ABSTRACT
Whether the EU has been the midwife of ‘regional autonomy’ is a moot point. On the one hand it has offered its regions an additional political arena. Yet, as far as its territorial governments were concerned, each time more competence has been transferred from the state to the European tier of authority, there was the attendant risk that they endured a loss of autonomy as a result.2 Despite the fact that it has been in existence for nearly half a century, the EU is something of an enigma and that too cultivates a degree of ambiguity as to whether it is a force for regional autonomy. Although it has its own currency and embryonic foreign and security policy, it is not a state, in a conventional sense. Yet it is beginning to acquire the vestiges of statehood both in terms of its institutional structure and its powers. But, unlike most states, thanks to successive enlargements, territorially, it rarely remains the same size for long. Moreover, each new treaty marks the moment when more power is ceded to the EU.
