The Committee Of The Regions And Scottish Self-Government: A German Perspective

Abstract

With the creation of a Committee of the Regions in Article 198 of the Maastricht Treaty, substate government was for the first time officially acknowledged as part of the European Union decision-making system. Apart from this general perception, the discourse on any specific implication of this new body has remained very much fragmented. This is mainly due to the heterogenous structures of substate government in EU member states. THE SCOTTISH CONTEXT In Scotland the perspective is shaped by an important additional dimension. Since the late 1980s the debate on the European integration process has increasingly been related to the constitutional question (Keating and Jones 1991). The European Union has frequently been envisaged as an alternative multi-national framework allowing for Scottish self-government, either in the form of an independent state or in a Europe of the Regions, where the nationstate has lost its hegemonic power. In the emerging muli-level system of governance (Marks 1993), Scotland, as a territorial substate unit, is subjected to a double integration by the United Kingdom and the European Union. As empirical evidence shows, this system has by no means fully eroded the political capacity of the nation-state, but it did lead to the theoretical insight that territorial self-government can no longer be measured in terms of absolute sovereignty. In a globalised and highly interdependent world, the relative degree of territorial selfgovernment, whether on the state or substate level, will be determined by two analytically distinct components: