ABSTRACT
For the first time since World War II, the present crisis of capitalism appears, more and more, as a crisis of the state. Attention has been focused, in southern Europe and elsewhere, not just on the usual failure of the state to ‘manage the economy’, but on the need to restructure expenditures, policies and apparatuses. In this respect the ‘regional crisis’ has been directly associated with the crisis of the central state and the contradictions of local authority actions. In a period characterized in Europe on the one hand by the serious criticism of state intervention and on the other by the rise of regional social movements in many countries, the whole question of the limits and possibilities to state actions becomes crucial.
