A Non-Mainstream Political View of the European Project: European Municipalism

The EC/EU has been a nation-led project, where nation-states have been the central actors. However, parallel to the “Europe of the states”, a long-standing yet peripheral counter-project, theorised by thinkers such as Gasser, has advocated the relevance of municipalities as the mainstay of a truly democratic system. At European level, this municipalist movement led to the institutionalisation of inter-urban cooperation within the European architecture through the creation of European municipal organisations, such as the Council of European Municipalities and Regions, and inter-urban networks, as Eurocities. From a scholarly perspective, the study of European municipal cooperation has become a consolidated thread of research in European and Urban Studies. Contributions on the topic tend to focus mainly on the pragmatic aspects of the municipal collaborations, seen as strategic means for cities to obtain cognitive, political and economic benefits. By way of contrast, the dedicated literature is fairly silent about the ideological foundations of European municipal cooperation. By challenging the dominant scholarly view, the proposed paper contends that municipal cooperation at EU-level is not merely utilitarian, but is significantly ideologically oriented. Drawing on the urban history scholarship and contemporary critical urban studies, the ideological roots of European municipal cooperation are traced and analysed, from its outset in the early XX century to its recent developments. As a result, this paper shows that municipal cooperation is the expression of a European municipalism, configured as a fully-fledged political paradigm, markedly internationalist and Europeanist and imbued with pacifism and inter-urban mutualism. In so doing, the proposed paper provides a two-fold contribution to the scholarship on European Political Theory: on the one hand, it sheds light on an under-researched –albeit influential - strand of political thought; on the other hand, it overcomes the methodological nationalism permeating the theoretical literature on the EU.