the EC for its own reasons inaugurated a system of regional funds, beginning in 1975 with the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
From the point of view of Brussels-based officials, the ERDF and other so-called ‘structural funds’ had two purposes. The first was to address the problem of economic backwardness and unevenness within a Community that was still very much guided by a post-war culture of ‘growth’, as the Single European Act made quite explicit. With each new group of members came new inequalities that required attention and compensation if economic integration was to succeed. Italy’s
In 1982, taking the European Community’s average income as 100, Denmark—the wealthiest member— stood at 126, Greece at just 44. By 1989 per capita GDP in Denmark was still more than twice that of Portugal (in the US, the gap between wealthy and poor states was only two-thirds as wide). And these were national averages—regional disparities were greater still. Even wealthy countries had deserving zones: when Sweden and Finland joined the Union in the mid 1990s, their Arctic regions, under-populated and totally dependent on maintenance grants and other subsidies from Stockholm and Helsinki, now qualified for assistance from Brussels too. To correct geographical and market deformations that locked Spain’s Galicia or Sweden’s Vasterbotten into dependency, agencies in Brussels would devote large amounts of cash—bringing undoubted local benefits but also setting up expensive, cumbersome and occasionally corrupt local bureaucracies in the process.[245]
The second motive behind Europe’s enormously costly regional funding projects—between them the various ‘Structural’ and ‘Cohesion’ Funds would consume 35 percent of all EU expenditure by the end of the century—was to enable the European Commission in Brussels to bypass uncooperative central governments and collaborate directly with regional interests within the member-states. This strategy proved very successful. Ever since the late 1960s, regionalist sentiment had been growing (in some cases reviving) everywhere.
The new regionalist politics fell into many over-lapping sub-categories—historical, linguistic, religious; seeking autonomy, self-government or even full national independence—but generally divided into wealthy provinces, resentful at being obliged to subsidize penurious regions of their own country; and historically disadvantaged or newly de-industrialized zones, angry at being neglected by unresponsive national politicians. In the first category were to be found Catalonia, Lombardy, Belgian Flanders, West Germany’s Baden-Wurttemburg or Bavaria, and the Rhone-Alpes region of south-east France (which together with the Ile-de-France comprised nearly 40 percent of French GDP by 1990). In the second category were Andalusia, much of Scotland, French- speaking Wallonia and many others.
Both categories stood to gain from European regional policies. Wealthy regions like Catalonia or Baden- Wurttemburg set up offices in Brussels and learned how to lobby on their own behalf, for investment or for Community policies favoring local over national institutions. Political representatives from disadvantaged regions were just as quick to manipulate grants and aid from Brussels to increase their local popularity—and thereby pressure compliant authorities in Dublin or London into encouraging and even supplementing Brussels’ largesse. These arrangements suited everyone: European coffers might hemorrhage millions to subsidize tourism in the depopulated West of Ireland or to underwrite tax-incentives to attract investors to areas of chronic unemployment in Lorraine or Glasgow; but even if only from enlightened self-interest, the beneficiaries were becoming loyal ‘Europeans’. Ireland successfully replaced or updated much of its dilapidated transport and sewerage infrastructure in this way, and among poorer, peripheral member states it was not alone.[246]
The SEA expanded Community powers into many policy areas—the environment, employment practices, local research-and-development initiatives—in which the EC had not previously been involved, all of which entailed the dispensing of Brussels funds directly to local agencies. This cumulative ‘regionalization’ of Europe was bureaucratic and costly. To take one tiny example that can stand for hundreds: Italy’s Alto Adige/South Tyrol region, on the country’s northern frontier with Austria, was officially classified by Brussels in 1975 as ‘mountainous’ ( an uncontentious claim); thirteen years later it was officially declared to be over 90 percent ‘rural’ (no less self- evident to any casual traveler), or—in Brussels jargon—an ‘Objective 5-b Area’. In this dual capacity the Alto Adige was now eligible for environmental protection funds; grants to support agriculture; grants to improve vocational training; grants to encourage traditional handicrafts; and grants to ameliorate living conditions in order to retain population.
Accordingly, between 1993 and 1999 the tiny Alto Adige received a total of 96 million
The result, in the South Tyrol as elsewhere, was that—costly or not—integrating the continent ‘from the bottom up’, as its advocates insisted, did seem to work. When the ‘Council [later the Assembly] of European regions’ was launched in 1985 it already comprised 107 member regions, with many more to come. A certain sort of united Europe was indeed beginning to come into focus. Regionalism, once the affair of a handful of linguistic recidivists or nostalgic folklorists, was now offered as an alternate, ‘sub-national’ identity: displacing the nation itself and all the more legitimate in that it came with the
The residents of this increasingly parcelized Community, whose citizens now professed multiple elective allegiances of variable cultural resonance and daily significance, were perhaps less unambiguously ‘Italian’ or ‘British’ or ‘Spanish’ than in decades past; but they did not necessarily therefore feel more ‘European’, despite the steady proliferation of ‘European’ labels and elections and institutions. The lush undergrowth of agencies, media, institutions, representatives and funds brought many benefits but won scant affection. One reason was perhaps the very abundance of official outlets for disbursing and overseeing the administration of European largesse: the already complex machinery of modern state government, its ministries and commissions and directorates, was now doubled and even tripled from above (Brussels) and below (the province or region).
The outcome was not just bureaucracy on an unprecedented scale but also corruption, induced and encouraged by the sheer volume of funding available, much of it requiring the exaggeration and even invention of local needs and thus all but inviting the sorts of venal, local abuses that passed unnoticed by the Community’s managers in Brussels but risked discrediting their enterprise even in the eyes of its beneficiaries. Between a reputation for policy-making by distant unelected civil servants, and well-stocked rumors of political back- scratching and profiteering, ‘Europe’ in these years was not well served by its own achievements.
The familiar shortcomings of local politics—clientelism, corruption, manipulation—that the better-run nation states were thought to have overcome now resurfaced on a continental scale. Public responsibility for occasional ‘Euroscandals’ was prudently shifted by national politicians onto the shoulders of an invisible class of unelected ‘Eurocrats’, whose bad name carried no political cost. Meanwhile the ballooning Community budget was defended by its recipients and promoters in the name of cross-national ‘harmonization’ or rightful compensation (and fuelled from the Community’s seemingly bottomless funds).
‘Europe’, in short, was coming to represent a significant ‘moral hazard’, as its carping critics, in Britain in particular, gleefully insisted. The decades-long drive to overcome continental disunity by purely technical measures was looking decidedly political, while lacking the redeeming legitimacy of a traditional political project pursued by
