Attila Ágh, Tamás Kaiser, Boglárka Koller (eds)

Europeanization
of the Danube Region:

The Blue Ribbon Project

Together for Europe

Series

Kossuth Publishing Co.

The Blue Ribbon Research Centre wishes to express its gratitude to the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund for the financial support of the “New forms of multi-level governance in the European Union and Hungary”, four year research project (OTKA ID: 81553).

Table of Contents

Preface

Europeanization of the Danube Region: The Blue Ribbon Project

ATTILA ÁGH: Danube Strategy as a challenge of globalized locality (glocality): The Europeanization of a Functional Macro-Region in the Danube Valley

TAMÁS KAISER: Regional development in the EU and the European Danube Strategy

JÜRGEN DIERINGER – PATRICIA LAUKÓ – GÁBOR SCHNEIDER Towards a European Strategy for the Danube Area

ZSOLT PÁLMAI: Stakeholder involvement in the preparation process of the European Danube Strategy

ANNA MOLNÁR: From the pilot experience of the Baltic Sea Strategy to the implementation of macro-regions in other regions

TOMÁŠ STRÁŽAY: The complementarity of the Danube Strategy with other Regional Initiatives in Central Europe – a view from Slovakia

TAMÁS SZABÓ – TAMÁS POLGÁR The Danube Strategy and Innovation Perspectives and priorities

BOGLÁRKA KOLLER: The imagined region Prospects of the Danube identity

STEFAN AUGUST LÜTGENAU: Civil society participation in the European Danube Strategy

Communication from Studio Metropolitana

LÍVIA TÖRÖK – DERS CSABA: The emerging Danube Macro Region from the perspective of Budapest: Creating new networks of cooperation in development

Research note

RÓBERT KOVÁCS – IVETT SIPOS: Measuring regional competitiveness with special focus on the Danube Strategy

Authors

Imprint

Preface

In ancient times rivers determined civilisations and often served as boundaries from geographic, economic and cultural points of view as well. Currently, our existence is not bound anymore to territories defined by rivers, since we live in complex structures of various territorial, political and economic entities. Nevertheless, it seems that Europe’s river, the Danube has been obtaining a new role, stepping forward as a connecting link between local communities, and becoming a revived symbol of the old continent. The declaration and the ambitious plan of the European Danube Strategy (EDS) is a clear evidence of the endeavour that tries to tie up a large region of Europe with a beautiful Blue Ribbon: the Danube, and create a suitable framework for its better socio-economic, environment-conscious, and culturally open development.

The Blue Ribbon Project, namely the establishment of a functional macro region along the river Danube is an attractive experiment. This EU generated initiative was born in 2009 in the upper Danube city of Ulm and since then a wide range of stakeholders signed up for it. Parallel to this, research centres, think thanks, governmental and intergovernmental actors have been participating in the debate and discourse on it. The Blue Ribbon Research Centre (BRRC), established in 2009 at the King Sigismund College, Budapest and supported by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA) within the framework of the No. 81553 Research Project, defines itself as part of the academic network dedicated to contribute to this new project in Europe by furnishing analyses, findings and recommendations. The multi level governance theories (MLG) provide the overall theoretical framework for analysing and understanding the emerging macro-regions. The research conducted by the BRRC aims to explore the various forms of MLG and identify and conceptualise the main challenges facing European macro-regions.

The Danube Strategy which is one of the key priorities of the rotating Spanish, Belgian and Hungarian (SBH) team presidency has a special relevance in Hungary, as it is planned to be finalised and adopted in the first half of 2011 when Hungary is leading the trio. It is rather evident, why the EDS has become a central priority for the Hungarian EU presidency, since Hungary has a central position geographically in the Danube Region, and consequently central interest in the intensive contacts between the Upper Danube and Lower Danube Regions. As Austria played a special role in the preparation for EU membership of its neighbouring countries, it is expected that Hungary – in tandem with Bulgaria and Romania – will play a pioneering role in assisting the West Balkan states in their accession process.

