Working Paper n.º 10
Europeanization and Representation
03 | 09 | 2005
Leonardo Morlino,Universidade de Florença
1. The Two Notions
Representation is a complex process and its core aspect is in protecting the interest of an individual or group through another person who is not the direct holder of the protected interest [see Sartori 1987, 306]. To appreciate the complexity of such a process we can recall the different dimensions and related dichotomies that characterize it. Once we take for granted that we are dealing with the public representation and not the private one, the next important dimension refers to the dichotomy between identity and interest. In fact, another simple definition of representation is “the ‘making present’ of A by B”. This can at the same time be an ‘acting for’ and a 'standing for', that is, the acting of someone for the interests of other individuals or associations and the standing of someone for the identities of other individuals or associations (see Pitkin 1967). Pizzorno (1983, 33-34) emphasizes the same point when distinguishing between "representation as an identifying activity" and "representation as an efficient activity". In the ‘efficient activity’ political leaders and interest association leaders ‘represent’ in the sense of making or supporting decisions that are aimed at improving and/or preserving the positions of specific collective groups within the system. This can be made through the public political institutions or through alliances, bargaining, and confrontation. The politicians should be able to make a good use of state organizations and procedures by showing administrative professionalism, bargaining skillfulness, legal knowledge. The goals are already set up, but - let it be added - the political leaders may reshape and rethink them. The identifying activity of political actors is achieved by building, maintaining and, in some occasion, strengthening the collective identities through parties, interest groups, movements, associations, and so on. This is a symbolic activity and the political elites have to be able to create trust, loyalty, and solidarity, that is, a set of positive attitudes not immediately related to the governmental decision-making.
Following the classical literature on the subject, a second dimension to be recalled is that between “function” and “territory” as the alternative bases for representation. Through functional representation interests and identities of social and economic groups are defined and transmitted directly and indirectly to decision makers. Through territorial representation, conflicts and divisions present in the territory are shaped and expressed. While the same actors may perform the activities pertaining to both kinds of representation described above, the expression of functional and territorial representation requires specialisation. Thus, trade unions as well as the most disparate sorts of interest associations express, with varying degrees of success, functional-based identities and interests; while parties, especially through elections in a democratic context, are the channels through which the divisions present in a given territory are expressed. The community to which functional representation refers is composed by the set of people that share a certain position in production processes: workers, for example, or the workers of one particular industry; or else small land-owners, or shop-keepers. The community to which territorial representation refers is composed of citizens as inhabitants of a given territory, and in this sense parties express the cleavages that exist (and are activated) in that territory and transmit them to decision-making institutions through the elected representatives they manage to obtain.
A third dimension is the one between simple and compounded representation. Briefly, representation – functional as well as territorial, identity-building as well as the efficient one – may encompass a single level (for example, one territory, one sector of the economy, one association) or may have a varying range (for example, the municipality, the province, the region or a whole country, or the EU, or, in a different sense, several sectors of production). Therefore, there may be a simple form or a compounded form of functional representation; a simple, or a compounded form of territorial representation. Here, the most important aspects to be stressed are that a compounded representation not only involves the coexistence of several levels of representation, but also implies that representation may at different times concern different territories, each of which will have to be considered as the combination of all residing identities and interests – and these territories may in turn be a municipality, a region or a country, possibly overlapping and interconnecting in the different forms of representation. As a consequence, of course, the difference among levels of representation lies not in the collective actors but in the individuals situated at those different levels of representation.
The complexity of the representation process is also perceived when a fourth – and, for our purposes, last – dimension is introduced, relating to the effective loci of representation. While from the perspective of normative democratic theory the proper loci for representation ought to be the institutional fora where decisions relevant for interests and communities are made, and these in turn ought to correspond to the elected bodies, in practice informal and bureaucratic fora – that is, non elected bodies – are often more important for representation, in the phase of preliminary formulation of decision as well as in the phase of implementation of generally-valid decisions. If non-elected fora become relevant, then administrative actors turn out to be as important, or even more important, than strictly representative actors.
