Formal Rationalisation Without Substance: Symbolic Territorial Restructuring and Artificial Regions in France Under European Pressure

The merger of French regions in 2015 represents a paradigmatic case of territorial restructuring implemented under European pressure and significant domestic political constraints. Its official justification was linked to France’s need to show progress in streamlining sub-national governance within the framework of the Excessive Deficit Procedure. The European Council encouraged France to simplify its territorial architecture by reducing the number of municipalities and reconsidering the departmental tier, but these recommendations met strong parliamentary resistance. Unable to implement the measures requested by the Council and operating under tight deadlines, the government adopted regional mergers as a strategically less contentious alternative. The reform gained support from the Senate because the creation of exceptionally large regions—larger than several European states—was interpreted as a way to preserve departmental councils, whose institutional relevance had been questioned at European and national levels. In this sense, the reform acted as a mechanism of symbolic compliance: a formally rational gesture signalling responsiveness to European expectations while avoiding politically costly reforms. The design of the reform reflected this logic. Drafted within an extremely short timeframe, it was adopted without substantial consideration for geographical coherence or anticipation of administrative effects. For symbolic reasons, the government focused primarily on announcing a 50% reduction in the number of regions. Instead of redrawing boundaries to create coherent territorial entities structured around metropolitan centres, it opted for the rapid fusion of existing regions. Although the map reduced the number of regions from 22 to 13, the final boundaries resulted from political bargaining rather than analytical evaluation. Securing parliamentary and local support required maintaining staff and administrative services in former regional capitals, making a multi-site configuration structurally unavoidable and undermining the reform’s stated aims of economies of scale and administrative rationalisation. The consequences diverged sharply from the official ambitions, producing tangible outcomes that exceeded symbolic politics. The dispersion of administrative functions across multiple sites generated organisational fragmentation, increased coordination burdens, and reduced bureaucratic efficiency. The excessive size of several new regions and the obligation to maintain services in multiple former capitals lengthened travel times for civil servants, elected officials, and stakeholders, complicating decision-making and weakening the perceived legitimacy of the regional tier. The coherence of mergers was uneven: while Normandy was accepted, others were poorly received, in sparsely populated areas that felt absorbed rather than integrated. These disruptions weakened central elites’ credibility and fuelled anti-elite sentiment. The former region of Alsace formally requested de-merger, illustrating the fragility of identities produced through top-down amalgamation. Compared with other European reforms—most notably the Danish restructuring of 2007—the French top-down process was weakly negotiated, limiting local support and reinforcing perceptions of artificiality. The French regional merger illustrates the politics of administrative rationalisation under European pressure: a reform designed to demonstrate alignment with European expectations and strengthen France’s supranational credibility, yet one that failed to deliver substantive rationalisation. While producing no fiscal savings, it generated administrative disruption and offered the far right a political resource through proposals to dismantle the merged regions, amplifying anti-elite rhetoric.