Governance Territoriale Comunitaria e Sistemi di Pianificazione. Riflessioni sull'Allargamento ad Est dell'Unione Europea
The European integration process has been characterized by a growing interest for the territorial dimension of community policies. During the last 20 years, the EU elaborated several attempts to correct the growing territorial disequilibria caused by its achievements in terms of economic integration. The discourse underlying EU territorial interventions and the set of tools and actions explicitly or implicitly focusing on territorial goals is usually referred at as European spatial planning. At the same time, the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 produced a radical change in the perspective of future European integration. The European Council held in Copenhagen in 1993 officially opened a process that in some ten years would have granted the EU membership to ten post-socialist Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia Bulgaria e Romania). Whereas the simultaneous accession of such an heterogeneous group of nations represents a new chance in terms of widening and deepening of European integration, it also represent the hardest challenge faced by the EU throughout its history. The territorial impact of the enlargement appears particularly relevant, with 92% of the population of the new member states leaving in regions with a GDP per capita lower than the 75% of EU average. The described emergencies represented as many potential threat for the process of European integration, leading the European Commission to produce a set of document analyzing the territorial impact of the future enlargement, and to introduce specific tools to support candidate countries’ road towards EU membership. For similar reasons, also the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP), by the most defined the proudest achievement of European spatial planning, highlighted the importance to consider CEECs’ peculiar reality within the future cohesion policy. The same is true for EU’s latest document of territorial guidance, the Territorial Agenda. While at the supranational level the described confrontation was going on, the candidate countries were busy with the complex transition from central economic planning to market economy, having at the same time to deal with the completion of accession requirements and the transposition of the acquis communautaire. Within such a highly fluid institutional environment, new spatial planning systems had to be built, in order to deal with the challenges of the new market-friendly reality. This PhD thesis elaborates on the above considerations, building on the assumptions that the process of European integration under way has led to the development of peculiar institutions and functioning mechanism that involve the different territorial layers within a complex framework of multi-level governance, generating processes of reciprocal contamination and adaptation going under the label Europeanization. Said that, the work explores the characteristic of European territorial governance in the eastward enlargement of the EU. The scientific community is still looking for a shared definition of European territorial governance, mainly due to the different impact of the European dimension on member states’ spatial planning systems. In this light, the present dissertation contributes to the debate analyzing, on the one hand, the role of the EU in the evolution of spatial planning systems in the four candidate country of the Visegrad group, on the other hand, the influence of the new challenges of the enlarged European Union on the redefinition of European spatial planning. Looking at European territorial governance from the eastwards enlargement led to interesting findings on the mechanism that stands behind Europeanization. It suggests how the process of reciprocal contamination between European and domestic context were shaped, on the one hand, by CEECs’ specific starting conditions, on the other hand, by the highly asymmetric power relations between the different actors attending the accession negotiations. As the candidate countries undertook a radical process of internal restructuring in order to satisfy accession requirements, at the same time the EU had to face its future enlarged configuration and the important territorial challenges coming along with it. The different dimensions of European spatial planning were challenged by the enlargement perspective, and revisited through a process of combined economic rationality and political decision-making. The findings of the research shows how the enlargement influenced the evolution of European territorial policy, leading to the introduction of specific pre-accession instruments directly tackling territorial challenges in candidate countries and to the extension of existing structural programming to Central and eastern Europe. The evolution of European spatial planning tools notwithstanding, several studies shows how, whereas EU interventions produced economic convergence between the different member states, at the same time they led to a widening of internal disparities, especially within the new member states, that may eventually lead to the consolidation of a two-speeds European scenario. This may be explained if one considers that present European spatial policy is still underpinned by approached and metaphors developed during the 1980s and 1990s by a north-western rooted epistemic community, that have become outdated and require to be revised taking account the new European reality. Within the scarcely institutionalized scenario of European spatial planning, an important role in developing new spatial ideas and planning approaches is played by the European spatial planning epistemic community. In this concern, EU eastward enlargement constitute an un-precedent opportunity towards the integration of western- and eastern-European actors, whose successful seizing is a crucial step in the perspective of integrating both old and new member states’ challenges and priorities within a coherent framework for future action. The above considerations suggest how European territorial governance has been strongly embedded in the characteristics of the enlargement. This outstanding political event opened several windows of opportunity, leading to the evolution of several policy fields at both EU and domestic levels as a result of the interaction between member states, candidate countries and European institutions. Whereas this appears immediate for those policy fields where the EU detains legitimate competences, the present thesis shows that also spatial planning hasn’t been immune to the described Europeanization process. Hence, one can say that the enlargement process led to specific mechanism of Europeanization of spatial planning, on the one hand, laying down the pace of the reforms through a tight sequence of deadline and, on the other hand, embedding the interaction of the different actors in a complex network of power relations. Within the described framework, European territorial governance in the eastwards enlargement appears as a highly asymmetric field, reflecting the roles and power of member states, candidate countries and European institutions in the accession negotiation. The EU could count on candidates’ will to obtain EU membership and to benefit from financial incentives in order to apply a “systematic pressure” on domestic reforms, promoting the adoption of specific rules and priorities through conditionality mechanisms. On the other hand the candidate countries exercised almost no influence on European spatial planning, the evolution of the latter being the result of a process occurred within decision-making arenas where they had few or no contractual power vis-à-vis existing member states.
Governance territoriale comunitaria, Sistemi di pianificazione, Europeizzazione, Polonia, Slovacchia, Ungheria, Repubblica Ceca, Strutture, Discorso, Strumenti, Pratiche, Allargamento, Settore ICAR/20 - Tecnica e Pianificazione Urbanistica
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