Concerning each of these four dimensions, it must be noted here that over the last few decades research in this field has highlighted - more or less definitely – the existence of some trends. Thus, concerning the first dimension, the weakening of ideology and the cultural secularisation that have characterised Western Europe over the past decades originate a trend towards ‘efficient’ activity as opposed to identity-building activity, and thus towards interest-based representation as opposed to identity-based representation. However, this same trend is partly contradicted by religious and ethno-linguistic resurgences. With respect to the second dichotomy, functional organisation of representation seems to have grown stronger than its territorial-electoral counterpart, due to the emergence of neo-corporatist phenomena as well as to a corresponding weakening of the presence of parties on the territory – as revealed by decreasing levels of turnout at elections and by the weakening of the structured presence of party organisations on the territory. Notwithstanding the predominance of the “functional” element of the dichotomy, however, the very mechanisms of democracy – not least the electoral mechanism among others – ensure the survival of territorial-party representation. albeit significantly weakened. Prevailing conceptions of democracy (shared by the left as well as the right wing, especially in Italy and Spain) favouring a strengthening of local levels of government as a means of achieving a higher level of democratic quality, and the translation of such conception into practice – carried out by disparate actors, such as the Northern League and Democratic Left in Italy – have caused the (third) trend towards compounded levels of representation (municipalities, provinces, regions, whole country) as opposed to the simple levels that characterise unitary states, where parliamentary representation is the only one that really matters (e.g. is the case in Greece and Portugal). The weakening of parties, the fragmentation of interests, and the increasing complexity of issues justify the emergence of the fourth trend highlighted here: the increased relevance of non-elected, and especially bureaucratic, fora in the exercise of representation. In this case, it is hard to see any countervailing trend, except for the emergence of strong political leaders in some specific cases and situations, at the local as well as the regional and national level, especially when laws contribute to create such roles of leadership, as is the case in Italy and Spain at the local and regional level. Figure 1 shows the four main dimensions, dichotomies, and prevailing trends described above.
Figure 1: Essential dimensions, dichotomies and trends of representation |Ver PDF|
With regard to the concept of Europeanization, we can refer to the chapter by Radaelli (this volume) (see also Olsen 2002) and here make only reference to impact of EU on the representative dimensions sketched above, and more precisely ‘the gradual and differentiated diffusion-penetration of values, general norms, and specific decisions from those European institutions into the domestic politics, that is, into the working domestic institutions, decision-making processes and domestic policies at different levels’ (Morlino 2003). Of course, the impact may appear in the long or short run into the domestic politics of different member countries and we refer to it, that is, to the domestic structural impact only. It may include: the creation of new institutions, new articulations of already existing institutions, new functions of the old institutions, a different working of the existing institutions or branches of them, the emergence of new actors and the change of old actors. Moreover, the structural impact may affect a large array of domains. Figure 2 suggests the main ones. Some of them are not worth analyzing in a political science context. Rather, they have a greater appeal for jurists (e.g. the impact on the legal system). Others are very important in a political science context.
Figure 2: Salient Domains of Domestic Impact |Ver PDF|
As shown by figure 2, to understand the domestic structural impact, the most important areas of research are those concerning the main institutions. Consequently, they include: the functions and structures of representation, cabinet/assembly relations, centralization/decentralization, and administrative structures. All four directions are related to the following questions: how can a decision be made and implemented in each member country; how can the entire domestic decision-making process and implementation be reshaped by European norms and directives, that is, when the existence of an additional level of decision-making is taken into account.
2. Mechanisms and Hypotheses on the Structural Impact
Within a perspective that is focused on the decision-making process, three characteristic mechanisms have to be emphasized in order to explore the domestic structural impact of the European Union on member countries. They can be briefly labeled: the policy/polity consistency, the spillover effect, and the complexity impact. In each mechanism the analysis of actions by institutional and political elites must be emphasized, but the attitudes of the people and their reactions are extremely relevant as well.
By the first mechanism, policy/polity consistency, I am referring to the problems and consequences that occur because of the distance and extent of consistency or incompatibility between different European norms and the domestic institutions in their actual workings. That is, when domestic institutions actually work in connection with European regulations and directives, then the extent of mutual consistency/inconsistency becomes a salient aspect that can provoke consequences. If the consistency is high, Risse, Green Cowles and Caporaso (2001, 6) label it “the goodness of fit”. In this case there is no pressure for change and no need for institutional adaptation. The European pattern and the domestic one tend to overlap. There is already a convergence. Shortly, there is no visible, noteworthy impact. If there is inconsistency, then there is “misfit” and consequently, a pressure for change and adaptation is imposed on the domestic institutions.
