Governing Europe, Book by Jack Hayward, Anand Menon; Oxford

University Press, 2003

22 The Changing European State: Pressures from Within
Patrick Le Gal s
Vincent Wright's main interest was in the state, both as an historian and as a political scientist.
While working in France, this admirer of the Jacobin state enjoyed searching for archives in the
most remote French prefecture which went hand to hand with his research on the Council of State
in Paris. In Italy, Spain, or France he was always interested in the diversity of those countries and
in the ways in which the state constructed and managed a political order. However, he was no
conservative and did not use his sharp mind to defend a frozen representation of the nation-state.
Among the first, with his close friends Yves M ny, Jack Hayward, or Sabino Cassese, he
passionately engaged in exploring changing forms of the state faced with the dynamics of
European integration, changing markets and firms, and the rise of regions and cities. To explain
the changing forms of the state, Vincent put forward the dynamic combination of the following
factors: the economic recession, a paradigm shift in favour of the market, changing forms of
politics, globalization, Europeanization, liberalization, technological progress, decentralization
and fragmentation, reforms of the public sector, and a different political agenda. However, he
never lost sight of the achievements of the state form and its capacity for restructuring, hence his
famous recourse to a series of paradoxes which he loved to present to puzzled students and
colleagues alike.
This chapter deals with bottom up pressures on the state. Although Wright enjoyed nothing better
than giving a hard time to his students working on regions or cities, he had a profound interest in
the ways in which those subnational governments managed their relationship with the state in the
new environment. In the 1980s, his edited volume with Yves M ny (M ny and Wright 1985b)
and then the special issue of West European Politics he edited with Rod Rhodes in 1987 were
essential points of reference to move out of the 'centre-periphery paradigm' and to engage in
systematic comparative work. However sceptical he might have been, he had no doubt that the
dynamic of cities and regions in Europe was cumulative and self-sustaining, that is, 'the genie
appears to be out of the bottle'.
The chapter focuses on the challenges that cities and regions are posing to the nation state in
Western Europe, rather than the rise of 'meso-government' in Europe. It analyses three sets of
pressures (the fragmentation of the policy process, the competition for resources, the legitimacy
of the nation state) and the role they play in the transformation of the state.
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Fragmentation of the State and Public Policy: Is the State Becoming Impotent?
The state has lost its claimed monopoly in public policy (although that monopoly was never
complete). Local and regional governments are more involved in policy making. However,
pressures and contradictions limiting state capacity also apply at that level (Wright 1998b). They
contribute to the fragmentation of the policy process and the mosaic of public policy making in
Europe, hence raising the salience of issues of policy coordination.
Local and regional governments are more differentiated within the political system and therefore
contribute to the fragmentation of the state and of the public policy process. However, they face
the same contradictions as the state in terms of the multiplication of actors, increasing demands,
and deterritorialized networks. As Wright once wrote: 'Today . . . regional government is
increasingly a prisoner of the traditional demands of the nation-state: to manage contradictions
and elaborate legitimate forms of governance. Governance requires the coordination of multiple
levels of inter-dependencies in a complex framework, and includes not only official politicoadministrative actors, but also a vast series of economic and social actors, both public and private,
that manage, control . . . and are members of networks which in some cases, exceed official
political boundaries' (Wright 1998b : 48).
A large body of research has by now emphasized the twofold fragmentation of the state and the
policy process both from the sociology of organizations and the public policy approaches. It
appears fragmented into a myriad of organizations (agencies, networks, individuals,
differentiation of political arena) where public policies do not work in terms of hierarchies or
coherent policy stages but rather in terms of negotiation, flexibility, and ad hoc arrangements,
sometimes suggesting a dissolution of the state. This fragmentation also has a multi-tier
dimension: the European Union, the international, and, as far as we are concerned, subnational
levels of governments.
More than thirty years ago, Pressman and Wildavsky stressed the illogicality of policy
implementation in Oakland (Pressman and Wildavsky 1973). Starting from a crisis of
governability, a different body of literature underlined the resistance of subsystems of societies to
state steering and their self-organizing capacity: policy networks, sectors, social actors, and
subnational territories (Kooiman 1993 ; Mayntz 1993 , 1999). Subnational levels of government
play an increasing role in public policy.
