The EUREGIO: the ‘model case’

The EUREGIO is the oldest CBR in Europe, and can be counted among the most advanced in terms of organizational autonomy and strategic coherence. Particularly through its leading role within a transnational ‘club’

of border regions and CBRs – the Association of European Border Regions,

AEBR¹⁾ – the EUREGIO provided a model that was replicated by many other initiatives across Europe (Perkmann 2002).

Figure 5.1 Euregio

2.1.1 History

The EUREGIO dates back to 1958 when municipal associations on both sides of the border organised a first cross-border conference. Both associations had been founded separately in the attempt to improve the local and regional infrastructures and it was thought that cross-border cooperation would prove mutually beneficial.

1) www.aebr-ageg.de

In 1966, a ‘Work Group’ was founded to operate as the informal board of the cross-border region. It attempted to shift the EUREGIO’s work from purely project-based contacts towards a programmatic collaboration. At the same time, a secretariat was established, funded via membership fees, which at the time was distributed across two locations on each side of the border.

Two studies, in the fields of culture and economic affairs respectively, gave the secretariats a programmatic basis for the further development of the EUREGIO.

In the mid-seventies, the Work Group was given a formal basis by means of a statute, and an action programme was developed. This formalisation process ended with the establishment of the Council in 1978, the first cross-border regional parliamentary assembly in Europe constituted by the political delegates of the member authorities.

In 1985, the separate administrative units were merged into a single secretariat, located in Gronau (DE), employing both Dutch and German staff.

A ‘regional cross-border action programme’ was presented in 1987, outlining the general strategy for the EUREGIO for a twenty-year period. This was promoted by a Dutch-German agreement involving the Dutch central government and the adjoining German Länder North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony with additional funding provided by the European Commission. A Steering Committee was established, involving central and Land authorities as well as the Dutch provinces, German districts²⁾ and the EUREGIO.

This action programme constituted the main input for a first Operational Programme under EU Cohesion Policy for the period 1989-1992, funded as pilot project. When the European Commission launched Interreg I in 1990, the EUREGIO reacted with the speedy elaboration of a second Operational

2) In German: Bezirksregierungen.

Programme and has since been instrumental in deploying Interreg policy measures in this area.

2.1.2 Socio-economic profile

Stretched over 8,000 km², the EUREGIO area has a population of approximately 2 million, consisting of Dutch and German citizens on a balanced basis. The largest urban centre is Enschede (NL), with approx.

145,000 inhabitants. Due to the Enschede-Hengelo agglomeration, on the Dutch side the population density is considerably higher than on the German side, which has a mainly rural character.

The EUREGIO is an old industrial area within a rural setting, traditionally specialising in the textile sector. The mainly cotton-based industry emerged out of home-based textile production in the second half of the last century, and developed into the main industrial base of areas on both sides of the border. Although the border has remained unchanged since 1648, its impact on the economic structure was increasingly felt only in this century. Until the end of the 19^th century, the area had been characterised by strong functional interdependencies induced by the common industrial structure along the so-called Baumwollstraße (‘cotton road’). The populations on both sides of the borders spoke the same language, a Saxon-lower German dialect. In 1960, 21% of the labour force still worked in the textiles sector whereas today the share has declined to a marginal 4%. The unemployment rate in the area has been consistently above the respective national average; similarly both the GDP per capita and the value added per employed person are below average, reflecting the relative marginalisation of the local border economies relative to the central agglomerations of economic activities.

2.1.3 Organisational set-up

The EUREGIO has just more than 100 member authorities, each associated with one of three inter-municipal associations, one on the German side and two on the Dutch side. Legally, the EUREGIO is a body resulting from the merger of these three inter-municipal associations, which are constituted according to Dutch or German public law, respectively. A common Dutch-German statute states the tasks and responsibilities transferred to the EUREGIO by the inter-municipal associations. Legally, both the statute and the standing orders are private law agreements between public law bodies on both sides of the border (Raich 1995). However, all Dutch and German member authorities have each officially approved the statute, the standing orders and the funding rules in both languages. This means that a ‘quasi-public law bracket’ has been devised that obliges the members to follow common rules, gives the EUREGIO a secure financial basis and regulates questions of legal liability (Raich 1995). On the basis of the agreement, decision-making in the EUREGIO de jure operates according to the majority principle.

The EUREGIO has the following bodies: a Council, a Working Group, a Secretariat and a number of ‘Working Circles’ in various policy fields.

