Cycles of regional policy and territorial governance in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

The paper is a tribute to Gyula Horváth’s work. Gyula Horváth was convinced that countries with regionalized government systems are more effective in terms of economic competitiveness and more successful in their social and territorial convergence. The regionalization reforms implemented in Western Europe about three decades ago also support this view.

It was no coincidence, then, that these successful examples served as models for the acceding Central and Eastern European countries in their adjustment to EU cohesion policy. This study tries to describe the causes behind these latter reforms’ failures and fall-backs. The authors, by conducting a chronologically ordered comparative analysis of territorial governments and Cohesion Funds management, show that the success of regional reforms required an extremely complex system of conditions. The institutional changes were not sufficient for regional decentralization, but neither the lack of institutional changes alone explains the failure of regional convergence. Gyula Horváth was right to argue that the effectiveness of regional development and cohesion policy considerably depends on institutional and governance adaptability. Unfortunately, he was wrong in assuming that the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe will be able to achieve this in a short time. The governmental and political culture of the countries successful in their territorial governance favors modernization and consciously prepares its institutional system for continuous change. Other countries, on the other hand, which are unprepared for government modernization tend to track an external sample and, therefore, produce hectic and often unsustainable changes in their territorial reforms.