A first point to mention is related to the slightly limited margin of financial manoeuvre. Central
governments are always willing to associate other levels to contribute financially to public policy
schemes. Everywhere in Europe, the financing of public policies involve complex transfers and
cooperation between central and local governments. In a country such as France, where the state
was once the main provider of resources and expertise, it often seems that it is largely
impoverished and unable to push forward its own priorities. Local and regional authorities pay for
universities and different public policies (on top of their own functions and policies) . . . but
demand a say in the process. The rise of yet another buzzword 'partnership' was first used to
describe cooperation between public and private actors. But in many countries,
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it also encompasses wide-ranging cooperation between public actors at different levels

(Benington and Geddes 2001). The whole issue of the coordination of public policy involves
various schemes to bring together different level of governments. Policy instruments addressing
this question are on the rise, for instance contracts, pacts, and partnership. The development of
new policy tools provides evidence of the ambiguities and dynamism of public policies. It
attempts to redefine public policy in a rather flexible way in order to face ill defined problems, to
cope with heterogeneous goals, or to manage different types of networks (Kickert et al. 1997). At
the microlevel, policy processes reveal fragmentations, adjustments between representations,
goals, and policies which are made through interactions on a day-to-day basis, progressive
elaboration of some views of general interests, institutionalization of collective action
(Lascoumes and Le Bourhis 1998 ; Le Gals 2002).
Second, subnational levels of government now have more resources, more legitimacy, more room
for manoeuvre within European governance in the making. Public policies and their impacts are
becoming more important to legitimise representative governments (output legitimacy in
Scharpf's terms (2000b)). Local and regional governments alike have become keen to manage
services and to launch public policies in order to gain more legitimacy within the political system
which, these days, is not favourable to representative government.
Cities and regions have become more or less involved in the European institutionalization
dynamic. Their representatives have learned new roles, repertoires, and modes of action. They
have found legitimacy on this larger playing field of European multi-level governance (Jeffrey
1997 ; Hooghe and Marks 2001), which has increased their room for manoeuvre in relation to the
state. Bartolini insists that the form of the modern state, 'the case in which a strongly
differentiated internal hierarchical order manages to control the external territorial and functional
boundaries and to correspondingly reduce exit options so closely as to insulate domestic
structuring processes from external influence . . . is simply the contingent historical result of a
specific configuration' (1998: 9). Beyond the most clear-cut cases of exit (secession),
Europeanization offers regions and cities a relative capacity to escape the constraints and
hierarchies of the national political system that is, partial exit. There is an almost automatic risk
that engagement in challenging this national order will increase. The state's capacity to structure
its territory is being questioned. However, no local authority can really completely escape the
national territory, although there are some exceptional cases. As Bartolini reminds us, looking at
the areas that interest us, capacities for exit are shared very unequally between cities and regions.
Cities and regions that have the most interest in and capacities for escaping the constraints of the
system represent the greatest potential threat to the state's authority; they may therefore gain
additional capacities to influence changes in the balance of power and the system, in favour of the
simple fact of having potential possibilities for exit, however limited. Emphasizing internal
political structuring processes, linked with the formation of boundaries (political, economic, and
cultural), may create a fertile setting to better understand the dynamics of Europeanization and
their consequences for cities. One should, however, keep in
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mind the deep diversity of European state experience which renders perilous any generalization.
Europeanization processes have potentially very destabilizing effects on regions and cities. At
first, Europe represented an international stage for cities and their elected representatives; it gave
a form of recognition, a new political legitimacy for representing citizens beyond the state's
borders, with possibilities for integrating horizontal and vertical networks and bypassing the state,
and with access to new resources in other words, new room for manoeuvre and new
opportunities for political entrepreneurs. Europe seemed to represent modernization, the culture
of a new generation of elected representatives.
The second stage saw the constraining, destabilizing effects of this European governance come
fully to light. The criteria that have to be observed in order to obtain funding seem even more
rigid and strict than those pertaining to national programmes. Behind flexible networks and forms
of interdependence lie complex rules, the difficulty of exerting pressure on choices, and the
constraints of coalitions and networks. Elected representatives have finally discovered the limits
of their activities, norms that seem to have come upon them like a bolt from the blue. Thus, the
European integration dynamic has a destabilizing effect because of the uncertainties associated
with it.