According to Risse, Green Cowles and Caporaso (2001, 6-8) the actual working of this mechanism may be better understood by examining three possibilities. First, if the adaptation pressure is low and a great deal of structural adaptation is not required, “an institution is unlikely to resist changes in its environment which are consistent with its own constituting principles”. Second, if the adaptation pressure is very high, there is little institutional change “because of the enormous discrepancy between EU institutions and well-entrenched domestic institutions.....National institutions will defend their identity and integrity...”. As suggested by Olsen (1995), radical and rapid transformations may result only over time and after a serious performance crisis of the institutions. Third, “the adaptation pressures are significant, but low enough in order to be surmountable by domestic actors. In such cases both structure and agency should matter”. This third hypothesis is likely to be the most recurring one, and consequently the important related direction to explore concerns what structures exist and what change will be possible, but above all, what strategies the actors will pursue.
The consistency/inconsistency mechanism can be described in a more detailed way when the different moments of actions and reactions are disentangled. That is, once a decision has been made and it is seen to be consistent, partially consistent, or inconsistent with the domestic rules, then different reactions can be envisaged during both the incorporation into the domestic legal system and the implementation. Accordingly an entire repertoire of reactions may be seen. They include the simple incorporation of the rule, the attempt to transform it in this phase of absorption, the postponement of the implementation, the attempt to change it while implementing it and then the attempt to influence domestic representatives, public and private, in the new decision-making process to change the new output, which may be incompatible with the domestic attitudes, preferences, and positions of domestic actors.
On the whole, Caporaso and his colleagues point out a key mechanism, but they seem to make two important assumptions that, in a few cases and domains, do not hold. First, they assume that the domestic institutions are well established and entrenched. Consequently, the involved actors are well-defined and conscious of their strategies. On the contrary, in a democracy that is going through a long, difficult crisis or a permanent transition this is not so. All main institutions are discussed and debated and maintain a poor legitimacy (Morlino 1998). If this hypothesis is compounded by a high inconsistency and consequently a high adaptation pressure, what happens? Is there a defense of integrity and identity of national institutions that do not actually exist?
In addition, if the democratic regime is led by a government that would like to bring about changes and if the European policies happen to be congruent with those future changes, then the present inconsistency is largely irrelevant and despite its extent there will be change. This, however, cannot be considered the result of some impact or of an adaptation, but in the best case a shrewd way to profit from the European Union. Moreover, if the institutions are in the process of consolidation and accordingly on the way to defining themselves and their stability (Morlino 1998), again, what happens? In the perspective of the involved actors and unstable uncertain domestic institutions, the specific most appropriate action in each situation has to be singled out (March and Olsen 1989, 23-26). In other words, the key question that party leaders and other actors have to face is to determine the most appropriate action and strategy to achieve their goals, provided that given well entrenched European rules exist and must be implemented in order to benefit from them. When Italian democracy is at the core of my research, or when Spanish, Portuguese and Greek democracies are scrutinized to analyze the effects of Europeanization, appropriateness and its connected aspects seems to be the right path.
Secondly, the three above-mentioned authors assume a strictly institutional perspective so that there are rules at the European level which can be implemented at the domestic level. But let’s rather take into consideration the decision-making process in its making and the decisions agreed upon as the end results of the interweaving of different domestic and supranational arenas. In this different perspective, there are objective changes, no resistance can be envisaged, and there is nothing else to do but either to react and adapt in some way or to violate and go through an infringement procedure. Consequently, in this hypothesis and within well-established domestic institutions, singling out the most appropriate actions can be the best strategy from the point of view of the actors involved.
Figure 3: Mechanisms of Europeanisation: Consistency/inconsistency |Ver PDF|
Third, let’s add that if there are different kind of policies, a different impact can also be conceived. An interesting distinction on this matter is proposed by Knill & Lehmkuhl (1999), who propose three possible kinds of European policies that bring to:
1. positive integration, characterized by European regulatory policies that prescribe an institutional model (ex.: environmental protection, health and safety at work, consumer protection, sections of social policy);
2. negative integration, with European policies that prescribe no model or old regulatory policies that were ‘market making’(ex.: policies defining conditions for market access and market operation, directed at liberalization and deregulation to secure the functioning of Common Market);
3. framing integration, that is an intermediate situation where policies give some minimal indications, that prepare the ground for other activities of negative or positive integration, designed to change the domestic climate and to stimulate the support for broader European reform objectives (ex.: railways policy).
