"Contested spaces: Europeanized regional policy in Great Britain and Germany"

Conzelmann, Thomas. (2003) "Contested spaces: Europeanized regional policy in Great Britain and Germany". In European Union Studies Association (EUSA) > Biennial Conference > 2003 (8th), March 27-29, 2003, pages 18, Nashville, TN.

Abstract

In the recent academic debate on European integration, the concept of "Europeanization" has drawn attention to those processes of institutional formation that are causally connected to the process of integration, but do not fit into the notion of integration as such. Europeanization, in this paper, relates to changes in policy, politics and polity at the level of individual member states, changes that have been discussed as a "transformation of governance" in academic literature. [This] paper seeks to contribute to that debate. It looks at changes in domestic regional policy in the UK and Germany during the 1980s and 1990s and asks whether and to what extent such changes are related to the emergence of cohesion policy at the level of the European Community. A second objective is to develop a concept of Europeanization that leaves behind the mechanistic assumption that Europeanization mainly works through "adaptation pressures" emerging from the European level. While this notion may be useful as long as the focus is on regulatory polities of the EC (where domestic adaptation is a reaction to integration by law, i.e., to EC regulations and directives requiring a certain extent of harmonization of national policies), it is of limited avail in the case of a mainly redistributive policy such as the EC's regional policy. The paper therefore suggests a concept that puts emphasis on changing actor strategies in a situation of "contending spaces" The argument is that European integration results in a situation of contending institutional orders on the national and European scale that draw normative legitimacy from a peculiar relation to geographical space.