Crafting European cohesion from the bottom-up – Local Networks of Europe-related Action

Both political practice and academic discourse assume that the local level has the potential to strengthen cohesion in the European Union. Recent crises like the Euro crisis, the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ and the Covid 19-pandemic have fueled these discussions about economic and social cohesion, problematizing polarization and increasing structural imbalances within the EU. At the same time, these crises have also contributed to strengthening Eurosceptic sentiments among the citizens. Due to its closeness to citizens and the concrete implementation of European policies, the local level is considered a starting point for tackling these problems and strengthening cohesion. Anyhow, this thesis has so far not been reviewed systematically on a broader scale. We argue that the strengthening of cohesion depends on agency, both of local administrations and politics and local (organized) civil society. How local actors engage with European issues and communicate about these locally may have an impact on the expression of local cohesion, understood as citizens’ relationships with the polity (vertical) and each other (horizontal). The paper investigates this expectation empirically, focusing on two directions. First, it looks into which societal actors are part of Europe-related networks and how they are integrated into the political process. Given that the local level enjoys no formal status in the European policy-making process beyond the advisory Committee of Regions and constitutional guarantees of subsidiarity, we expect to find different manifestations of local networks, priorities and cooperation models. The aim is to bring our empirical findings in this context into order as a first step on the way to typologize Europe-related local networks. Second, the paper investigates local administrations’ ideas about how to address local society, and whom they consider their primary audience. This second direction, therefore, focuses on discourse and ideas of the role of civil society in Europe-related issues. The paper presents fresh empirical data from a current research project. It includes findings from a survey of all German municipalities with at least 20.000 inhabitants about their Europe-related action. Furthermore, it draws on case studies in eight German cities (four medium-sized and four big cities) consisting of expert interviews with local actors and documents’ analyses. By combining the different types of empirical material, the paper develops a multi-faceted view of local actors’ Europe-related networking activities, focusing on their interaction with the citizens and among each other and stressing their ideas about their respective role for European cohesion. Based on this, the paper critically discusses the cohesion thesis.