed for the near future (particularly visible following the adoption of the multiannual financial framework (MFF) for 2014–2020), yet this has not triggered autonomy in financial terms. More importantly, the resources available for cohesion policy in general and the conduct of transnational cooperation have been reduced considerably over the current EU budgetary period when compared to the 2007–2013 MFF. This context of fiscal consolidation within which the strategies were born is likely to affect their development, for instance, by forcing them to consistently demonstrate their added value.

Under EU cohesion policy, a ‘macro-regional strategy’ is defined as ‘​​an integrated framework, endorsed by the European Council, to address common challenges in a given geographical area' where both Member States and third countries are located. A macro-regional strategy is based on five core principles construed around the need to integrate existing policy frameworks, programs, and financial instruments; coordinate between sectorial policies, actors, or different tiers of government; cooperate between countries and sectors; involve policy-makers at different levels of governance; and to create partnerships between EU member states and non-member countries (see European Commission 2013, 3). From this angle, macro-regional strategies seek to create both ‘platforms for coordination’ and ‘frameworks for reference’ to integrate structures already in place such as the Council of the Baltic Sea States or the Northern Dimension and its respective polices and financial resources. Furthermore, they aim to improve cross-sectoral perspectives on policy areas that are closely intertwined such as maritime and land-based threats to environmental degradation. Macro-regional strategies do not ‘reinvent the wheel’ and measures have long been taken to mitigate ‘silo-ization’ of actors and policies; however, they challenge existing structures of European Structural and Investment Funds as well as European Territorial Cooperation and thereby create opportunities for institutional change in view of renewed territorial governance in the EU – a process which can be captured by the notion of ‘experimentalist governance’ (Sabel and Zeitlin 2010, 2012; Gänzle and Mirtl 2017; Gänzle 2017). In addition, they forge more comprehensive overview involving a great number of activities across the board for the entire macro-region – and, perhaps more importantly, the prospect of a comparative perspective between Europe’s ‘macro-regions.’ In this vain, the prefix ‘macro’ creates comparable territories across the EU, turning this form of regionalization into something generically in line with the very ‘essence of the Union’ (Joenniemi 2010, 33).

It has been suggested that the ‘soft space’ of macro-regional strategies could ‘harden’ institutionally in the long run (Metzger and Schmitt 2012; Faludi 2012, 208), thereby fostering a rift between the northern and the southern Europe by embedding territorial differentiation. Yet these effects are likely to be minor given the scope of the strategies, and overall seem to be amply mitigated by the function that the strategies perform as arenas for an exchange of best practices and mutual learning – across sectors as well as levels of governance, including both member and partner countries of the EU alike.

With its strong focus on functional cooperation, the EUSBSR could even provide a future springboard for reestablishing relations with the Russian Federation, via the active participation of its northwesterly territories in the strategy and based on functional needs, such as combatting pollution of the Baltic Sea to which, in particular, the Kaliningrad region contributes quite significantly. However, as EU-Russia relations have cooled down in the wake of the Russian annexation of Crimea, this is currently not a realistic scenario. Hence, in a nutshell, macro-regional strategies aim at nothing less than establishing ‘regional building blocks for EU-wide policies, marshaling national approaches into more coherent EU-level implementation’ (European Commission 2013, 5). These ‘regional building blocks’ aim at fostering a genuinely transnational perspective and drawing functional cooperation and territorial cohesion closer together, and further encourage collective action of public and private actors across all levels of EU governance in areas such as transport, infrastructure, economic development, public health, and environmental policy. It is the core purpose of this special issue to provide a coherent perspective on this new tool of EU cohesion policy complementing the triad of social, economic, and territorial cohesion in the EU – introduced by the Treaty of Maastricht in 1994 and completed by the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009. Macro-regional strategies also have the potential to influence other policies of the EU, such as environmental policy, as well.

The Baltic Sea region deserves our attention. It forms the core of wider northern Europe and is located at the interface of two regional seas: the Arctic Ocean and the North Sea (see Figure 1​​). Furthermore, it forms a potential strategic link between Eurasia’s North and the Far East on the one side, and Western Europe on the other. The Arctic Ocean, Baltic Sea, and North Sea have been consolidating their patterns of regional collaboration over the past few years. While the Arctic region remains somewhat separate given the strategic interests of the United States and Russia, with the focus on military security matters growing stronger in the light of the Ukraine crisis, both the North Sea and, in particular, the Baltic Sea have increasingly been framed as macro-regions. Although the North Sea has not been addressed by an EU macro-regional strategy yet, the North Sea Commission has explicitly sought to draw ‘inspiration from the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region’ (NSC 2011, 2) in its ambitions to foster coordination and collaboration among the countries along its shoreline.

