The Impact of European Integration on Centre/periphery Relations

The core research question in this article is a straightforward one : has EU regional policy, interpreted as a form of Europeanisation, produced policy change ? What explanatory variables might explain such change, or resistance to change ? These questions give rise to consideration of three main hypotheses to explain change : those of misfit, convergence and mobilisation. The three hypotheses are “tested” with reference to two cases, France and the United Kingdom. The research thus captures two distinct state types that represent contrasting liberal democratic poles and yet contain sufficient variation to allow internal, as well as cross-national comparison. The cases considered offer some evidence of inertia (the management of structural funds reaffirming pre-existing national patterns of centre-periphery relations), some evidence of policy recalibration (in the UK devolved nations and the French regions), but none of policy transformation as a result of EU cohesion policy. As a more general point, structural funds policy is perhaps not the most appropriate instrument to measure policy change ; from this survey, structural funds are an epiphenomenon of deeper explanatory variables rooted mainly (but not exclusively) in domestic institutional orders and change.