Abstract
Regional and local authorities are nowadays completely part of the European Union policy-making process. They are now almost 200 regional organisations in Brussels (Greenwood, 2011) and they emerged massively in the mid-1980s during the rise of the Single European Act (SEA) and the establishment of the second biggest redistributive policy in the EU budget; the Regional policy. Indeed since the Treaty of Rome in 1957, the European integration and governance always considered territorial interests and economic, social and territorial cohesion in the EU. In order to, counterbalance the centre-periphery phenomenon in terms of wealth and economic power, the EU attempts to fund corrective policies, infrastructure, social inclusion measures, training in order to make the single market coherent. As matter of fact, the European Commission especially is pushing forward even implicitly territorial interests and their representations in Brussels and it bargained during accession talks the creation of sub-national authorities in order to monitor structural funds (Kada, 2010).
Since the EU governance, its policies and its decision-making can be very tough to glimpse, French regional (and local) authorities established in the early 1990s “regional representations” or ‘para-embassies' (Pasquier, 2013). Two main motives also for the creation of those representations; the emergence of a multilevel governance in the EU (Hoodge and Marks, 2001), and create a flexible but constant link between Brussels and regionals capitals.
This paper will try to answer to the following question, how can we define the role of the French regions and their representations in Brussels? This essay will try to test briefly both the accuracy and the relevance of regional representations. Firstly, we are going to describe how regional representations are functioning. After looking at several profiles of regionals bureaux, we are going to scrutinize their interactions with the main EU bodies of their influence; the Committee of Regions. The third part of this essay will focus on their actions repertoire in the ‘European bubble' i.e. in the EU governance and the decision-making in Brussels. And last but not least, we will try to set up in a prospective way, how institutional and policy changes, as well as at the EU and at the regional level would transform their modes of actions and strategies.