Figure 1. EU Member states and partner countries of the EUSBSR.

Analytically, the contributions draw on the lens of the multilevel governance approach that considers the interplay between local, national, regional, and international levels, taking geographical scales into consideration and immediately directing our focus to ‘three novel developments of contemporary political life’ (Piattoni 2010, 249). These are political mobilization within and across institutional boundaries, policy-making that blurs the lines between policy-makers and policy-receivers, and, ultimately, the emergence of a new polity that produces policy decisions that become less and less understandable as fixed and established (see Piattoni 2010). Against this backdrop, the special issue pursues four core objectives. First, almost ten years after the inception of the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region, it analyzes and evaluates its impact in terms of fostering policy coherence and efficient policy outcomes along a series of agreed priority areas and actions. Second, it assesses the development of regional cooperation in the North Sea area, exploring whether or not the EUSBSR provides a template that informs ‘macro-regional’ cooperation in the immediate vicinity (policy diffusion). Third, it assesses how third-party countries such as Norway and Russia are being integrated into the decision and policy-making processes of a primarily (but not exclusively) internal strategy. Finally, it discerns the scope of political mobilization and empowerment of cities and the rise of networking regions in the Baltic macro-region by focusing on the mushrooming of city twinning, the increase in regional capacities for foreign affairs, and the co-optation of existing regional bodies into EU policy-making in the Baltic Sea region.

Stefan Gänzle will apply the multilevel governance approach in order to explore the dynamics of the EUSBSR. The aim of this new instrument of EU (cohesion) policy is to enhance horizontal and vertical coordination between existing actors and institutions as well as to improve the implementation of available funds and legislation vis-à-vis matters of environmental degradation and economic development. He discloses the various dynamics triggered by the EUSBSR with regard to the inclusion of civil society and in general non-EU as well as subnational actors – dynamics that, conversely, have been met with increasing skepticism by the Russian leadership – especially in the aftermath of the so-called Ukraine crisis. For instance, the Nordic Council shut down its offices (in St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad, among other centers) and operations in Russia after it became clear that partners were at risk of being considered collaborators dealing with ‘foreign agents’ by the authorities. Similarly, Russian participation in the Interreg Baltic Sea Program (2014-20) has been disrupted for some time. Although the EUSBSR is now operating in a more hostile environment, this chapter argues in favor of a continued effort to depoliticize and functionalize transborder governance and administration across the countries located on the shores of the Baltic Sea.

Mike Danson turns to the ‘emerging’ North Sea Region. Each region and nation across Europe has experienced some form of economic crisis recently, with international networks and cooperation having provided a forum for learning and collaboration on resilience and recovery. In this context, the historical, enduring, and overlapping linkages between the Nordic and Celtic countries and those in the Baltic Sea region suggest that there are lessons and interactions that deserve exploration in the era of EU macro-regions. This contribution examines how the economies and structures of these macro-regions have performed since the millennium, in particular with regard to the development of innovative models for resilient welfare states and sustainable economies. It then discusses whether the context of the proposed North Sea macro-region has facilitated sharing and dialog on solutions to developmental issues and how transferable these are. It examines how institutions such as the regional development agencies and European Partnerships have been involved in and responded to the crisis in these environments, and how these contrast with the roles and experiences in those territories with less well developed institutional landscapes.