Third, local and regional governments aim at improving the living conditions of their citizens and
the general prosperity of their territory (Goldsmith and Wollmann 1992) through public policies
and the delivery of services. They have become involved in the fields of welfare, urban
regeneration or economic development, culture, environment. The territory a city, a locality, a
region may appear as a possible integrating factor in a fragmented policy-making process.
Thanks to their territorial roots, 'new economic and social policies' may be more democratic,
more transparent, more effective, more long term, and more coherent. In social policy in
particular, subnational territories appear as a potential support for a new generation of renovated
public policies. Unfortunately, even if it offers a mobilizing myth and some important potential, it
often fails to provide such support (Balme et al. 1999 ; Le Gals 2001b ; Stoker 2000). On the
one hand, the rise of partnerships and their activities are indicative of attempts to territorialize
public policies through an integrated horizontal approach. On the other hand, there are also cases
either of de-territorialization of actors or of local adaptation of programmes and policies, whose
logic, as well as legal and financial constraints, are still determined at the central or European
level.
Regional and local government and governance-building are about the development of
subnational political arenas which allow political leaders to behave as political entrepreneurs and
to aggregate different networks. There are plenty of examples demonstrating that subnational
governments are present in a number of networks, are learning new rules of the political game,
and in some cases, certain sectors and certain countries, we can see the structuring of urban or
regionalized forms of governance (Keating and Loughlin 1997; Balme 1996 ; Keating 1998).
These forms are still extraordinarily limited and the pressure from market forces is compelling
different actors to demand horizontal coordination, indeed political structuring, in order to protect
themselves from the destructuring caused by markets (Bagnasco and Le Gals 2000).
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Meanwhile, politicians involved in the making of territorialized modes of governance play an

important political role. In fragmented environments, the question of leadership becomes more
important (John 2001). The restructuring of the public sector leads to increased confusion in
public policies and the fragmentation of urban governments (Pierre 2000), hence the growing
interest in issues of leadership, management, coordination, and governance (Borraz et al. 1994 ;
Stoker 2000). Both in order to integrate and to represent networks of actors and interests, political
leaders develop a repertoire of action. The personalization of power in democracies also impacts
on the subnational level. As the national level is less central to structuring the political system,
regional and local leaders can articulate values, norms, and expectations of groups and
individuals within a given system. Within a multi-level European governance in the making, local
and regional leaders are more involved: 'Leadership constructs meaning: the meaning of a
community or collective action; the meaning of member participation; the meaning of the place of
this community or collective action in society. It builds bridges, translates, imparts values,
incarnates principles' (Borraz 2000). Leaders are part of the institutionalization of local and
regional governments. It follows that they may exert more pressure on the state, contest its
legitimacy, use vertical and horizontal networks to bypass the national political order.
In recent years, high profile political leaders have emerged and challenged the legitimacy of the
state, have competed with it and have tried to play a role in Europe in order to secure resources
and influence within and beyond the state. The Catalan leader Pujol and the Barcelona Mayor
Maragall have frequently done so. In Italy, the president of the Lombardy region Formigoni or
the former mayor of Venice Cacciari have articulated views and political projects which are far
from coinciding with the Italian state. Even in Sweden, the Mayor of Stockholm is putting
forward ideas which challenge classic Swedish universalism. The same is true for the Scottish
and Welsh Parliaments, some French mayors, or German L nder presidents.
Competing for Finances, the Threat of the Impoverished State
In a context of Europe in the making and economic forces evading the nation state, the latter has
lost part of its monopoly, not its importance. Subnational levels of government are gaining room
for manoeuvre, limited possibilities to exit the disciplines of national systems, and therefore can
negotiate more forcefully their share of public resources. Those pressures constitute a permanent
challenge to the nation state and may threaten, in some cases, the redistributive role of the state.
More Resources at the Local and Regional Levels
In the post-war period, a common trend of state expansion dissimulated a wide variety of modes
of territorial organization within states: the dual state in the United Kingdom, the Jacobin
centralist state in France, the ponderous but not so effective
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Italian state, the social democratic, egalitarian Scandinavian state, federal Germany and its
sophisticated egalitarian form of federalism, authoritarian regimes in Spain, Portugal, and Greece
for a while.
