Multi-Level Governance: a Method to Solve Problems and to Minimize Conflicts

Otto Schmuck
UEF-Vicepresident, Member of the Board of Europa-Union Deutschland

Some theses for discussion

1. Multi-level governance has become an important feature of the European Union. The reasons of this are manifold: Nationstates alone do not have the power and the effectiveness to solve important political problems. At the same time there is an increase in international interdependencies and direct contacts of actors at various political levels.
2. In the founding Treaties of the EU, the regions were only mentioned as objects of politics (Preamble of the Treaty on the functioning of the European Union: “….anxious to strengthen the unity of their economies and to ensure their harmonious development by reducing the differences existing between the various regions and the backwardness of the less favoured regions …”). But, linked to the completion of the internal market (1992), with far reaching spill over effects to many other political fields, like social and environmental policy and even culture, regions successfully made demands to have a say in those fields of European politics where they are affected in a certain way.
3. The Treaty of Maastricht (1992) was a breakthrough for regional influence: the Committee of the Regions was established, the principle of subsidiarity was introduced with a reference to the regional and local level (“…the Union shall act only if and in so far as the objectives of the proposed action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States, either at central level or at regional and local level ….”) and the provision “decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen…” including, from a regional perspective, all levels of policy making
4. From the citizen’s perspective, European integration and regionalization can be viewed as complementary processes: on the one hand, power goes further away from the lower level; on the other hand, power comes closer to the citizens.
5. Multi-level governance can be described as the dispersion of authority away from central government: upwards to the supranational level, downwards to subnational jurisdictions, and sideways to public/private networks. It is the reorganization of authority in the European Union as a polity-creating process in which authority and policy-making influence are shared across multiple levels of government: subnational, national, and supranational. While national governments remain predominant participants in EU policy making, control in various policy fields has slipped away from them.
6. Important political aims, like those of the Europe 2020-strategy (increasing the employment rate, increasing combined public and private investment in R&D, climate change and energy targets, reducing school drop-out rates, increasing the share of the population having completed tertiary education, lifting at least 20 million people out of the risk of poverty and social exclusion), can only be achieved if they are supported and implemented by all political levels – European, national, regional and local. 
7. From a regional perspective, in a system of multi-level-governance the predominance of the nation state has diminished and as a result regional conflicts may loose importance. History shows that the internal market, with its aim to open the borders between the Member States, contributed to resolving regional conflicts, especially in cases where regions have been divided by national borders, like in the Tyrolian, the Basque or the Irish case.
8. Moreover, the European Union guarantees fundamental rights based on shared values. This regime gives the regions a stable framework and protection against possible attacks of national governments.
9. European integration offers regions a possibility to play an active role at the European level. Regional and local representatives are members of the Committee of the Regions. Moreover, many regions have established liaison offices in Brussels. With the instruments of regional policy and territorial cohesion, the EU has developed direct links to the regions. Thereby the administrative capacity of the regions has been strengthened even in centralized member states.
10. A major problem in the concept of multilevel governance (and the concept “Europe of the Regions”) is the multitude of sizes and the difference in competences and administrative capacity of the regions. Beside strong regions with legislative powers, there are purely administrative regions and very small entities in the Member-States, like Malta, Cyprus and Luxembourg. 
11. Now as before, the decision-making process evolving in the EU gives a key role to national governments, with a certain influence of subnational governments in selected arenas. The outcome of this process is not as orderly as a classical federation. The final product is and will be a colourful picture of territorially variable, functionally specific, overlapping, non-hierarchical networks. National governments will continue to be central actors because the territorial claims that national governments represent are exceedingly strong. But the nation-state is being supplemented by other actors in a more complex geography.
12. Separatism is not and cannot be the aim of regionalism in Europe. One of the predominant aims of European integration after WWII was – and still is – to frame the influence of independent nation states and to hold back the dangers of an exaggerated nationalism. The nation states have a strong position in a federal Europe, but their capacity to act is limited according to the accepted rules and procedures. At the same time, the status of the regions, including their right for self-government, is accepted by the EU and the EU procedures offer a certain influence for the regions in the European decision making and in acting at the European level. It is neither the aim nor a promising concept to create a multitude of small new nation states and, by doing so, to increase the number of member states in the EU.