Lassi Heininen shifts the focus of attention toward the North and asks whether Baltic Sea cooperation holds any lessons for unfolding Arctic cooperation. There is a growing international interest toward the Arctic region and its rich natural resources, with new actors concerning themselves with the region and its future development. For the time being, the Arctic is politically stable and peaceful without armed conflicts, which also holds for the wider post-Cold War Baltic Sea region – though there are signs of some trouble, e.g. with the kidnapping of an Estonian border guard in an alleged Russian raid. Nonetheless, underpinning the present situation in both regions is a fundamental shift from the confrontation of the Cold War to international cooperation across national borders, starting in the late 1980s, and accelerating with deeper regional cooperation in the Baltic Sea region and modern region-building in the Arctic through the 1990s. Here, the Baltic Sea region was a forerunner to a new kind of trans-boundary cooperation across the former Iron Curtain, as cooperation between the region’s universities and cities well indicated, and a model for region-building in the Arctic, as shown by the Barents Euro-Arctic Council. In the twenty-first century, however, the Arctic has been increasingly transformed into a hotspot of international competition and rivalry, with new actors developing and asserting their own agendas in the region. As a response to this new situation, the Arctic states have shifted their national priorities and policy objectives toward the Arctic region, and remapped themselves as Arctic countries. These strategies and policies aid stability and promote existing international cooperation, but are not based so much on new kinds of regional cooperation or globalization as they are on the promotion of economic activities and business in the region. Parallel to this process, the EU launched its Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region, as well as its Communication on the Arctic and its follow-up Joint Communication on Arctic policy. These latter developments can be interpreted as indicating the EU’s growing interest in increasing its already substantial role by becoming a more significant actor in its own right within the Arctic.

The following two contributions zoom in on the significance of two of the central countries of Baltic Sea cooperation, Sweden and the Russian Federation. Malin Stegmann McCallion and Alex Brianson draw on an investigation of Sweden’s participation in the EUSBSR to ask what it can reveal in terms of how regional integration’s ‘awkward’ states – those regularly considered by their partners to be beyond the regional mainstream – secure their preferences despite their label. They focus on the everyday level of regional integration politics, investigating the ongoing work of officials charged with making the EUSBSR function in practice. They thereby seek to add to existing macro-level analyses of Sweden’s place and position in the EU, and their findings – albeit tentatively – suggest that, under certain conditions, awkward states can offset their status against a reputation for everyday effectiveness and reliability.

Andrey Makarychev and Alexander Sergunin turn to the role of Russia in regional cooperation in light of the EUSBSR. They examine how the EU and the Russian Federation interact in the Baltic Sea region, building on an analysis of some leading Russian schools of foreign policy. The authors lift the analysis to the broader set of EU-Russian relations focusing on specific issues such as trade, energy, transportation, environmental protection, tourism, visa regimes, education, and youth in the Baltic Sea region. The contribution demonstrates that Russian and EU regional strategies are compatible at times, though they are quite often ignorant of the other, if not even confrontational. Ultimately, the authors argue that subregional institutions and regimes assume a vital role in the promotion of the EU-Russian dialog in the Baltic Sea region and have the potential to bridge the misperceived gap between EU and Russian strategies for the Baltic Sea region.

Subsequent contributors seek to deepen the exploration into some core arguments of the multilevel governance approach regarding the mobilization of the subnational – i.e. the regional and local – levels of governance. Pertti Joenniemi and Alexander Sergunin provide a study evaluating city twinning in northern Europe. They argue that over the last two decades, city twinning became quite popular in northern Europe. This form of coining transborder communality was particularly strong in the Nordic countries with their long-standing cooperative experience, but also included the Baltic States and Russia. Many North European municipalities view twinning as an instrument available for both solving local problems and ensuring sustainable development. In some cases, it has amounted to a kind of local foreign policy (paradiplomacy). This contribution probes the burgeoning phenomenon by exploring four city pairs engaged in twinning (Tornio–Haparanda, Narva–Ivangorod, Imatra–Svetogorsk, and Valga–Valka) as a way of bolstering their somewhat marginal positions through endeavors aimed at reducing the divisive impact of state-to-state borders. More generally, the article explores the dynamics and meaning of twinning in a broad and critical perspective. It is argued that northern European twins do not just bridge the ‘trust gaps’ that have traditionally existed at the boundaries of nation-states, but they also create – to varying degrees – communality and shared spaces across national borders. In particular, the article questions whether trans-nationalization at the city level is carried out by the cities themselves linking up with various forms of regionalization, by Europeanization as well as internationalization at large, or whether this rather reflects the policies pursued by the states to which the cities belong. In exploring the interplay between the various relevant actors, city twinning is probed particularly in the context of the EUSBSR.

Harald Baldersheim and Morten Øgård, in turn, focus on the networking capabilities of northern European regions as a precondition to active involvement of the subnational levels in EUSBSR matters. Regions’ capacities to form networks are an important feature of regional cooperation. Drawing on historical data from a 2006–2008 survey – before the EUSBSR was launched – among elected regional politicians from certain Nordic countries, this contribution assesses why Nordic regions engage in network activities and what new organizational patterns of collaboration emerge from them. It argues that through this process, regions are becoming partners as well as players in regional cooperation and European integration, so that a movement of ‘integrative regionalism’ is taking shape, in contrast to more traditional forms of inward-looking ‘identity regionalism,’ or self-centered ‘competitive regionalism.’