In some of those models, particularly in the North of Europe, powerful municipalities were in
charge of implementing welfare services. The accelerated rise of education, health, and social
services in the 1960s worried political elites. Anxious to control the growth and rationalize the
delivery of those services, they started a process of local government restructuring which lasted
for several years in a cooperative manner in Scandinavia or Germany, in a more brutal way in the
United Kingdom (Goldsmith and Page 1987). Most countries started at the time some form of
weak decentralization (France, Italy) and/or local government restructuring to improve the
effectiveness of public spending. The game was played under the strict control of state elites.
Nowadays, the situation has become quite different. In the 1970s and beyond, most states had
faced a fiscal crisis which has progressively led to greater or less stabilization of the percentage of
state expenditure in relation to the GDP, and to limit the deficit. Pressure from international
markets particularly important for the states deepest in debt (such as Belgium, Greece, and Italy
where the debt is higher than 100 per cent of GDP), together with the European agreement on
deficit reduction, is limiting the room of manoeuvre for the state. Although less spectacular, the
rise of local and regional governments in Europe is having a profound impact on public finances.
National states have to share some tax revenue and taxing power with subnational governments.
Although they keep the major say in the organization of revenue sharing, they have progressively
to give up a growing share of the revenue to local and regional governments all over Europe,
except in the United Kingdom.
Table 22.1 shows that in all Western European countries but Portugal, more than half of the
public investment is now made at the local or regional level. In the Netherlands or in France,
local and regional authorities now account for 70 per cent of the public investments. This
constitutes a crucial change for public expenditure (Tables 22.2 and 22.3).
In most countries, from 1985 to 1996, local tax kept increasing, however slow and diverse that
trend might be. The United Kingdom is, of course, the remarkable exception to this trend as the
figures declined from 3.8 to 1.4 per cent. At one extreme, where local tax is important such as in
Denmark or Sweden, they have risen by nearly 2 per cent of GDP. At the other extreme where
they used to be low, they have risen from about one to two per cent of GDP in Portugal or Italy,
and these figures are rising. France is in an intermediary position from 3.8 to 4.7 per cent of GDP.
The slow rise of local taxation is often strengthened by a redistribution of tax which takes into
account the local level with once again major variation between Denmark and Sweden, where
local government obtained over 30 per cent of all fiscal revenues, and the United Kingdom,
Ireland, and Greece, where this figure is below 5 per cent.
In terms of revenue raising and sharing, the context in which the cooperation/competition
between various levels of government takes place is making the choice more acute and politically
contested. This takes two different forms which
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constitute different challenges, if not a serious threat to the nation state. First, politically dynamic
regions and cities are demanding more resources. Second, in some cases, they want to limit the
redistribution within the nation state to keep a higher share of revenues, hence threatening the
major redistributive role of the welfare state. Significantly, associations of urban mayors have
flourished in Germany in the mid-1990s, in Britain with the Core Cities groups, in Italy with the
movement of the cities, in France, Spain, and now the six cities of Finland have done the same. In
all cases those organizations express an interest different from the traditional redistribution within
the welfare system, emphasizing the needs of cities' inhabitants and the crucial role of the cities
for the competitiveness of the countries.
The slow rise of local, regional, and federal government in Europe was bound to have some fiscal
impact. Revenue sharing has always been a crucial demand from local and regional authorities,
eager to start their own programmes and policies. In Scandinavia, powerful municipalities have
gained from the apparently ever increasing welfare state . . . until the crisis of the early 1990s. In
Italy, in the 1990s, several laws have given greater political legitimacy to the mayors, the sindici,
who became directly elected. The new administrative function of 'city manager' also went in the
same direction of enhancing local public policies and the delivery of services. Within a context of
tight fiscal centralization, those mayors, who became major political figures in Cattania, Venice,
Naples, Rome, and Palermo, were bound to ask for more resources to go together with their new
political legitimacy. The mayors of large cities having to deal with increased social polarization
and the pressure of economic competition sought to obtain more resources from the state to deal
with the urban
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problems. In a different context, the same applies: in Stockholm, Lille, or Stuttgart, where mayors
have been actively seeking more resources from the state. If the model of the elected mayor gains
as much ground as expected in the United Kingdom, following the London example, one would
expect those new political figures to compete more vigorously for funds.
