ABSTRACT
In the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty the EU placed increasing emphasis upon the region as a common building block for policy and action. In the same period the collapse of the Soviet bloc led to the emergence of a ‘New Europe’ of former Central and Eastern Europe characterised by a reawakening of regional autonomy and identity beyond the boundaries of the EU. This chapter considers the implications of these developments for the UK regions in the early to mid 1990s and their responses in light of the various forms of regional administrative structure which left local government as the key elected sub-national institution. Overall, the chapter argues that central government's stance towards the issue of regional institutional capacity and the role of local government in this period was such as to have damaging consequences on the ability of the UK regions to respond to the new challenges posed by developments in Europe. Section one provides evidence of the operational deficiencies in terms of seeking to exercise influence over the EU policy-making challenge. Section two suggests that there was also a representative deficiency in terms of responding to institutional change in Europe. This was clearly reflected in the case of UK representation on the EU Committee of the Regions, as well as in respect of the Assembly of European Regions (AER) which had a broader geographical coverage than the EU. A number of the problems experienced by regions in the UK, and especially in England, are illustrated from the author's experience of participating in the preparation of the Yorkshire and Humberside Regional Strategy — the region's background strategy for its bid to the European Commission to gain access to the Structural Funds (Yorkshire and Humberside Partnership 1993).