Hungary began the preparations for the EU presidency in 2007 and several research projects were launched to elaborate its perspectives. The Hungarian Prime Minister’s Office in cooperation with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences initiated a research project to design the strategic vision for the SBH team presidency. The strategic working group met regularly in the countries concerned and as an outcome of this cooperation four books were published. The first volume on presidencies, compiled by our expert group – The prospect of the EU team presidencies: Integrative balancing in the new member states – focused on the general description of the team presidencies as a new institution in the EU. The second volume – New perspectives for the EU team presidencies: New members, new candidates and new neighbours –highlighted the new challenges of the EU: the completion of the deepening of the integration process as mandated by the Lisbon Treaty, and at the same time, the expansion of the Union by facilitating the integration of the West Balkan countries, and simultaneously reforming the European Neighbourhood Policy. The third volume – The global crisis and the EU responses: The perspectives of the SBH team presidency – elaborated further on the tasks facing the SBH team presidency. Finally, the fourth just published volume – Think European for the Global Action: From the Lisbon Strategy to the Europe 2020 Strategy – deals with the most imperative priority, the updated Lisbon Strategy, i.e. the Europe 2020 Strategy.

This book is the fifth volume of the above mentioned series of books, dedicated especially to explore the EDS. The Blue Ribbon Research Centre – in close cooperation with the Together for Europe Research Centre of Corvinus University – has been active and took the initiative in the elaboration of the European Danube Strategy through a series of conferences that led to this volume. On 4 December 2009, the BRRC organized a preparatory conference on EDS at King Sigismund College that was followed on 20 January 2010 by a wider national conference as a preparation of the stakeholder conference in Hungary on 25-26 February 2010. The conference series were completed on 18 March 2010 by an international expert conference at the King Sigismund College where the papers of this edited volume were presented.

This volume includes studies focusing on various aspects of EDS, viz. the political, economic, social, cultural challenges. Theoretical analyses as well as practical implications can be found in the papers. The Danube strategy is just in the making, therefore we decided that instead of prescribing a strict theoretical and methodological structure of the book, we leave it to the authors of various backgrounds, disciplines and nationalities to explore and analyse EDS from new angles and elaborate their own interpretations.

The editors

Europeanization of the Danube Region: The Blue Ribbon Project

ATTILA ÁGH:
Danube Strategy as a challenge of globalized locality (glocality): The Europeanization of a Functional Macro-Region in the Danube Valley

“The era of globalization of the economy is also the era of localization of polity.”

(Castells, 1998:357)

INTRODUCTION:

European Danube Strategy as a challenge

The European Danube Strategy (EDS) as a development project provides a real challenge for both the old and new EU member states as well as the potential members and the neighbours, since

(1) The painful effort to overcome the socio-economic consequences of the global crisis in the EU (“exit strategy”) has created both the danger of “economic patriotism” in the most developed member states concomitant with the national fragmentation of crisis management and the unique opportunity for a radical change with policy innovations to cope with the “governance deficit” at the EU and global levels. Therefore, the Europe 2020 Strategy and the EDS have appeared as mutually reinforcing processes of new strategies, in which the EDS has also been part of the relaunching of the single internal market for global competitiveness.{1}

(2) The enlargement fatigue in the old member states has been also seriously aggravated by the global crisis, while the new member states are still in their early consolidation process and post-accession crisis just to be shaken by the global socio-economic crisis. The new member states, however, can also benefit from the accelerated process of the pre-accession in the West Balkan (WB) region, seen as an extension of the internal market or the common economic area with shared social progress.{2}

(3) In the last decade the EU has been less and less able to act as a “magnet” or centre of gravity for the West Balkan (WB) countries by failing to provide the proper attraction and mobilization in their pre-accession process for implementing the conditionalities (“carrot crisis” as a failure). This situation can be fundamentally changed by the EDS as a genuine “European perspective” for the WB countries to reorganize their societies based on EU values and regulations.{3}