In Spain, the Autonomies, now quasi-federal states, have pursued a similar strategy. Since the
return of democracy, led by the historical Autonomies of Catalonia and the Basque country, they
systematically asked for more resources and became powerful political actors. In Belgium, the
long and complex process of differentiation between Flanders and Wallonia also required the
sharing of taxing and spending power at the expense of the Belgian central state. In Italy, the long
march of the regions has gone hand to hand with the increase in the resources at their disposal.
The new law in 1997 has considerably increased their general powers. Ongoing discussion about
forms of federalism or decentralization in Italy include important transfers of resources and
powers to subnational levels of government. Once officially created in 1982 with taxing powers,
French regions were, fiscally speaking, the most dynamic level of government in France until the
1990s: raising tax to hire employees, chief officers, and to develop public policies.
The process of European integration also fuels this dynamic up to a point. European programmes
concerning regions and local authorities (mainly within the structural funds framework) often
require nation states to match European funds. Although they usually try their best to maximize
the use of European money, or even to use those funds to finance their own programmes, their
gate-keeping role is limited by the fact they do not exert strict control over the content of
development programmes. Central government funds are to some extent more biased towards the
financing of local and regional development programmes, legitimized by the European Union,
entering more or less within the priorities of national governments.
This long term trend of increasing resources for subnational governments is not uniform and
masks large variations among and within countries. It is not just the result of the pressures from
within the state, but also the result of the strategy of state elites. Already in the early 1980s, M ny
and Wright had clearly shown that decentralizing the management of cuts and shortages was a
popular move among nation states' elites. In Scandinavia, Finland, and France, for instance,
decentralization reforms, or the making of a regional level of cooperation, was instrumental to
decentralize the responsibility of managing the restructuring of hospitals, to limit the growth of
social services, and to accumulate indicators to restructure health policy.
Beyond taking advantage of such a movement in order to be able to concentrate on other issues
and to escape part of the political pressure, nation states in Europe are usually able, when required,
to impose their fiscal choice at the expense of local and regional governments. The United
Kingdom has shown this at length. Even in the process of the devolution of power to Scotland
and Wales, a key point was to limit very narrowly the spending powers of the newly elected
parliaments and governments. The same, or even stricter, budgetary discipline applies to the
Mayor of London, and will probably apply to future elected mayors of large cities and nonelected
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regional assemblies. London's tight control on public spending which developed under the
Thatcher period also became a New Labour credo. To meet the Maastricht criteria to enter the
Euro club, Italy increased taxes but required sub-national governments to reduce expenditure. At
the time of welfare cuts in the second part of the 1980s in Denmark, municipalities had to bear
the brunt. When Finland was badly hit by the economic crisis of 1992, it led to a dramatic
recentralization of public finances at the expense of municipalities. Last but not least, the
reunification of Germany led to a massive transfer of funds to former East Germany: L nder and
municipalities had to pay for a large part of those transfers. In other words, in times of crisis,
nation states still have the political resources and legitimacy to impose fiscal discipline and cuts
on reluctant local and regional governments. It remains that entrenched within the state, local and
regional authorities constitute a powerful lobby competing for public resources. They exert a
constant pressure to control a higher proportion of fiscal resources, hence strengthening the
financial power of the state within a context where tax increases do not seem a popular option.
Challenging State Redistribution
Competing for public expenditure is one thing; competing to raise its taxes or to keep a larger
share of the main tax is another. In the past two decades, the challenges to the state from regional
or quasi-federal governments has taken a different turn which reveals a powerful logic of
decreasing state control. The term 'neo-regionalism' aims at capturing the mix of political
entrepreneurialism and identity led regional mobilization in a context of strong economic growth
(Balme 1996 ; Keating and Loughlin 1996). The spatial logic of economic growth seems to
benefit large urban areas, cities, and some dynamic local economies in Italy, Germany, or
Scandinavia.
