The municipal gaze on the EU: European municipalism as ideology

Abstract

The EC/EU has been an eminently nation-led project. However, running in parallel, the European municipalist movement, braiding relations among cities across Europe, has sought to build an influential political role for municipalities within the European polity. The study of European municipal cooperation has become a consolidated thread of research in European and Urban Studies. Nonetheless, contributions on the topic tend to focus on the pragmatic aspects of municipal collaborations, glossing over the ideological foundations of European Municipalism. Therefore, by challenging the dominant scholarly view, this article contends that European Municipalism may be considered as a 'thin-centred' ideology. To support this argument, the ideological structure of European Municipalism is unbundled by throwing light on its conceptual components. As a result, this article construes European Municipalism as a 'thin-centred' political ideology, which postulates universal city-to-city mutualism and proposes a European counterproject built on a polycentric and diffuse conception of power.

The ‘European City’ at the Crossroads: Four Analytical Elements for Understanding Convergence and Differentiation

“…Specifically, this strand of literature highlights the strong role of public administration in European cities, which, together with other characteristics like their small and medium size and the persisting presence of a middle and lower-middle class, have continued to mitigate inequalities and segregation (see Kazepov and Cucca 2018;Le Galès 2018). Contrary to the neoliberalisation thesis on the erosion of regulatory mechanisms in cities and regions within global capitalism, the European city model underlines the strong role of the local welfare state, the activism of municipal authorities and the presence of an active civil society in providing more equal redistribution and representation in public institutions and policies (McEwen and Moreno 2008; see also Mocca 2023).…”

“…Proponents of new municipalism regard cities as a key 'entry point' for creating progressive politics through strategies carried out both by social movements and state actors, working in a conflictual/ collaborative tension to change the production and reproduction of urban life and beyond, in accordance with egalitarian ideals (Russell 2019). This entails establishing a range of measures, from the formation of an independent counterpower to the use of local governmental machinery for emancipatory reasons (Mocca 2023). As a result, new municipalism seeks to pluralize local political action by overcoming state-centred party politics and democratizing public administration (see Blanco and Gomà 2020).…”

Politicising proximity: Radical municipalism as a strategy in crisis

“…In the case of Spain, where the term has most frequently been used, the prefix 'new' is meant to distinguish recent experiments from a long municipalist tradition (Ordun˜a Rebollo, 2005). In some places, new municipalism -sometimes called 'neo-municipalism' (Mocca, 2021;Pirone, 2020) -is all too easily misinterpreted as a rediscovery of 19th-and 20th-century municipal socialism (Leopold and McDonald, 2012) and international municipalism (Clarke, 2012;Saunier, 2002) Some scholarly discussions of the recent global remunicipalisation phenomenon, for example, have pronounced this the return of a 'pragmatic municipalism', apparently oblivious to the wider new municipalist movement with which it shares its name (Warner, 2023). In practice, while attempts at (re)municipalisation are frequent features of new municipalist movements (e.g.…”

“…In the case of Spain, where the term has most frequently been used, the prefix ‘new’ is meant to distinguish recent experiments from a long municipalist tradition (Orduña Rebollo, 2005). In some places, new municipalism – sometimes called ‘neo-municipalism’ (Mocca, 2021; Pirone, 2020) – is all too easily misinterpreted as a rediscovery of 19th- and 20th-century municipal socialism (Leopold and McDonald, 2012) and international municipalism (Clarke, 2012; Saunier, 2002) for the 21st century (e.g. Association for Public Service Excellence [APSE] , 2018; Centre for Local Economic Strategies [CLES], 2019).…”