ABSTRACT
With devolution occurring in the United Kingdom, it is evident that the most unitary states in Western Europe are Luxembourg, Ireland and Greece. Luxembourg is a unitary state almost by default since it is too small to have regions in the sense in which they are recognised within the EU. The whole country is deemed to be a single region for the purpose of Structural Fund allocations. Ireland is also a region for EU funding, but its basic political and administrative units are its central government and the counties (dominated by non-elected officials). Centralised power is a legacy of the ‘former colonial administration based in Dublin’ and the ‘centralising tendencies of Irish nationalism’ (Jeffrey, 1997: 152). In response to serious criticism, there has been some attempt to decentralise administration with the establishment of nine Regional Development Organisations (RDO) in 1994, but this has done little to reduce the dominance of the state/county system. The Greek system of government is modelled on the Napoleonic system of ‘a highly centralised state and prefectorial control of sub-national entities’ (Jeffrey, 1997: 152), which has survived despite recent attempts to decentralise power and to establish a regional level of administration.
