This article seeks to map out routes of direct regional interest representation in the European Union. It identifies six main opportunity structures available to regions: the Committee of the Regions, the Council of Ministers, the Commission, the European Parliament, regional Brussels offices and European networks and associations. Using original interview material, the article analyses how and under what conditions each route can be most efficient for regional interest representation. It concludes that though these opportunity structures have not triggered the emergence of a 'Europe of the Regions' as some of the literature in the 1990s had predicted, they do represent important channels of access that regions can use in an attempt to influence the EU policy process. These regional para-diplomatic activities bypass EU member states and consequently challenge liberal intergovernmentalist assumptions regarding the nature of EU politics.

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Although talk of a ‘Europe of the regions’ has come and gone, regions have come to Brussels but stayed. While such mobilisation has not led to the emergence of a ‘third level’, regional officials in Brussels sometimes outnumber their peers from their country’s permanent representation. Considering the perseverance and size of such a presence, we explore what factors best account for it. To this end, a series of multi-level models inform us about its determinants. Controlling for a number of economic and demographic factors, we find that different dimensions of regional authority matter when accounting for regional presence in Brussels. These findings stress the importance of domestic institutional factors when analysing the extent to which regions project themselves supranationally.

Initially unfolding in parallel ways, the Europeanization and the regionalization of politics have increasingly intersected. Regional authorities have organized themselves to affect policy developments at the supranational level. They do so through the internal restructuring of their administrations, by carrying lobbying activities directly in Brussels, but also by institutionalizing and sometimes constitutionalizing their authority over their Member State's EU position. In other words, both their informal and formal influence over EU affairs has grown. The relevance of these trends is illustrated by recent events such as the Wallonia parliament holding up the EU–Canada trade deal. This case highlights how the nature of both subnational and supranational politics has changed over time. International trade deals used to be considered as ‘high politics’, remote from the immediate concerns of regional bodies and well beyond their formal reach. The Wallonia case illustrates this is no longer so.

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