On the European and national political agenda, it may seem paradoxical, in the current situation, to speak of the Europe of Regions and the regionalist doctrine of the European Union.
The reference published opinion is dominated by the geopolitics of the big countries, the macroeconomics of the Eurozone and the microeconomics of the European single market.
The mesopolitics and mesoeconomy of Euroregions, metropolitan areas, city networks and, in general, European territorial cooperation groupings (EGTC), are observed with some contempt from the capitals and considered as endogenous variables of macroeconomic policy and financial decision decided in Brussels and Frankfurt.
Furthermore, within the framework of the adjustment policies in force, regional policies end up functioning as instruments for managing aggregate demand and, therefore, subject to the “stop-go” of these policies and their “discontinuation” in the transition between community frameworks of support and multi-annual programming periods.
The geopolitical relevance of a Europe of Regions
Three recent episodes further underline the geostrategic and geopolitical relevance of a Europe of Regions in the European project.
We are talking, firstly, about the refugee crisis and their full integration within the framework of a Europe of the Regions, secondly, about the precedent created by the recent British renegotiation within the European framework and the subsequent Brexit, which undermined the regional autonomies and which give rise to a new approach to the Europe of the Regions, lastly, we speak of the numerous international responsibilities and implications that currently burden the European Union with regard to the signing and implementation of major transoceanic trade and investment treaties (TTIP and Canada) and its complex regional implications for European territorial cohesion.
The central question that arises here is the order of relative importance of the themes on the agenda and the political priorities that are established when there is not time and resources to tackle all the problems at once.
In view of the serious problems on the agenda at the moment, it is very likely that some “minor issues” will have to be sacrificed and that one of these issues is, precisely, territorial cohesion within the European Union, for a majority of reasons when the “theory of stability and conditionality” prevails over the “theory of cohesion and solidarity”.
This is also the reason why we say that the European Union lacks a regionalist doctrine and that it is a "crime against Europe" not to take advantage of the potential of "distributed growth" that resides in the Europe of Regions, in the networks of cities and in the European territorial cooperation groupings.
A Regionalist Doctrine for the European Political Union
It's 2016, eight years have passed since the outbreak of the systemic crisis of European capitalism. The European economy has been practically stagnant since then and, therefore, doubts are legitimate about balanced, harmonious and sustainable development (Article 3 of the Treaty on European Union) and nothing guarantees that the information and knowledge society in which we already live be a rebalancing and virtuous factor in that development.
On the contrary, the starting conditions favor the already existing agglomerations and the regional cleavages could reappear even more strongly.
From 2010 until now, the countries of southern Europe have been subject to various macroeconomic conditionality regimes within the framework of the stability and growth pact, the budget treaty and the European semester, in addition to other macroeconomic correction procedures in force under the so-called "Packs".
As we have already said, the dominant doctrine of macroeconomic regulation treated space-territory as an endogenous variable, with regional policy being considered, in the first instance, as an instrument for managing aggregate demand. Take, for example, what has happened to public investment in Portugal.
The immediate consequence of this severe adjustment is a “new generation of regional imbalances” that may even jeopardize the investment and convergence effort made in previous community support frameworks.
This objective verification of an important regression in the levels of economic and social convergence of the regional policy of the southern European countries means that, in this context so severe and competitive, there are no regional problems definitively resolved.
In 2016, moreover, as in 2008, there are worrying signs of a return of the “toxic twins” to the financial markets. In view of the emergency interventions already carried out and the conditionality regimes still in force, no one, at this moment, can guarantee what the final configuration of regional policy will be in the coming years.
Here are some unremarkable signs:
– The continuation of the deflationary environment in the European economy, despite the policy of quantitative easing from the ECB (purchase of financial assets from the banking system) with a view to raising the rate of inflation;
– Crashes on the European stock exchanges of banks' shares as a result of the bail in bank resolution;
– High volatility and instability in sovereign debt interest rates, although not reaching the high levels of the years 2010-2013;
– Systematic doubts regarding the restructuring of sovereign debts at the European level that alert to the possibility of new defaults;
– Lack of symmetric adjustment between European countries with current surpluses and deficit countries in the euro area;
– Serious problems in financing the real economy due to the simultaneity of credit deleveraging and bank recapitalization operations;
– Structural reforms in productivity and competitiveness of very unequal importance and lagging very accentuated temporals, whose effects are slow to produce effective results;
– Great difficulties in managing the expectations of different strata of the population and in mobilizing domestic savings for investment, as a result of the thinning and impoverishment of the middle classes;
– Extreme vulnerability in dealing with global risks and asymmetric shocks due to the lack of available and mobilized resources for prevention and emergency policies;
– Significant deceleration of growth rates in emerging economies, with repercussions on external demand, financial flows and external investments in these countries.
This combination of critical factors is already marking the evolution of the regional policy system and the territorial cooperation of the European Union, if we observe, for example, the exasperating slowness with which all the technical and financial engineering of the community support framework is being assembled for the 2020 horizon.
Just remember the excessive weight of sovereign debt service on the national budgets of southern countries, the ridiculous amounts of budgeted public investment and the lack of equity (private debt) to carry out private investment in order to have an approximate perspective of what will be the territorial cohesion policy until 2020 and, more serious, the value of potential GDP at the end of the period, against which, for example, the structural budget deficit is measured under the terms of the budget treaty of the European Union. The Portuguese case is, moreover, the most eloquent in this regard.
