Of Grasshoppers and Ants: Normative Beliefs Structuring the New Cohesion Policy

The recent European sovereign debt crisis has thrust under the limelight the issue of a “Transfer union”: the presence of a distributive cleavage between a “paying” core and a “receiving” periphery. The Cohesion Policy is both the main redistributive policy available to the EU and the one which addresses territorial disparities in the EU. Quite reasonably, it should be one of the most prominent arenas where to observe the the tensions between peripheral and core Member States. The core-periphery cleavage would be used as a heuristic device to investigate the dimensionality of the decision-making process of the current Cohesion Policy; and then, how the core-periphery cleavage informed the debate surrounding the decision-making and the decision-making itself? The first aim of the research is to provide a detailed representation of how the Cohesion Policy has been reformed with the last multi-annual framework (2014-2020), both in terms of the policy’s substantive contents and of the regulations attached to ensure Member States’ compliance. The second aim is to map the descriptive and normative beliefs of the relevant actors involved in the negotiating process about the core-periphery cleavage. In particular, a) their beliefs about the nature of the relation between the core and the peripheral states (is this relation decomposable?) b) their descriptive ideas about the state of the core and the periphery (e.g. what is the condition of the periphery concerning poverty?) c) their normative ideas concerning the problems of the core and the periphery.