Suchergebnisse

How the committee established to officially recognize sub-national units of government is beginning to influence federal policy and politics; European Union.

THIS ARTICLE FOCUSES ON QUESTIONS OF REGIONAL REPRESENTATION. IT SETS OUT THE WIDELY DIFFERING STRUCTURES OF SUB-NATIONAL GOVERNMENT THROUGH THE EUROPEAN UNION (EU) AND THE PROBLEMS OF DEFINITION THAT THE TERM "REGION" THROWS UP. THESE FACTORS PLAYED A CENTRAL ROLE IN SHAPING THE ORGANIZATION STRUCTURE AND POWERS OF THE COMMITTEE OF THE REGIONS. IT IS ALSO ARGUED THAT THE COMMITTEE HAS BEGUN TO BREAK FREE FROM THE RESTRICTIONS WHICH WERE IMPOSED ON IT AND TO MAKE A MARK ON EU POLITICS THROUGH ITS CONSULTATIVE POWERS AND THROUGH AN EMERGENT CONSTRUCTIVE RELATIONSHIP WITH OTHER EU INSTITUTIONS. ITS GREATEST SIGNIFICANCE LIES IN BREACHING THE ESTABLISHED PRINCIPLES OF REPRESENTATION IN THE EU AND IN ESTABLISHING FORMAL RECOGNITION BY THE EU OF SUB-NATIONAL GOVERNMENT.

The 'Europe of the Regions' debate in the late 1980s and early 1990s influenced the current regionalization process in Sweden; regional actors used it as an argument for further decentralisation of power with a degree of success (Warleigh-Lack & Stegmann McCallion 2012). Thus one important element in any discussion around a 'Europe of the Regions' and its possible obsolescence is its impact not just at the EU level but also in the regionalization processes within member states. If the EU is a multi-level polity, then for a Europe of the Regions truly to be 'obsolete', it must be absent at each level of the polity, in each member state. This article argues that a Europe of the Regions is far from obsolete, although it may well be patchy and expressed differently, and to different degrees, in each EU state. Focusing on the case of Swedish regional actors, the paper argues that officials and politicians from this level, who participate in politics at the EU level or in the EU arena, see this participation as a win-win situation that they wish to preserve.

Since the Lisbon agenda in 2000, Europe stated the goal to become the most advanced knowledge economy in the world relying specifically on the increase and strengthen of its human capital and technological endowments. However, given the presence of localized externalities in the knowledge accumulation process, this policy may produce distortive and unwanted consequences at the territorial level reinforcing the existing high inequalities among regions. Another crucial feature to be considered is the recent enlargement process of the European Union which has brought on stage new players characterized by a low average level of knowledge activity accompanied by a huge degree of internal territorial disparity. The aim of this paper is to identify the "knowledge regions" in Europe and to examine their main territorial features. To this aim we first build, for 287 regions belonging to 31 European countries, a comprehensive picture of the two variables - human capital and technological activity - which constitute the main pillars of the knowledge economy. For each of these two variables we construct several indicators examining their spatial distribution across the European regions. Further, we compute two synthetic indicators for human capital and technology and, on the basis of these two dimensions, we finally identify the knowledge regions.