European integration and the relationship between state and regions in Italy: The interplay between national and common agricultural policies

Abstract

The relationship between state and regions in Italy has been going through important changes since the beginning of the regionalization of the Italian state in the early 1970s. Nonetheless, the dominant view on Italian regionalization has been rather sceptical: generally, it has been considered as ineffective, having failed to decentralize the policy process, and to reduce state control over the peripheries, especially over finances and the budgetary process. In short, for a long time, many scholars shared the opinion that Italian regionalization was a new instrument for the old mechanism of state control (Dente, 1983). In the last ten years, though, new changes have had positive effects on Italian regionalism, strengthening the position of the regions and conversely loosening the state's general control over policies and resources. These changes are due to two main factors: (1) the crisis of the Italian state in the early 1990s and the growth of some antistate forces, mainly shown by the emergence of the Northern League with its roots in the northern regions; (2) the new perspective brought into the process of european integration by the Maastricht Treaty, which redefines the position of the regions with regard to European Union (EU) institutions by means of the legal concept of subsidiarity. Steps towards the establishment of direct and stable links between regions and the EU, in an attempt to by-pass the member states, are now manifest in some important cases: Germany, Spain and Belgium, notably (Hooghe, 1992; Harvie, 1994; Jones and Keating, 1995).