Thus, the global crisis and the “carrot crisis” have equally proved that the usual conceptual framework of the EU, the traditional approaches of both “widening” and “deepening” have been unable to identify and solve the new problems. Instead of the old paradigm of “economic growth” the new paradigm of “social progress” has come to the fore. The social progress centred paradigm will also basically change the transnational cooperation among the subnational units along the Danube Region (the “transnational subnational”).{4}

When conventional wisdom loses its explanatory power, then a new analytical design has to be elaborated. The new concept is “glocality” as the globalized locality, or global thinking and acting in local societies and economies according to the slogan “Think Global – Act Local”. In this spirit the policy programmes of the French-Czech-Swedish and the Spanish-Belgian-Hungarian team presidencies have been published under this title: “Think Global – Act European”. This programme can be translated into the main message of this paper “Think European – Act Local”.{5}

The EDS exemplifies that the elaboration of the new conceptual framework is urgent. The “Think European” aspect has presupposed that the new concept of Europeanization is the strategic design for the “globalization cum regionalization”, since the EU cannot play a preeminent global role without the regionalization-Europeanization of its neighbourhood. It is evident that the globalizing world in the EU has direct “domestic” implications for the “globalized locality” or “glocal process” in policy-making (see e.g. Kenneth, 2008). The “Act Local”, or Regional, aspect has made the application of the territorial cohesion – in combination with economic and social cohesion – into a central requirement of the EU development projects in the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty (see e.g. Kaiser, 2009).{6} Thus, the main trend for Europeanization is the adaptation to global competitiveness in the complex terms of social progress and/or social productivity instead of the narrow indicators of “economic growth” in GDP terms. In such a way global competitiveness and social progress compose together a twin paradigm. It applies not only for the “deepening” of the EU, but also for its “widening” because the Danube Strategy demands the rethinking of both in their mutual feedbacks. The current EU documents on EDS have taken the first steps for the change of paradigms in general, and for the EDS related practical organizations in particular. As a reminder, the December 2009 Presidency Conclusions wisely noticed about the EU 2020 Strategy that a new reflection is needed for “a more efficient and transparent governance structure (…) to improve coordination of economic policies and on the best way of using country recommendations to strengthen the link between national and EU measures, and enhance national ownership through more active involvement of social partners as well as of regional and local authorities.” (Council, 2009d:7). Thus, this paper follows the itinerary of the EU documents and tries to provide the outlines of a “wider” and “deeper” analysis by opening the window to the larger social science literature, first and foremost in the field of new regionalism and globalism.{7}

The elaboration of the EDS has reached its turning point, since the first part of this exercise has come to an end by June 2010. There have been many events centered on the EDS, mostly as stakeholder conferences. Germany organized its stakeholder EU conference on 1-2 February in Ulm and on 25-26 February 2010 a similar event was held in Budapest. These have been followed by a common Vienna-Bratislava meeting (19-21 April 2010), then by the Ruse/Giurgiu (10-11 May 2010) and Constanta (10-11 June 2010) conferences. Altogether five official EU conferences have taken place. These “stakeholder conferences” have been organized by the European Commission and they have all had a high level attendance by prime ministers and other leading politicians, so they put the EDS on the right track.{8}

At the same time, there has been a process of finalizing the main principle of the Europe 2020 Strategy that has been completed by the 17 June 2010 European Council meeting (Council, 2010b). This Strategy gives the general framework for the EDS with special regard to cohesion policy as it was also combined with the Lisbon Strategy. Although the Presidency Conclusions of the June 2010 European Council meeting have confirmed the significance of the future cohesion policy and its organic contact with the Europe 2020 Strategy, the debate on the perspectives of cohesion policy in the period of the new financial perspectives (2014-2020) is still going on. Two approaches have clashed clearly about the vision of the future cohesion policy, some have claimed that cohesion policy should support competitiveness of all regions, while others have emphasized that the focus on the less developed regions has to be kept in order to support the convergence process and to improve the territorial cohesion of the EU. Undoubtedly, the EDS has a good chance only by focusing on the less developed regions, including those beyond the EU borders in the potential member states.

