Enlargement and Regionalization: The Europeanization of Local and Regional Governance in CEE States

Abstract

In building any home location is key. Geography is widely regarded as the single most important reason why the post-communist countries of central and eastern Europe (CEECs) can realistically aspire to inclusion in a common European home that is democratic and prosperous (Przeworski, 1991: 190–1). This hypothesis may have sound structural foundations in that those transition states that are most proximate to the vibrant democratic market economies of central and western Europe are most likely to benefit from ‘spillover’ and contagion pressures for Europeanization. Moreover, some of the CEECs contiguous with the European Union (EU) share a pre-communist historical legacy of close relations with their EU neighbouring states dating from their interwar era of independent statehood. In the immediate period after the fall of commmunism there existed a widely held perception in many of the CEECs that post-communism equated with a ‘return to Europe’, and that swift European integration would follow. In the decade after the fall of communism, however, the concept of Europe-building has been stretched by the pull of two policy agendas: first, a process of ‘deep integration’ among a historical core-group of EU states driven by a distilled notion of European exceptionalism; and, second, a process of eastward enlargement of EU membership driven by the diluted notion of a ‘wider Europe’. Thus far, the inherent tension between these alternative grand projects has been analysed, on the whole, as a macro-level problem between supranational, transnational and national institutions and elites (Wallace, 1999: 1–13).1KeywordsEuropean UnionEuropean Union Member StateStructural FundLocal GovernanceLocal EliteThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.