Lars Gschwend and Romulo Pinheiro focus on how one hegemonic idea – excellence which has significant impact on science and higher education policy – was translated in two Nordic countries. Building on key concepts emanating from political science and organizational sociology, the paper assesses how excellence was locally translated by policy-makers, leading to the rise of a series of policy measures aimed at fostering excellence in science across the board. In doing this, we investigate a key empirical dimension: the policy mechanisms or instruments launched at Nordic and national levels in the form of Centers of Excellence.

Finally, Fabrizio Tassinari puts the overall findings into perspective with a number of seasoned arguments vis-à-vis the governance of Europe’s North–South Divide and the future of macro-regions. This contribution proposes an alternative reading to Europe’s macro-regional dynamic by dwelling on the multifaceted factors behind the gap between Europe’s North and South, which has become increasingly apparent since the EU’s sovereign debt crisis. In order to pursue this objective, the author argues that unpacking the different understandings and ensuing practices of governance can showcase Europe’s North–South Divide. After reviewing competing definitions of governance in the European literature and policy-making, the contribution sets out to qualify and quantify the nature of Europe’s governance gap, by sampling significant domestic discourses and comparing some of the most relevant governance indicators available. The author further explains how the pursuit of ‘convergence’ at the European level has in effect become cause of, rather than prospective solution to, the governance gap. This assertion stands in stark contrast with the dominant discourse, which over the past two decades has accompanied the emergence of macro-regions. While similarly linked to the literature on the EU’s multilevel governance, macro-regional dynamics offer an alternative mode of European integration to the rigid, centralized EU mechanisms that have come under increasing pressure during the Euro crisis. In a Europe of macro-regions, accommodating and adjusting to diversity translates to ‘convergence’. The North–South Divide challenges this notion and Tassinari concludes by offering some comparative observations on whether and how Europe’s North–South dynamic impacts on Europe’s macro-regional dynamics.

This special issue thus covers a dizzying array of topics of growing global significance. Macro-regional strategies present an experimental new form of cooperation that could potentially eliminate or otherwise lessen the ubiquitous fact of political conditionality based on power-relations, with cooperation on truly equal terms made possible by the strategies’ functional focus on common challenges. The EUSBSR in particular highlights the importance of embedding more recent EU member states into cooperative frameworks, with the platform serving as a potential avenue for future EU-Russian ‘reconciliation’. To the Baltic Sea’s north, the Arctic is increasingly attracting actors and presenting the world with a kind of paradox, as the effects of climate change offer the surrounding states access to resources whose utilization could only further contribute toward global climate change. While the costs of exploiting Arctic resources fall, to the Baltic Sea’s west, the North Sea offers a case where resources have long been utilized (oil, fish, etc.) but at a growing cost, again raising the question of the utility of cooperative structures in managing resources, with the added dimension of nationalist developments in Scotland. City twinning developments provide a case study into how political power is being diffused away from its traditional national core, with the rise of para-diplomacy. Another governance development is raised with the emergence of the North–South Divide in Europe, which is significant and of growing importance since the debt crisis hit Europe. What unifies these varied perspectives is the geographic interface of the areas concerned, hinging around the Baltic Sea, and a multilevel governance approach that allows the dynamics of these diverse cases to be analyzed in succinct way.

Acknowledgments

The editor wishes to acknowledge the research and editorial support of Daniel Matthews-Ferrero (College of Europe, Natolin) and Sarah Wing (Ph.D. student, Central European University, Budapest) and thank the University of Agder for its generous financial support. I am grateful to the comments of several reviewers and the journal editor, Terry Creighton. The cartography in this chapter has been supplied by Jamie Quinn from the University of Plymouth. Finally, I thank the authors for their efforts in producing such an impressive collection of academic papers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.​​​​

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stefan Gänzle

Stefan Gänzle is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Science and Management, University of Agder. Previous affiliations include the German Development Institute in Bonn, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and the University of Jena. Together with Kristine Kern he is the editor of Macro-regional Europe: Theoretical Approaches and Empirical Evidence (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).