The Municipalisation of the European Political Space

Abstract

The EC/EU has been an eminently nation-led project. However, running in parallel, the European municipalist movement, weaving relations among cities across Europe, has sought to carve out an influential political role for municipalities within the European polity. The study of European municipal cooperation has become a consolidated thread of research in European and urban studies. Nonetheless, contributions on the topic tend to focus on the pragmatic aspects of municipal collaborations, glossing over the ideological foundations of European municipalism. Therefore, by challenging the dominant scholarly view, this chapter contends that European municipalism may be considered as a ‘thin-centred’ ideology. Drawing on Freeden’s (1996, 1998, 2017) work, the ideological structure of European municipalism is unbundled by throwing light on its conceptual components. As a result, this chapter construes European municipalism as a fully-fledged political ideology, which postulates universal city-to-city mutualism and proposes a European counter-project built on a polycentric and diffuse conception of power.