ABSTRACT
In the late 1980s the idea of a ‘Europe of the Regions’ suddenly became politics. The European ideal revived with the passing of the Single European Act, and the process of governmental and policy integration accelerated. Confronted with federalism, the politicians of the German Länder, of the Spanish ‘autonomous communities’, and even, increasingly, of the French regional councils, discovered the ‘principle of subsidiarity’, and interpreted it as the devolution of powers from Brussels and Strasbourg not to a national but to a sub-national or regional level.