Catalonia in Spain epitomizes the dreams and fears of many in Europe. Holding the balance of
power first in favour of the Gonzalez Socialist government and then for the Aznar Conservative
government, the Catalan leader Pujol negotiated period after period more fiscal and political
advantages. It seemed at the time a never ending process which would progressively give
Catalonia greater political and fiscal autonomy at the expense of the Spanish state. The fiscal
argument was central and not without paradox. Although Catalan leaders figured prominently in
Brussels to defend regional policy in favour of southern European countries and regions in the
name of social cohesion, they did not accept those arguments in Spain. By contrast, in the name
of autonomy, they defended fiscal egoism and attacked welfare state redistribution in favour of
Spain's poorest regions in the South. During the transitional period, national grants to Autonomies
used to depend on the cost of services transferred. From 1987 to 1991, the government included
socioeconomic criteria in the calculation of Autonomous Communities' share of the state's tax
incomes. As the Socialist government needed their support to secure a majority, the Catalans
negotiated a share of 15 per cent of income tax for Autonomous communities, health financing
reforms, and debt coordination mechanisms. In 1997, the newly elected centre right Aznar
government needed the Catalans to secure a majority in parliament. Autonomous
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Communities obtained a share of 30 per cent of income tax (Gallego 2000). In 2000, Aznar's
greater political success (majority) in the general elections and by contrast Pujol's narrow success
in Catalonia has stopped this process. The central government in Madrid is trying to restrict in a
variety of ways the autonomy of the Autonomous Communities, and Catalonia in particular.
What is at stake is not the end of the Spanish state, because Catalan political leaders have claimed
they do not want their independence, but want to stay within Spain in Europe. However, West
European states contribute massively to the reduction of inequalities (less so in the United
Kingdom, of course). The Catalan dynamic put that redistributive role at risk, together with its
homogenizing role in society.
To a lesser extent, the Italian case reveals a similar dynamic. As Diamanti (1995) has shown at
length in the case of the Northern League, the rhetoric of its leaders and its members (mainly
small firm entrepreneurs) demands greater autonomy for a mythic 'Padania' in the North, from the
corrupt Italian state and from transfers in favour of the Mezzogiorno. Within the European Union
and facing increased economic competition for firms, they argue that they cannot pay for
inefficient state services. Again, the threat is not so much against the existence of the state as such,
but may lead to forms of federalism which allow increased differentiation in terms of culture,
education, and services, but would also prevent fiscal and social redistribution, hence
dramatically reshaping the role of the state. In that sense, and in that sense only, one could
imagine a 'hollow state' scenario. The dynamics of neo-regionalist movements, or of the rich as is
sometimes said, clearly encompasses a resistance towards public redistribution in favour of the
poorest regions within the nation state.
That sort of pressure also exists in Germany (Benz and Goetz 1996). It was once the country of
cooperative federalism where a sophisticated system of joint policy making (Politikverflechtung)
went hand to hand with a strong commitment to maintain uniformity between the L nder. The
complex system of horizontal and vertical revenue sharing and tax redistribution proved very
effective in limiting inequalities in Germany. This system is under intense pressure, so much so
that Germany may be evolving towards a system of 'competitive federalism' where each Land,
and particularly the most powerful among them such as Bavaria, is showing discontent with
existing arrangements. The European integration process has clearly destabilized them together
with existing inter-dependence between levels within Germany. Faced with ongoing
Europeanization processes they cannot control, persistent fiscal pressure to support the
reconstruction, and a federal state which enjoys new room for manoeuvre, the L nder seem to
question the uniformity principle, to put more emphasis on the defence of their own interest and
economic prosperity. If that trend towards competitive federalism grows, that may limit the
ability of the centre to coordinate the L nder, or even put a ceiling on redistributive mechanisms
as argued by Bavaria.
Last but not least, in Belgium, several observers have claimed that the large debt, together with
the monarchy, are the sole remaining obstacles to splitting the country between Flemish and
Walloons. Again, the dynamics of federalization have clearly gained over the past three decade at
the expense of the central state, as the two
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quasi federal states have gained more powers and resources. They also tend to diverge more and
more in various ways including policy making.
In that complex interplay between powerful regions, quasi federal states, federal states, and the
centre, the United Kingdom is nowadays quite intriguing, particularly in Scotland. On the one
hand, Scotland is another case of nation without a state which has historically been integrated into
the United Kingdom. The emotional reopening of the elected Scottish Parliament in the summer
1999 in Edinburgh marked an important step in the revival of Scotland as a political community.
