Europäisches Zentrum für Föderalismus-Forschung

Regionale und kommunale Kooperation in Europa

Europäisches Recht für die regionale Integration  Neue Entwicklungen beim Recht der grenzübergreifenden Zusammenarbeit europäischer Gebietskörperschaften

Gregor Halmes

S. 517-537

With the coming into force of the Karlsruhe Agreement on the cooperation across borders between Germany, France, Luxemburg and Switzerland, new standards had been set in 1997 for the law of regional integration in Europe. Ten years later fundamentally new developments of the law of cross-border cooperation between regional and local administrative bodies in Europe become visible again: as part of the second stage of decentralization the appropriate steps were taken by the legislature in France to avoid the undesirable developments of the 1990s. Thus, for instance, cumbersome procedures of sanctioning the participation of French regional and local administrative bodies in cooperation groupings outside France were removed. Certain kinds of cooperation within the Karlsruhe Agreement can now be used in the whole of France. With the Regulation for a European grouping of territorial cooperation (EGTC), having come into force in 2006, a legal basis was created in European law for regional integration for the first time. As a result, a legal basis now exists, for the first time, for the cooperation of regional and local administrative bodies across borders, which can be applied all over the European Union. The report mentioned above presents these new developments in detail, explains the political reasons for them and analyzes to what extent these innovations can tackle the problems of cross-border cooperation of regional and local administrative bodies in Europe, which still exists. This analysis takes place against the background of a thorough experience of the implementation of complex cooperation projects during the past ten years. This experience proves that the reforms carried out in the French legislation can be highly advantageous to the partners of French regional and local administrative bodies. On the other hand, it is doubtful whether the new instrument in European law is actually suited to be able to permanently get rid of problems of cross-border cooperation throughout Europe: the details of the legal basis of the EGTC were linked too much, in the process of discussing the issue, to the legal basis and the permission procedures of the member states concerned. It is feared that, in practice, numerous problems might appear again which could be noticed about the Karlsruhe Agreement before the French legislature introduced greater flexibility. Moreover, the EGTC offers no solution to one of the remaining key problems of the cooperation across borders in Europe, i.e. the cross-border exercise of powers conferred by public law.

Zitiervorschlag für diesen Artikel:
Halmes, Gregor 2008: Europäisches Recht für die regionale Integration  Neue Entwicklungen beim Recht der grenzübergreifenden Zusammenarbeit europäischer Gebietskörperschaften, in: Europäisches Zentrum für Föderalismus-Forschung (Hrsg.): Jahrbuch des Föderalismus 2007. Föderalismus, Subsidiarität und Regionen in Europa, Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, S. 517-537.