At a meeting hosted by the Committee of the Regions (CoR) in Warsaw on Thursday 2 March, several representatives of the local and regional authorities told the Commissioner for Regional Policy, Corina Crețu, of their concerns regarding two scenarios contained in the White Paper on the future of the European Union.
The day after the European Commission presented its White Paper (see EUROPE 11736), the regions criticised the fact that the regional policy may be one of the fields in which Europe decides to limit its activity or cease it altogether, if scenario no. four on scaling back Community policies wins the day.
“We cannot agree on it”, Raffaele Cattaneo, president of the commission for territorial cohesion policy and EU budget (COTER) of the Committee of the Regions, told EUROPE. “It is for the first time that in an official document of the Commission, to eliminate cohesion policy is included. We cannot accept this proposal”, he stressed.
Scenario no. two, in which Europe would restrict itself to being a single market, also came under fire from several local authority representatives. The reason for this is simple: if there is no longer anything but a single market, then the other European policies would become obsolete and the cohesion policy would be one of them.
Crețu in favour of scenario no. 5. Commissioner Crețu was bold enough to give her own personal opinion during a debate held in the morning on an opinion of the CoR given over to cohesion policy post-2020. She feels that best-case scenario is no. five, in which the Europeans decide to pool even more policies. (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)