All in all, this is also the opportune moment to elaborate a little more “outside the box” with regard to the more conventional cohesion policy which, in my opinion, continues to revolve a lot around clienteles and usual recipients.
I am referring here to what we could call “the regionalist doctrine” of the future Political Union in two different perspectives: first, in a line of “negative integration”, let's say “Brexit Line”, at the same time more liberal and more intergovernmental, secondly, in a line of “positive integration”, more integrationist and unionist, more neo-Keynesian, some would say illiberal.
In the first perspective, the "Brexit line" is essentially a "minimum" line, returning to the common market, to a more defensive regulatory policy and, above all, to a more degovernment commercial arbitration in line with what it proposes, for example , the TTIP.
This perspective leads us, most likely, to an intergovernmental line and a directory government in which the following traits would be dominant:
– The so-called Europe of the Regions would be a purely intergovernmental matter and merely decorative at European level, although some “global events” might give it an important role (for example, the reception of refugees);
– An erosion of the parliamentary component of the political system at the level of the European Parliament, National Parliaments and Regional Parliaments, that is, despite the Treaty of Lisbon, the deficit of parliamentary control would be aggravated and would turn into a potential source of evil -being for the European system of territorial cooperation;
– The fiscal macroeconomics of the stability pact, the fiscal treaty and the European semester would be considered inadequate and would have to be revised in a more deconcentrated and intergovernmental line;
– The diversity of regional situations would also demand a greater diversity of regional solutions; the differentiated way in which member states are politically constituted (federal, regional and unitary) would allow them to receive and apply the principles of territorial cohesion and subsidiarity in a different way;
A territorially more cooperative regional cohesion policy could emerge as a space for concerting initiatives and projects, associated with more innovative organizational formulas freed from more traditional administrative tutelage; moreover, decentralized regional cooperation could work as a stabilizing instrument for possible political-social conflicts and prevent emerging regionalisms from arising in their most perverse forms;
– The Europe of the Regions could be promoted for a less common reason, which has to do with the collective security of the Union and its external borders; the reinforcement of aid to the Union's external borders, the first gateway for erratic population flows in those areas, is essential to prevent acute crises of regionalism which, in this way, could gain additional arguments to emerge with renewed legitimacy; in the same vein, and within the framework of the common foreign and security policy, the Europe of the Regions can be transposed outside the Union in the form of cross-border and transnational cooperation; it is another facet of regional policy that needs to be clearly explained to European regions, otherwise regional egotism will be exacerbated in relation to regions from third countries, and it also needs to be properly translated and reinforced from a budgetary point of view.
According to the second, more integrationist and unionist perspective, the territory of the European Union would no longer be an endogenous variable or a second-order actor, but would become a leading actor in the context of a more clearly federal or federative multiterritoriality.
In this line of thought, territorial cohesion and regional policy would have to be exogenous variables and spared from the austerity of a short-term disciplinary macroeconomics. A possible and viable approach for this Europe of Regions would be to organize the European territory through a network of European macro-regions (the Iberian peninsula, the Baltic countries, the British Isles, the Scandinavian peninsula, etc.), of cross-border and transnational regions and of city networks (capital, thematic, historical, etc).
This Europe of the Regions would have the merit of being much more cultural, humanistic and symbolic, but also much more collaborative and solidary compared to today's Europe of goods and capital.
Europe of Regions, another territorial collective intelligence
It is autumn 2016. The conventional models of territorial cohesion policy seem to be exhausted, as they are “grown children” of several generations of community support frameworks.
On the one hand, a "more thematic and transversal allocation" is sought, to grow quickly and improve global competitiveness, which, in practice, favors more the already competitive territories, on the other hand, a "more distributive and regional” which, however, only provides slow growth and does not guarantee that it will be able to solve the structural problems of the less developed regions.
As a result, the continuity of the European structural policy, pressured from the outside in, as we know it today, is not effective and is jeopardized because it creates imbalances and asymmetries in the internal cohesion of the Europe of the Regions.
Therefore, we say that the vitality of local and regional cultures and their decentralized territorial cooperation are necessary to bring a soul supplement to the construction of the European project.
And because those local and regional cultures will add their own political legitimacy precisely because of the asymmetries created, we are, let's say, obliged to take care of and remake our image of territorial representation in view of a new level of relationship and development between European institutions and Euroregions within the framework of a more polycentric and decentralized European territoriality.
This European territoriality could take the form of a New Deal regionalist and collaborative of federal inspiration, financed by “euro-growth bonds” and linking European macro-regions, Euro-regions, networks of cities, universities, business associations, research centers, social and cultural institutions of all kinds , with a view to creating specifically European social capital and symbolic capital and thus giving body, substance and meaning to the concept and practice of multiterritorial European citizenship.
Examples of this New Deal, at the same time regionalist and cosmopolitan, already exist and could include: the reinforcement of mobility programs for students and researchers; the social responsibility of all initiatives and projects financed with community funds (inclusion of refugees); European solidarity with the great global risks and the common goods of humanity; a specific European law to deal with cross-border and transnational projects (refugee integration); an appropriate right and framework for cooperation for local and regional authorities; a European health program for the mobility of the “largely sick and disabled”; a common European approach to services of general economic interest; the reinforcement of European programs to combat desertification and special attention to conservation and biodiversity strategies, a European program of local employment initiatives aimed at the integration of the long-term unemployed.
But this is the other Europe, isn't it?
Author Antonio Covas
Full Professor at the University of Algarve
Doctorate in European Affairs from the Free University of Brussels
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