Regional Governance

While the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century could be deemed the golden age of the nation-state, a new process of diversification of levels of governance has changed the political organization of a large number of liberal democracies since the end of World War II. First, a progressive generalization of subnational territorial governance meant that decentralized and federal systems greatly progressed since 1945. More innovatively, however, a certain number of supranational regional organizations also resulted in the emergence of a higher level of governance. Altogether, these new multilevel systems of governance and the crowning of regional governance as a new unit of decision making represented a quiet revolution in the life of many Western democracies, though attempts at regional governance have not been confined to these countries. Nevertheless, it is the case that regional governance is most advanced in Europe and less so outside of the West.

Arguably, the origin of regional governance could be found in the long imperial tradition of the European continent, from the Greek and Roman extended areas of sovereignty to the Austro-Hungarian empire from 1867 to 1914. However, the notion of a nonimperialist form of regional governance that is based on a union of independent sovereign states is not quite as new as one may first suspect. In 1464, the King of Bohemia at the time, George of Podehrady, wrote to his European colleagues suggesting that they unite in a new form of European Union (EU) for the common good of themselves (the monarchs) and of their people and to avoid more unnecessary bloodshed.

Four hundred and fifty years later, in the early twentieth century, other idealists revived the idea of a political unification of Europe that finally stopped to be an abstract dream following the end of World War II. Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands created the Benelux area of preferred trade, and some leaders tried to think of ways in which the German Zollverein of the early nineteenth century could be replicated at a trans-European level. In the Congress of the Hague in 1948, Western European political and intellectual elites, as well as a number of their liberal colleagues from the center and east side of the continent, decided to launch this political process, which resulted in the creation of the Council of Europe, a cultural organization.

By and large, the unification of the Western European continent became the single most outstanding example of regional governance in the world. Starting as a primarily economic and peace-oriented project, European unification progressively transformed into a fully fledged, quasi-federal political system with its own policies, institutions, citizenship, and constitution. The various treaties that marked the deepening of the European model of regional governance (Rome, Schengen, Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice) all participated in this profound transformation of our understanding of regional governance.

Indeed, the EU is no longer a simple single market area, but the source of eighty-five percent of the new legislation that applies in every single member state every year. Within the spirit of multilevel governance, an EU citizenship now exists, which allows any citizen from a member state to freely travel, work, or live in any part of the European Union. A unified European Union passport, the direct election of a European Parliament through a single transnational election (nationally organized at the same time across the member states), and the right to vote in local and European elections in one's country of residence have completed this new conception of a European citizenship. Among the institutions of the new supranational political system, apart from the European Parliament and traditional executive (European Commission) and state-representing second legislative institution (the Council of the European Union), a Court of Justice of [Page 809]the European Communities has, by and large, the role of a national supreme court and can be directly solicited by individual citizens, unlike traditional supranational judicial instances. Similarly, a European ombudsman deals with the problems occurring between EU citizens and their institutions.

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