On the other hand, Scotland is not such a rich region. The transfers of public money go from
England to Scotland. Another step towards more autonomy may lead to severe cuts in public
spending . . . unless the North Sea oil revenues that the Scottish National Party would like to
claim are transferred to Scotland, a move which would radically change the fiscal rules of the
game between Scotland and the United Kingdom.
The Deregulation of Identity Structuring
In more differentiated, more individualized societies, which are party to globalization processes,
national society, viewed from the perspective of the nation, no longer has a monopoly over
structuring identities; this (according to Badie 1999) is leading to 'deregulation of the identity
market' and the proliferation of alternatives on offer ethnic, religious, sexual, and particularly
urban and regional identities. In Europe, regional and urban actors take great pleasure in
representing themselves as new 'imagined communities' (Smouts 1998), in reconciling reinvented
tradition with the future. In so far as cities and regions have room for manoeuvre in national
societies, where the groups and actors that make up the societies define themselves partly in
relation to globalized processes (sanction, mobilization, resource allocation), regions and cities
have become one space among others, a space for social regulation and for identity-based
mobilization.
The making of European nation states and national societies took several centuries. Most authors
now stress the diversity of the populations to start with and the diversity of the processes, the
complex fitting of local interests and national rules, the slow social and cultural integration.
Anthropologists, social historians, and sociologists alike underline the time dimension in the long
process of building a nation, including the most centralized cases. For sociologists, the nation
state is usually defined in the terms of Weber and Gellner (i.e. a bounded monopoly of legitimate
violence, administration, and culture), but national society includes the interrelationship of a
modern industrial economy, a national class structure, a set of national institutions, rules, values,
organized interests (political parties, churches, welfare states, economic interests), and
infrastructures (Touraine 1990). All of these were more or less in place at the end of the
nineteenth century. The post-1945 decades marked the completion of national modern
industrialized European societies, although many characteristics were to be found elsewhere.
Thanks to television, national cultures became dominant and national languages triumphed nearly
everywhere. Regional differences were on the
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way out thanks to massive redistribution, national labour markets, the strength of national
institutions, and integrating factors, as well as mass consumption. Society meant national society.
National societies and nations are challenged in particular by the pressure from local and regional
mobilization. In most areas of social life (work, family, consumption, education, leisure, politics,
religion) social science research tends to stress the following points: individualization,
fragmentation but also rearticulation of groups, autonomy towards institutions, differentiation,
pluralization, individualization, detraditionalization, deinstitutionalization. These processes are
often put forward under the heading of the fragmentation of societies (Mingione 1991 ; Dubet and
Martucelli 1998) and the apparent ever increasing autonomy of individuals toward national
institutions. Hence the story of national political parties, national economic interests, national
churches, national armies (military industrial complex), but also welfare states and school
systems are facing increased pressure in most European countries. That does not mean they are
disappearing. But national institutions which used to structure societies, organize interactions,
provide social links, representations, norms, social practices, are less and less able to impose their
logic on regions or cities. They are part of this differentiation process.
The question of the level of social organization has been raised at the infra-national level. At the
time of the triumphant modern nation state in the 1960s, countervailing forces started to appear
which used localities and regions to contest national homogenizing tendencies: new social
movements, regionalist movements . . . While regions and localities were seen less as constraints
for individuals, thanks to social and geographic mobility, regions became increasingly significant
for the formation of social groups, the invention or reinvention of identities, solidarities within or
against the nation state. While national symbols started to lose their significance in the face of the
uncertainties and variability of economic relations, the state became less central. Local and
regional cultures became codes for the satisfaction of needs for self-expression and identity. In
view of the erosion of (more or less) integrated national societies and major institutions which
structure national societies (parties, unions, churches . . .), it could be assumed that other levels of
structuring of social groups are likely to have a greater importance. Research on localities in Italy,
France, and the United Kingdom has shown how social groups can be formed in the framework
of conflicts or local collective action, because all social groups clearly do not have the same type
of attachment to or interests in a locality. Progressively in the United Kingdom (it was always
more the case in Italy), the sociology of social groups and classes took local and regional
dynamics into account in the creation of these social groups. By contrast to the North of Europe,
the South of Europe is characterized by a greater emphasis on the territorialization of social and
political structures. Trigilia's classic work on political subcultures in the third Italy illustrates the
point, but there are many examples in Spain, Germany, or Italy (Trigilia 1986).