All in all, the main message of the EU is that “Following the accessions of 2004 and 2007, there is a need and an opportunity to overcome the legacy of former divisions and for the potential of the Region as integral part of the European Union to be more fully realised. This EU Strategy for the Danube is also within the EU 2020 framework being adopted at the Spring European Council. In addition, it is in line with the adopted Lisbon Treaty which states that the EU shall promote economic, social and territorial cohesion, and solidarity among Member States. Macro-regional strategies are prime test case of what territorial cohesion means in practical terms.” (European Commission, 2010:1).{9}

I. FROM BORING TO DARING

– ANSWERING THE CHALLENGE BY THE BLUE RIBBON STRATEGY

“The EU 2020 strategy must go local. (…)

The new EU 2020 strategy will only work if all levels of governance are involved (…)

(and) it will not work if it’s not connected to the regions and cohesion policy.”

(Luc van der Brande, President of CoR, 2010:1-2)

The Danube Region has been the largest unused territorial potential of the EU, the real challenge being the mobilizing of this neglected – actually wasted – territorial capital by turning it into a powerful macro-regional social capital. Therefore, the “boring” routine practices have to be abandoned and the EU has to start “daring” moves in the spirit of the new twin paradigm of social progress and global competition. The territorial capital of the Danube Region has a huge potential for the EU because these historically developed and so far neglected networks can produce substantial social capital and high trust, if proper development plans and confidence-building measures are launched. The extent to which territorial capital can be turned into social capital is the key to the regional competitiveness in a global context. Thus, the EDS represents a decisive turn in this respect for the Danube functional macro-region, since it is a project turning the unused territorial capital to a much greater social capital.{10}

It is the right historical time to take daring steps, since the EU is nowadays in a creative crisis, thus it has to make drastic “crisis driven changes” under global pressure. The EU has to respond to the new phenomena, namely to the emergence of glocality as the creative force of globalized locality or the bottom–up process of Europeanization cum globalization. The strategic design of the EDS has to provide the “compass” for the Road Map of development projects along the Danube. The EDS itself is, however, a “multilevel” answer to the globalization challenge, since it has to be formulated first at the level of those concerned member states, second at the level of all river states as a giant development programme, third, at the EU level as a “meta-program” for all member states, including the common Rhine-Main-Danube waterways as a huge logistic programme. Finally, fourth, at the global level as part of the EU programme for improving its global competitiveness by upgrading the internal cooperation in the Danube region and enabling it to dynamize the external EU relations with the four global “market corridors” (Szaló, 2010).{11}

The engagement of the governments concerned is absolutely necessary and it seems to be extended through a series of official meetings in the first half of 2010. But it is only a starting point for the expert work to introduce a radical change of paradigms, in order to redesign a long term vision for the EU and to formulate a new conceptual framework for the Danube cooperation. The new strategic design can only be based on the revelation that social progress produces bigger economic growth and better economic performance and not vice versa, meaning that allegedly economic growth automatically generates social progress. Pushing for bigger economic growth by preserving the status quo – with all social factors unchanged – invites failure and stagnation, first of all in the WB region. Instead of pushing for the abstract and over-generalized requirements (conditionalities) from above in a top-down process, the question has to raised, how to start a genuine, multifaceted social progress from below by employing a bottom-up process that leads to the Europeanization of the WB countries. Actually, the contrast between the two approaches is so big in the WB region that discovering the real bottlenecks of the WB pre-accession also reveals the more general solutions for the EU to create its own proper, social progress based vision in the Europe 2020 Strategy.

The main pillars of the new conceptual framework are the following:

{1} The Danube Strategy story at the EU level starts with the announcement by the European Commission at the Committee of the Regions plenary session held in Brussels on 8 October 2008 that the EU would draw up its own strategy for the Danube area, similar to the strategy that already exists for the Baltic area. On 18-19 June 2009 the European Council requested the Commission to elaborate this strategy by the end of 2010 (Council, 2009). The Presidency Conclusion in June 2010 did not deal directly with the EDS but “finalized” the Europe 2020 Strategy and stressed the importance of economic, social and territorial cohesion (Council, 2010b:3).

