Four stages in European regionalism

In Western Europe, the debate about regional economic development, for so many years monopolised by national technical elites - economists, geographers, policy scientists, engineers - has become decentralized and politicised, and it is not unthinkable that a similar transformation may in due course occur in Poland. This paper reviews the emergence of regionalism in terms of a four-stage model. It shows how movements for cultural and linguistic autonomy have triggered off more general demands for political decentralization, and how both have been accommodated by constitutional innovation. The progress of regionalism in Western Europe has often been attributed to a softening or weakening of the nation-states as a result of wider trends of European integration. The paper ends by asking whether the emergence of regional governments is indeed part and parcel of the growth of the supranational tier in Western Europe, concluding that it is not, and that the further progress of political and economic integration would tend to reduce, rather than enhance, the prospects for regionalism. -from Author