John Loughlin

University of Oxford | OX · Blackfriars Hall

This book is the result of a research project carried out for the Committee of the Regions and analyses the 'state of play' of democratic practice at the subnational level in all of the European Member states. Its initial hypothesis was that liberal democracy is closely associated with the rise of the nation state in the 19th century. The nation st...

Regional and Federal Studies started life in 1991 as Regional Politics and Policy published by Frank Cass & Son, a small family-run publishing firm which was later absorbed by Routledge. In 1995, it adopted its current name, Regional and Federal Studies. The journal is now turning 30. For this anniversary, the current editorial team asked me to wri...

This edited book is a collection of essays exploring the roots of the concept of human dignity in the synthesis of the Bible and Greco-Roman philosophy. It traces its development through the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the modern period. It examines its relevance to policy issues such as religious freedom and trans humanism.

This conclusion ties together the various contributions to the Special Issue from the perspective of the introductory framework. Based on this framework, the conclusion shows that: (i) domestic mediating factors are responsible for nuanced state rescaling outcomes in small unitary states, (ii) the EU has led to decentralization and recentralization...

This thesis is primarily about Corsican nationalism as it was in the 1980s. The thesisMé presents the Corsican case in the context of the upsurge of regionalist movement in France during that period. It argues that regionalism appeared because of a breakdown of the traditional mechanisms of political and institutional mediation between France and C...

This article examines three historical monetary unions: the Latin Monetary Union (LMU), the Scandinavian Monetary Union (SMU), and the Austro-Hungarian Monetary Union (AHMU) in an attempt to derive possible lessons for the European Monetary Union (EMU). The term ‘monetary union’ can be defined either narrowly or broadly depending on how closely it...

This special issue addresses the impact of the European Union (EU) on subnational mobilization in small unitary states. Located at the intersection between varied contributions from the literatures on multilevel governance and Europeanization, it offers a new theoretical framework to account for state rescaling processes in small unitary states. By...

The concept of human dignity lies at the heart of many national and international conventions of human rights. This idea, based on man's rationality, can be found already in Greco-Roman Antiquity, was fully developed in Christianity, in its synthesis with the Biblical conception of man as image of God. With the secularization of the European mind f...

La manera tradicional de distingir els sistemes de govern territorials dels estats és entre confederacions, federacions i estats unitaris. Aquest article argumenta que aquestes distincions no descriuen adequadament la complexitat de sistemes polítics contemporanis. A més, emmarca la situació contemporània en el context històric del desenvolupament...

Almost all states are either federal or regionalized in some sense. It is difficult to find a state that is entirely unitary and the Routledge Handbook of Regionalism and Federalism necessarily takes in almost the entire world. Both federalism and regionalism have been subjects of a vast academic literature mainly from political science but sometim...

The Oxford Handbook of Local and Regional Democracy in Europe analyses the state of play of democracy at the subnational level in the twenty-seven member states of the EU plus Norway and Switzerland. It places subnational democracy in the context of the distinctive Anglo, the French, the German, and Scandinavian state traditions in Europe asking to...

One of the central questions in contemporary social science is the fate of the nation-state. The nation-state reached its apogee during the period of post-war economic boom and expanding welfare states. European integration was a means of ‘rescuing’ nation-states during this period. Neo-liberalism mounted a serious challenge to the welfare version...

Romanian translation of Subnational Government: the French Experience (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

The 1982 French decentralisation reforms upgraded the indirectly elected regional councils to fully-fledged subnational governments alongside the departments and communes. This article examines how regional governments have grown in importance, gradually gaining new powers and, through the system of state-region contracts, becoming the key subnatio...

CoakleyJohn, LaffanBrigid, and ToddJennifer, eds. Renovation or Revolution? New Territorial Politics in Ireland and the United Kingdom. Perspectives in British-Irish Studies Series. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005. Pp. 266. $35.95 (paperback). - Volume 47 Issue 1 - John Loughlin

Ethnic and minority nationalist conflicts, and the peace processes that attempt to end them, always occur within specific geo-political or regional contexts and can be fully understood only by being situated within these contexts. Although it might be possible to compare conflicts and peace processes and to draw lessons from them across these diffe...

Multi-level governance appeared in the 1990s as a concept which sought to capture the changing relationships between different territorial levels of government in the EU. The concept was important as it drew to attention to important changes in territorial governance that were occurring at this time. This article steps back to analyse wider changes...

Resumé Un paysage politique et administratif en pleine transformation avec le programme de dévolution des pouvoirs.

THE CONFLICT IN NORTHERN IRELAND HAS LASTED FOR OVER sixteen years, defying all attempts by British and Irish governments to reach a solution. On 15 November 1985 the leaders of both governments, Mrs Margaret Thatcher and Dr Garret FitzGerald, signed, at Hillsborough in Northern Ireland, an Anglo-Irish Agreement which they hoped would establish mac...

Special Issue of Regional and Federal Studies ISSN 1359-7566

The expression ‘territorial politics’ refers to the way in which territory relates to the political system, how different political ideologies interpret this relationship, and how political parties and movements put their interpretations into practice. Of course, ideological discourse may be simply rhetoric and far removed from actual practice. Fro...