The working of the ‘consistency/inconsistency’ mechanism and the different related hypotheses are displayed in figure 3.
The second important mechanism to take into full consideration is the spillover. If there is an adaptation pressure, and even some extent of consistency between European regulations and directives and domestic institutions, then the impact may bring about three different effects, that often strengthen one another and are empirically very difficult to separate:
1. there is a transference of new rules, routines, and behavioral patterns from the sectors which are more directly affected by the European policies to other ones which are less, much less or remotely affected;
2. such a transference may imply a different, stronger relative role of the affected institution, and through this mechanism a basic empowerment of that institution is gained vis-à-vis other domestic institutions;
3. in a favorable context of domestic fluidity, crisis or change, uncertainty and conflict, the transference and institutional empowerment may have a catalyst effect, by bringing about a new or different settlement of institutional arrangements and of other decision-making processes.
The second and third effects in the preceding list may concern the central government, the regions, other local institutions, or even the bureaucracy, because of the key salience of the implementation phase. On the whole, if there is such a spillover effect a few decision-making processes and the actual working of the involved domestic institutions are largely molded and transformed. Although to a different extent, the existence of such a mechanism is the strongest and most visible test of a profound impact of the European Union on domestic institutions. In this vein it is the most effective confirmation that a Europeanization process is actually at work, and this is the mechanism that research has to address. This notion of spillover differs from that developed by Stone and Sandholtz (1998, 15), that is related to the progressive removal of hindrances to cross-national exchanges when there are the reactions of government and EU institutions.
In addition to these important mechanisms, an empirical analysis of the impact has to cope with a third impact, the complexity impact. The simple existence on a supranational level that can influence the key domestic political activities, functions, role and behavior of actors is, in itself, a source of additional complexity that cannot be avoided, and can profoundly change how the basic domestic functions and activities are performed. In this vein if elections, representation, decision-making process and implementation are the key political elements in every working democracy, the simple fact that there is an additional level of politics can deeply affect each element; and can change how those functions are actually performed. I need not explain how such a third mechanism is interwoven with the two previous ones.
Two additional analytic problems are closely related to those mechanisms: “time lag” and the “space horizon”. Both of these can be presented as two questions. First, how much time will elapse before the European rules have an impact at the domestic level, if, in fact, they do? Which is the horizon the actors take into account in their strategies in terms of space: the individual country, the European Union, or even a larger geographic area? In my perspective Bartolini (1999) deals with this problem when he develops his analysis of boundary building and political structuring. The space horizon is a key aspect in the strategies of the actors and gives them the guidelines for their action and, when needed, their research for appropriateness. Fig. 4 labels and summarizes the basic analytic phases to take into account when dealing with this theoretical problem and shows the analytic tools that are necessary to detect, describe and understand the impact
Fig. 4: Mechanisms of Europeanization: the analytic phases |Ver PDF|
3. Research Hypotheses and Empirical Results
Recent empirical literature analyzing the impact on domestic politics has not singled out these mechanisms or the additional problems addressed above. More simply, some authors formulated a few hypotheses in each different direction of research which was stressed in Figure 2. Among the most recurrent hypotheses, a few of them may be recalled. They include those on: the explanation of democratic consolidation of Southern European countries (Pridham 1997, Whitehead 1991); on multi-level governance (Marks, Sharpf, Schmitter and Streck 1996); the strengthening of national executives by increasing the efficiency of interstate bargaining and with regard to particularistic groups in the domestic polity (Moravcsik 1993); the reduction of executive autonomy and control, diminishing legislative power and increasing judicial power and sub-national independence of unitary and federal states, but, above all, the latter (Schmidt 1996); the new role of the regions which has become more relevant than local governments and in relation to central executives (Keating and Jones 1995 and Le Galès and Lequesne 1998); or how consensual and co-operative policy-making replaces majoritarian decision-making processes (see Magone 1997 and Börzel 1999); the modernization of national bureaucracies (Meny, Muller, Quermonne 1996). Figure 5 gives a simplified check list of the main hypotheses that have emerged in the literature on the impact that is discussed here with a few additional propositions on the changes in the functions and structures of representation.
