EU Commission as an Unexpected Driver of Tensions between Regions and Cities

Certain subforms of the so called new regionalism have brought into the European studies quite a new phenomenon. One-size-fits-all EU Regional policy, which was in the last decades generally implemented on the national (NUTS I) and regional (NUTS II) level, is after 2014 much more oriented on the regional and subregional levels (with the aim of strengthening the „territorial dimension“). New levels of competences (e.g. metropolitan areas) are competing with the “traditional” actors, i.e. the NUTS II regions in the case of EU regional policy. This was possible to be clearly seen for example in the Czech Republic in the years 2012 and 2014, when heated negotiations took place regarding the implementation of "Integrated Territorial Investments (ITI)," a new financial instrument of EU Cohesion Policy which was implemented on the substate level – i.e. in metropolitan areas. EU Commission presented this new tool as „a flexible mechanism for formulating integrated responses to diverse territorial needs“. The general idea was quite clear - to let the national states decide themselves, what kind of subregional actors will implement this bulk of EU money (ITI). There however occured some unexpected effects of such flexible approach. The EU Commission established (un)conciously a competitive relationship between cities and regions, positioning themselves against each other for resources, since it did not explicitly say, what kind of subregional actor has to implement the ITI. The aim of the paper is to analyze this new phenomenon and propose a better understanding for this development, where the aim to support heterogeneity led to strong competition on the domestic level and changed relations between domestic actors. The Central European countries (Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) are in focus of the study. They are ones of the major recipients of financial support under the cohesion policy and the ITI tool is being implemented in all of them. The study is based on semi-structured interviews with employees of city halls as well as offices of the regions. Emphasis was placed on the selection of employees in departments which were directly concerned with regional or local development.