France has often prided itself on being an ‘exception’ in Europe, whether this was in relation to its political history, its type of political system or its system of local government — or even with regard to its intellectual and literary brilliance. Undoubtedly, all national states like to think of themselves in these terms as a way of justifying...

Political decentralization and administrative deconcentration are meaningless and will not lead to genuine local autonomy unless local authorities possess the resources necessary to exercise the responsibilities assigned to them. Financial resources are a key element among the different kinds of resources that are necessary and which also include c...

Thus far in this book we have examined the historical, institutional and political dimensions of French subnational government. But none of this can work without the administrative dimension. In this area too there have been significant transformations in France over the past 50 years as the state has found itself forced to adapt, first to the dema...

French politics and society have been dominated by two conflicting ten­dencies. On the one hand, there is the centuries-long trend towards cen­tralization, beginning under the French monarchs and culminating in the French Revolution and the First Napoleonic Empire. On the other hand, as historians such as Fernand Braudel have shown, there is the gr...

The municipality is the oldest of the French units of local government and, in its modern form, was officially created during the early months of the French Revolution by a decree of 14 December 1789. Its origins, however, go back much further than this as the municipal boundaries corresponded closely to the old church parishes of the Middle Ages a...

Decentralization,1 ‘la grande affaire du septennat’, was to be the socialists’ flagship policy and, ultimately, was to have a more lasting impact than the other more traditionally socialist reforms such as nationalization, the introduction of labour legislation (including, for example, the reduction of working hours) and more generous social welfar...

France developed a set of political institutions at both national and subnational levels to express the idea of the one and indivisible nation-state. The dominant state ideology and tradition between the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century and the period following the Second World War emphasized centralization, standardization and unif...

While most unitary states have at the most one level of intermediate or ‘meso’ government,1 France has two: the department, created at the time of the French Revolution, and its great rival, the region, which has emerged from the shadows of the French institutional labyrinth only with great difficulty. Each institution has its partisans: ‘departmen...

Local authorities have played an important role in the Swedish model of the Welfare State. This state is characterised by high levels of welfare provision paid for through general taxation, the rates of which are very high and the application of uniform standards across the entire country based on the principles of equity and fairness. The main for...

The terms transformation and governance are used increasingly in the academic literature but often in a confused way. This article attempts to define both terms. It argues that there are three kinds of transformation: pseudo-change; incremental evolutionary transformation (IET), which is the most common form; and revolutionary transformation (RT)....

Albanian and English

ResumenIdioma Hay similitudes entre el Reino Unido y España, pero también hay diferencias. Ambos países son políticamente asimétricos. Las reformas españolas han beneficiado principalmente a las Comunidades Autónomas, llegando así a una asimetría también fiscal. En España hay una serie de ingresos locales, pero en el Reino Unido sólo existe el impu...

This paper investigates the new regionalism in Brittany, one of France's historic regions. It is based on findings from a mass opinion survey carried out in July 2001, as well as on insights drawn from over 70 semi-structured interviews. The quantitative and qualitative evidence is interpreted through reference to four hypotheses, concerning issues...

Published in paperback 205

Published in paperback 205

Guest editors of Journal. ISSN 1262-1676

This comparative survey of the historical, institutional and policy aspects of regional construction in Brittany and Languedoc-Roussillon illustrates the paradigm shift in the nature and functions of the state and the emergence of a new kind of territorial politics outline in the first part of this paper. Paradoxically, the twin evolutions of the s...

This book is the result of a research project carried out for the Committee of the Regions and analyses the 'state of play' of democratic practice at the subnational level in all of the European Member states. Its initial hypothesis was that liberal democracy is closely associated with the rise of the nation state in the 19th century. The nation st...

This book is the result of a research project carried out for the Committee of the Regions and analyses the 'state of play' of democratic practice at the subnational level in all of the European Member states. Its initial hypothesis was that liberal democracy is closely associated with the rise of the nation state in the 19th century. The nation st...

This book is the result of a research project carried out for the Committee of the Regions and analyses the 'state of play' of democratic practice at the subnational level in all of the European Member states. Its initial hypothesis was that liberal democracy is closely associated with the rise of the nation state in the 19th century. The nation st...

This book is the result of a research project carried out for the Committee of the Regions and analyses the 'state of play' of democratic practice at the subnational level in all of the European Member states. Its initial hypothesis was that liberal democracy is closely associated with the rise of the nation state in the 19th century. The nation st...

This book is the result of a research project carried out for the Committee of the Regions and analyses the 'state of play' of democratic practice at the subnational level in all of the European Member states. Its initial hypothesis was that liberal democracy is closely associated with the rise of the nation state in the 19th century. The nation st...

This contribution analyses 'the regional question' from three perspectives. First, it examines the concept of autonomy and what this means for understanding the position of regions in modern states. Second, it argues that the context for regional autonomy is changing as a result of recent state paradigm shifts. Third, it offers a framework of analy...

On peut trouver les origines de l'idee de representation des regions au sein des institutions europeennes dans la pensee politique « corporatiste » de la democratie chretienne ainsi que dans les courants regionalistes des annees cinquante. Ce dont il faut rendre compte, ce n'est pas de la mise en oeuvre de cette conception mais du caractere tardif...

Translated into the official languages of the EU (15 at time of printing)