Figure 5: A Few Main Hypotheses on the Domestic Structural Impact |Ver PDF|
In this vein the key hypotheses of figure 5 include the basic change of the legal system, but more importantly: the multiplication of the levels of representation, the larger possibility of bypassing the parties in the decision-making arenas and consequently the end of any possible gate-keeping role of parties (Morlino 1991), the establishment of trans-national organizations that both parties and interest groups have been building in their organizational restructuring, the emergence of new actors, such as the regions and other local institutions that largely complement parties and interest groups in performing representative functions, the establishment of a mainly corporative representation; the strengthening of the executive as opposed to the Parliament, and an additional decentralization and modernization of bureaucracy for a more efficient implementation of European law.
4. An Addendum on Southern Europe
Although Southern Europe is not a consistent area, during the same years, on the one hand, Italy has been experiencing a long period of crisis of parties and modes of representation and, on the other hand, Portugal, Spain and Greece entered the European Union and at the same time went through a process of democratic consolidation (Morlino 1998) and basic reshaping of representative modes vis-à-vis the previous authoritarian period and the first years of transition. Moreover, all four these countries had a phase of economic crisis in the 1980s. Therefore, on the one hand, they almost desperately needed the help of European resources and, on the other hand, were considering the European Union as the ‘great opportunity’ not to lose for the modernization of the country from both an economic and administrative point of view. Additional problems of uncertain identities and domestic problems caught those countries, and particularly Portugal and Greece, and pushed them even more strongly toward the European Union. Fourth, and particularly important, because of domestic reasons with consequences on foreign politics (Italy), because of being recently admitted (Spain, Portugal and Greece) and of being small countries (Portugal and Greece) those four countries are traditionally very weak in the input side of the European decision making process. This means that, at least on paper, there can be a higher number of situations on inconsistency and misfit than in larger, stronger countries such as Germany.
In such a context of unstable or stabilizing, but partially uncertain domestic institutions, the basic perspective of the Southern European actors inside the European Union was actually to look for the specific most appropriate actions in each situation (see March and Olsen 1989, 23-26). In other words, the key question that party leaders and other actors have to face is to determine the most appropriate action and strategy to achieve their goals, provided that given, well entrenched, even if inconsistent, European rules exist and must be implemented (see also Morlino 1999) in order to benefit from them. Appropriateness and its connected aspects seem to be the right path. If so, there is a large possibility of detecting an impact of the European Union on the domestic politics of those four countries, also taking into account the existing differences between the domestic situation and the European Union influence.
With the partial exception of France, which has been mainly studied in relation to the impact of EU policies on national administration (see, for instance, Carnelutti 1988, Meny 1989, Muller 1992), there are only few analyses on the other countries (see bibliography at the end of the paper). However, apart from the few exceptions still focused on France (esp. Ladrech 1994), that research mainly focus mainly on the influence of EU policies on the Southern European countries and either pay no attention or very little attention to the domestic structural impact of the Union.
In this perspective, the work by Ioakimidis (2001) on Greece is a relevant exception. This author sees the impact of European Union as a sort ideological programme for modernization and change supported by Southern European political elites (and even Eastern European elites), not only by Greek conservatives and later on by socialists. The reshaping of the size of the state and of its very functions in a previously statist culture, a decentralization impact, and the strengthening of civil society are the main features of Europeanization, according to Ioakimidis.
Although there is no full-fledged empirical analysis on most of the hypotheses sketched in fig. 5 with reference to Southern Europe, France included, Magone (1998) gives a contribution to the analysis of neo-corporatism when he compares the developments of this phenomenon in Spain and Portugal and points out how the European policies compel social and political actors to look for concertation and agreements. But whether this is the true actual consequence of Europeanization or is, rather, a simpler policy convergence between the two countries remains still unclear.
The impact of the European Union on regions and regionalism has received relatively stronger attention, although the extent and the actual mechanism of such an impact remains to be explored more closely. In fact, its declared high general salience (Keating 1998, 17) is falsified or at least not recognized by some research and confirmed by other works. Thus, Morata and Muñoz (1996, 217) state that “the structural funds reform did not succeed in…….a closer involvement of regional governments in the formulation and implementation of programmes….” And until 1993 such reform “only superficially affected the domestic pattern of central-regional relations”. On the contrary, Börzel (2001) develops an empirical analysis of Europeanization where a careful and well sketched comparison between Germany and Spain shows the impact of European Union in transforming the previous conflictive relationships between the center in Madrid and the regions into positive cooperative linkages. The most obvious explanation comes out of the time lag between the emergence of the phenomenon, that Börzel doing the research some years later was able to detect, and the previous moment when Morata and Muňoz conducted their own research. This said, however, the two authors did not deny an impact of the Union on the domestic bureaucratic structures. Although conducted some years later, the analysis by Dudek (1998) on Galicia and Valencia concur with that of these authors to stress the limits of regions in their actual influence within the relationships with the EU. But again, here we are considering two regions much weaker than Catalonia and País Vasco, and above all a different feature of the complex phenomenon, that is, the decentralizing effect of the European Union when the Structural Funds, the agriculture policy and the fishing policy are considered. As is well known, this suggests how taking into account the precise research questions is so important to understand the resulting reply.