{2} I have described the present situation in the new member states as a triple crisis stemming from the global, the EU institutional, and their own post-accession crises (Ágh, 2008a,b and 2009). I would like to note here that – against the conventional wisdom – the main function of the Lisbon Strategy, and its follow-up the Europe 2020 Strategy, is to cope with the enormous structural governance deficit in the EU, but this issue should be left for a separate paper.

{3} I have dealt with this issue of “carrot crisis” at length in my paper, Ágh, 2010. There have recently been some signs that the WB states have turned towards Turkey because they felt neglected by the EU.

{4} See the comprehensive analysis of the debate on the limitations of the simplistic, economic-growth based GDP approach in Fitoussi (2009) for promoting the social progress based paradigm. See also Theodoropoulou with Zuleeg (2009) and Martens (2010), since then the European Policy Centre (EPC) has launched a project for the elaboration of the social progress based indicators in cooperation with the OECD.

{5} The second volume of Think Global – Act European was published for the Spanish-Belgian-Hungarian team presidency with a book release on 4 March 2010 in Brussels (Fabry and Ricard-Nihoul, 2010).

{6} The most important EU documents are – besidesthe decisions of the European Council – the European Parliament resolution on 21 January 2010 on a European Strategy for the Danube Region (RC-B7-0031/2010), and the European Commission’s “Scoping Paper for the public consultation” entitled as the EU Strategy for the Danube Region (Brussels, 2 February 2010, REGIO/E1/EN/NV/OB D(2010). In fact, the EP document contains all major topics and concerns that have been repeated at the official meetings.

{7} For the further elaboration of the Functional Macro-Region (FMR) theory new regionalism has to be taken into consideration, see e.g. Tavares, 2004 and Telo, 2006, 2007 and 2009. The Ulm Declaration (2010:1-2) has noted that “An EU strategy for the Danube region should treat the Danube as a common EU responsibility and draw up a common vision for the region’s development (…) make existing EU policies, programmes and projects more effective by utilizing the scope for the increased coherence and synergies in their implementation and ensuring optimal use of the region’s territorial potential”.

{8} There have also been a series of other Danube conferences such as on 29 June 2009 in Linz for regional leaders, on 15 January 2010 in Vienna (Europaforum), on 20 January Bucharest conference on Danube Strategy, on 1 March 2010 in Regensburg (Bavarian Stakeholder Conference), and on 18 March 2010 in Budapest (Expert Conference at King Sigismund College). On 13 April 2010 there was a meeting in Brussels about the macro-regions (Europe’s macro-regions: Integration through territorial cooperation, Forum at the Committee of the Regions, www.cor.europa.eu/macroregions). So the calendar seems to be overburdened by the official events about the engagement of the governments concerned and there is a danger of repeating the same generalities about the Danube Strategy. This paper does not want to cover all these events and their official documents, since it focuses on the policy dimension and feasibility of the EDS.

{9} The papers “Danube Strategy” (2010/01/06) and “From the Black Forest to the Black Sea” (2009/05/05), Information on German Foreign Policy, www.german-foreign-policy.com also contain a critical approach about what they call the German expansionism. In fact, the German regions have played a positive role in initiating the EDS and they have to keep their momentum, at the same time the other regions have to organize their agencies for the proper interest representation and aggregation.

{10} The relationship between the territorial capital and social capital is one of the most intriguing questions of political science and public administration, although both have been defined extensively in literature (see e.g. Stolle in Dalton and Klingemann, 2009).

{11} On 23 October 2000, the „Directive 2000/60/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing a framework for the Community action in the field of water policy” or, in short, the EU Water Framework Directive (or even shorter the WFD) was finally adopted. The Directive was published in the Official Journal (OJ L 327) on 22 December 2000 and entered into force the same day.