The EUREGIO-Council is a para-parliamentary body with no formal legislative competencies, and is constituted by 64 elected politicians appointed by the member authorities. In the Council, formally the most authoritative among the EUREGIO bodies, issues of general political importance are discussed. The Working Group is a supervisory board with approx. 20 members, and is composed of elected senior civil servants and political office-bearers of the member authorities. The ‘working circles’, which are flexibly composed by various expert civil servants from local and supralocal authorities and interest groups, deal with most of the project-oriented work in various policy fields.

The Steering Committee is distinct from the EUREGIO as in addition it involves representatives of higher-level authorities that are not member authorities of the EUREGIO: The economics ministries of the Netherlands, NRW and Lower Saxony, the Dutch provinces and the German districts. The EUREGIO is a full member of the Steering Committee and is entitled to propose its chairman.

2.1.4 Activities and achievements

Most of the EUREGIO’s activities are funded via Interreg that define six policy fields as the general framework common to all Euroregions in the Dutch-German border area.³⁾ The EUREGIO commands approx. 54 MECU Interreg-related funds, amounting to an annual expenditure of approx. 4.5 ECU per capita. The largest share of the funds (55%) is dedicated to the areas ‘economic development, technology and innovation’ and ‘spatial planning’. These measures are targeted at transport infrastructures, industrial estates, R&D and inter-firm networking and tourism. The local and regional share in total expenditures is approximately one quarter of total expenditure (Schack 1998), indicating a considerable dependence on national and supranational funding allocation.

It is important to note that for the majority of projects the EUREGIO is not the actual implementing agency; rather, the EUREGIO functions as a grant-body and facilitator responsible for selecting and supporting the most promising projects. Hence, most projects are planned and implemented by 3) Note that the areas eligible for Interreg do not always exactly correspond to the areas covered by the Euroregions. This is because Interreg eligibility is determined by the NUTS status of the areas, and not their membership in a Euroregion. In view of Interreg III, the EUREGIO is currently lobbying the European Commission with the objective to declare the Coesfeld Kreis – currently an ‘adjoining’area – as eligible. The argument advanced it that in Southern Europe, in some cases areas up to a border distance of 100km are still eligible, as opposed to as little as 30km for some EUREGIO locations. For this reason, it is proposed to use labour market regions and not NUTS III units as criterion for Interreg. The issue is important in so far as the volume of Interreg support is determined on the basis of the eligible areas.

various types of public, semi-public and private organisations, in particular local authorities, inter-municipal associations, interest associations and chambers, charities, higher education institutions and firms. A closer analysis of the approved projects reveals that the actual members of the EUREGIO, i.e. municipalities and district authorities, play a rather modest role as project leaders. By contrast, universities and other higher education organisations account for 28% of the total EU means, and the EUREGIO is responsible project leader in nine cases utilising 20% of the available EU means.⁴⁾

2.1.5 Evaluation: The EUREGIO as a process of cross-border regional mobilisation

The emergence of the EUREGIO can be seen as a process of regional mobilisation in which Dutch and German local authorities succeeded in constructing an organisational base for an agency acting on behalf of a newly constructed territorial unit: a cross-border region. By establishing an organisational base, the secretariat, the EUREGIO over time acquired the capacity to act, both by representing the novel region vis-à-vis authorities on superior levels, and by creating governance mechanisms for endogenously intervening on the new territorial unit.

Two main strategies were pursued, the first one pointing towards an improved representation of the areas in relation to supra-local authorities, and the second aiming to construct governance structures able to intervene endogenously upon the newly constructed territorial unit. The chronology shows that the success of the first strategy was a precondition for the second.

The strategy of external representation succeeded because it managed to influence policy decisions on higher levels in favour of the area and because some resources were employed to build the organisational infrastructure necessary for developing the strategic capacity to act endogenously.

4) Cf. documentation Council meeting 05/03/1999.

In this sense, the EUREGIO can be seen as the emergence of a new collective actor, based on a ‘regional’ mobilisation of some 100 local authority members. This process of mobilisation was predicated upon three sets of conditions. First, the EUREGIO mobilisation was facilitated by favourable contextual conditions provided by higher-level authorities such as the European Commission as well as the German and Dutch national authorities. Second, the EUREGIO’s piecemeal acquisition of a capacity to act was decisively rooted in the policy entrepreneurship of the secretariat.

The secretariat, qua organisation, pursued a strategy of organisational growth by assuring a steadily growing inflow of resources both from local and supra-local public authorities. Third, this strategy was predicated upon the successful stabilisation of supportive network relationships between public both on the local and supralocal levels, in particular the insertion of the EUREGIO into the framework of the implementation of the EU Interreg programme.