Ladrech (1994) and Balme and Jouve (1996) on France, Verney (1994) and Ioakimidis (1996 and 2001) on Greece, Magone (1997, ch. 9 and 2001) on Portugal, Grote (1996) and Giuliani (2001) on Italy also analyze the regional topic with contrasting final results. Ladrech and Balme and Jouve stress the developments of regional initiatives aimed at Brussels and the cooperative relations between center and periphery brought about by the European regional policies. However, especially Balme and Jouve suggest how, on the one hand, other sub-regional units, such as départments and cities, are also relevant and, on the other hand, the central state is still dominant in all networks. Verney and Ioakimidis on Greece and Magone on Portugal emphasize the decentralizing impact of the structural funds within a previously strong unitary state, the modernizing effects on the civil service, the push for an improvement of industrial sectors and transport infrastructures, the mobilization of civil society. Grote and Giuliani on Italy express different opinions. Grote stresses the changes in administrative structures at regional level, the empowerment of regional governments, the undermining of the control of the central government, the role of other private actors, and also the push for more effective regional governments. In a shorter analysis of the topic Giuliani also considers the trend toward a stronger role of regions in Italy, but accounts for it by making reference to domestic and non European factors.
When the policies are analyzed, there is a much stronger agreement on the differentiated European impact in connection with the different policies. In her description of Italian adaptation to the European Union set up in Maastricht, Sbragia (2001) displays the intertwining of external factors and domestic ones in the reshaping of Italian public finance. Borrás, Font and Gómez (1998) point out the three different kinds of impact brought about by three specific policies (environmental, regional and technological policies) in Spain. Both the work by Tondl (1998) on European regional policy and its major impediments to an effective growth ( incompetence of national administration and unstable macroeconomic policies) and the important contribution by Leonardi (1998) on regional cohesion and convergence, especially in Southern Italy, also pays prominent attention to the policies, rather than to the structural impact.
Most of research mentioned above mirrors a reality described that has been changing in recent years. Consequently, these studies should be revised and updated. A forthcoming research on Italy (Fargion, Morlino, Profeti 2005) does this, and some of the main results can be summarized here in a few points in connection with the four dimensions of representation described in figure 1. They include: 1. the impact of European Union is not an agent of change, but as anticipated when the mechanisms of spillover were described (see above) it has to be seen as a ‘catalist agent’ to bring about results that were already in the actual possibilities; 2. there is a transference of policy patterns from the cohesion policies to other policies at regional level, characterized by a reshaping of regional arena of interests as well; 3. in this process the timing has been very relevant to account for those changes; 4. there no serious connection between amount of resources devoted to the regional policies and extent of change: the Northern and Central regions as Lombardy, Tuscany and Emilia Romagna that receive a relatively smaller amount of funds are those more present in Bruxelles and play a salient role of actors at that level; 5. the role of political leaders is an important factors to explain that activation; 6. because of the European policies a few regional governments have been achieving a greater role within their own space of direct action (the regional level); 7. in a few regions there has been the empowerment of the civil servant if they have at least a minimal capacity of efficient action.
5. Concluding Remarks
The Europeanization, domestic structural impact included, can be detected in different domains and a lot can be said about it. Here, one of the main conclusion of the chapter is that while is more difficult to check the impact of European Union vis-à-vis the parties and the public arena related to them, it is possible to detect such an impact at subnational level when the cohesion policies are considered also with reference to the partial reshaping of representative mechanisms in the direction already envisaged in Figure 1 and administrative modernization. The open question is how these policies will affect the various countries once that for the old member of the Union the basic processes of modernization and reshaping of representation took place and for the new members once the new funds and resources will arrive and have to be implemented and allocated.
