The Impact of the European Union Regional Policy on Sub- National Mobilisation in a Unitary State: The Case of Estonia

The discussion of multilevel governance and sub-national mobilisation, because of its potential for circumventing national governments policy, has become a critical case for those concerned with the political and institutional consequences of European integration. The debate of mult-level governance and sub-national mobilisation has almost exclusively been discussed in relation to Europeanisation and more precisely in the context of EU regional policy. However, in each country the roles, functions and financial structures of sub-national administration are different – so is the impact of EU legislation at the local level. Evidence so far indicates that regional mobilisation does not empower regional and local governments in general, but only select subset of them. In order to conceptualise more the impact of the EU on decentralisation and devolution of political systems due to the attention given to the sub-national level by the Commission (especially by including the principle of partnership to the SF legislation as well as setting up the Committee of the Regions) a great deal more casestudy testing needs to be carried out before multi-level government can be adopted as a general account of how EU operates. Therefore, the purpose of the paper is to explore the overall sub-national mobilisation in a small unitary new Member State Estonia due to Europeanisation through EU regional policy. As there is no regional level in Estonia, local governments remain in the centre of the study and the main research question explores to what extent has impact of the EU empowered Estonian sub-national level and why this kind of mobilisation has happened? The results of the study give ground to the analysis of the possible wider applicability of these manifestations to wider set of countries with similar territorial and political structures.