The Influence of Regional Governments on National Positions in the Council of the EU: A Legal and Constitutional Perspective

Abstract

In spite of the fact that some EU member states are fully-fledged
federations, some are centralized and many lie somewhere in between
these two poles, EU perceives its constituent countries as unitary, indivisible
actors. This can prove problematic since almost one-third of them bestow
autonomous legislative and executive power upon their sub-state units.
Thus the transfer of powers in favour of supranational institutions does not
affect only the central governments, but also the self-governing regional
bodies. As ‘compensation’ for supranationalization the states have
guaranteed access to the decision-making process on the supranational
level. However no such guaranties are given to the self-governing regions.
It is up to the member state’s internal legal configuration to integrate the
otherwise autonomous sub-state governments into the work of the pivotal
EU institution, the Council of the EU. The ways and schemes of providing
such integration are in the focus of this article. We intend to uncover
constitutional and legal models of the internal process of formulation and
articulation of member states’ EU policies, analyse them and compare
them.