Limited institutional change in an international organization: the EU's shift away from ‘federal blindness’

Abstract

The European Union (EU) has been through many institutional transformations since the start of the integration project in the 1950s. While much of the literature has focussed on the more dramatic changes, less attention has been paid to instances of more limited institutional change. This article maps out and then accounts for the limitedness of the EU's departure from its original 'federal blindness' vis-à -vis regional actors. Theories of institutional change would lead one to expect that, as integration and regionalization heightened, endogenous pressures for change would trigger greater reform than that observed. Using a novel formula to estimate the EU's aggregate regionalization levels over time, the article demonstrates that it peaked between 1986 and 2003 but has since dropped to a level below that of the 1950s. Such a finding not only corrects a widespread assumption about regionalization levels in the European polity, but also provides an explanation for the pace and scope of the observed change as well as predictions about its future sources.

The Rise of Regional Influence in the EU – From Soft Policy Lobbying to Hard Vetoing

“…The Amsterdam Treaty of 1997 added further areas of compulsory consultation of the CoR (employment policy, social policy, the environment, vocational training, transport) and allows the EP to consult the CoR (used for the first time in 2002, during the Convention on the Future of Europe). The most notable changes since the Maastricht Treaty, however, occurred through the Lisbon Treaty (Tatham, , pp. 23–30).…”

Regionalization and the Transformation of Policies, Politics, and Polities in Europe

“…Indeed, it has changed the legal and constitutional order of European states when it comes to formal territorial self‐government (the rise of self‐rule), state‐wide co‐government (the rise of shared rule), or shaping the position of Member States on EU dossiers (the rise of domestic shared rule on EU issues) (Hooghe and Marks, ; Tatham, ). The rise of regions has also triggered (limited) Treaty change at the EU level directly, although change in this supranational setting has been more timid than the changes observed domestically (Tatham, ). Indeed, with regards to the supranational legal order, after an initial wave of enthusiasm triggered by the Maastricht Treaty and the establishment of a European Committee of the Regions, many regions have mostly focused on achieving financial and regulatory goals rather than institutional ones (Tatham, ; Tatham and Bauer, ; Van Hecke et al ., ).…”

Coping with power dispersion? Autonomy, co-ordination and control in multilevel systems

“…Future work may wish to take this research further, along the lines drawn out by Jensen (2014b), to assess whether other features of the political system such as partisan set-up, economic development and attitudes towards EU integration may also affect central -regional co-ordination on EU policy. Meanwhile, it is fair to say that, whilst upwards and downwards dispersion have dramatically increased in Europe over the past half-century, regions are still relatively weakly involved in domestic EU co-ordination, 1 and the EU's institutional architecture has remained surprisingly 'blind' to its regions (Tatham 2014).…”

“…As central governments have dispersed power both upwards and downwards, decentralization reforms and deepening integration have generated substantial competence overlaps between the EU and its regions. Such overlaps have triggered regional mobilization, both to influence policies directly in Brussels Tatham 2013) and to shape the EU's emerging constitutional order (Keating 2004;Tatham 2014). In this vein, the contribution by Tatham and Bauer (2014) explores how regions protect (or 'ring-fence') their autonomy by controlling upwards dispersion.…”