In Europe, the dynamic of infra-national territories was first led by cultural minorities which
resisted the homogenizing forces of nation states and/or which were economically losing ground
within the national economy. As was mentioned
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before, not many states were homogenous to start with.'In most states, national integration is
incomplete since distinct cultures, identities, traditions, histories, and myths subsist' (Keating
1998 : 44). However, if the renaissance of regionalism and localism has often been interpreted in
cultural terms, the question is not to know whether the rediscovery of local cultures stems from
the need to express identity: this may be the case, without it having much effect on social
organization. As Bagnasco suggests, drawing on the Italian case, economies are less and less able
to consider themselves in isolation: a cultural and a political idiosyncrasy can endure only by
being associated with an economy that can withstand the free market (cases of neo-regionalism,
Catalonia, Bavaria, or the so-called Padania for instance).
The revival of identity-seeking claims perhaps count less in Western Europe in explaining
regional and local mobilization than the (offensive and defensive) reaction to globalization
processes. The reinforcement of subnational, territorial, political mobilization is pushed by the
need to face the destructuring of local and regional societies, bearing in mind, on the one hand,
globalization processes and, on the other, rivalries among subnational territories. Social groups,
organized interests, and institutions mobilize collective projects, reinvent local identities, and
organize governance regimes, in order to resist politically, culturally, and economically, or in
order to adapt to globalization processes.
National societies have not disappeared in Europe. They remain crucial for most individuals and
groups. However, national societies face acute processes of internal differentiation and
fragmentation together with the development of cross-national networks and levels of
interdependence. The second part of the equation of the nation state is also under pressure.
A last set of pressures comes from violent nationalist movements, which are a direct challenge to
the authority of the state and the political order. The Basque country in Spain and Corsica in
France tell a story of long term political violence, which at times seems rather desperate. In both
cases, the state has reacted through political negotiation and/or quasi-permanent war with illegal
nationalist organizations.
Conclusion
We can agree with Poggi (1996) that the reshaping of the state, along the lines we have sketched
above, seems to mark the beginning of 'a new phase of the state story' and perhaps, as an indirect
outcome, the end of a cycle for the state. This cycle began in the second half of the nineteenth
century, and was marked by the structuring of the state and its growth, which seemed to be
unlimited. In this context, regions and cities, whatever the room for manoeuvre in their particular
contexts, found themselves operating within the centre-periphery paradigm, within hierarchies
and national policies, in a political space dominated by the nation-state. This is no longer the case.
Closely interconnected processes of reshaping the state, and Europeanization, are rendering this
view obsolete. Cities and regions, even with Brussels' support, are not about to replace the state.
However, the central state's grip has been loosened, and
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Europe is witnessing increasingly unstable inter-governmental relations, with the

cooperation/competition model giving way to the creation of networks. This reshaping of the state
should not be confused with weakening. Retreat may actually allow state elites (finance ministries
naturally spring to mind) to pursue their main objectives, and to impose changes by acting on the
various levels of government. Most central governments have been able to make use of 'the
constraints of Europe', which they have been active in developing, in order to impose reforms on
national social actors. Conversely, many decentralization reforms have allowed central
governments to 'decentralize penury', giving regions the responsibility of managing scarcity and
painful restructuring.
Subnational governments are part of a complex European governance within which states are
reorganizing themselves. The key question as far as the state is concerned is: will regions or
federal states be able to 'exit' from the nation state? Is there any risk of dismantling the state?
Self-sustained process of regional autonomy seeking are not easy to stop. Although the central
government in Spain and the United Kingdom is now clearly fighting back and trying to limit the
autonomization of Catalonia and Scotland, it is hard to know what the future holds. The
federalization processes in Belgium, the United Kingdom, Spain, and to a lesser extent Italy, may
lead one day to the secession of one of the leading European regions. The Scottish dynamic is
particularly interesting. However, none is explicitly searching for an army or police force. One
should therefore expect continuous tensions and pressures from federal states or quasi-federal
states and regions on the status quo. The extent of the 'exit' strategies remains to be seen.
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