EU Regional Policy and the Candidate States: Poland and the Czech Republic

Abstract

As relatively poor countries, the candidate states from Central and Eastern Europe will be major recipients of structural funds assistance once they join the EU. This prospect raises important questions about the impact of regional policy on the territorial politics of candidate states. Chief among these is whether EU regional policy will promote the same trends towards political decentralisation and regionalism in the Central and Eastern Europe Countries (CEECs) that it is claimed to have promoted in current member states. To answer this question, this article compares preparations for accession by two candidate states, the Czech Republic and Poland. It finds that preparations for EU regional policy have indeed been an important factor promoting administrative decentralisation in these new democracies, but the longer-term impact of EU regional policy on the territorial politics of these countries, and by implication other candidate states, remains difficult to assess.