Spinning Around: Rethinking a ‘Europe of the Regions’ in the Light of Flexibility

This article argues that a ‘Europe of the Regions’ is not, perhaps, as unrealistic a prospect as is now considered conventional wisdom. This is not because scholars have failed to notice significant pressure in its favour in either bottom-up or top-down directions. Rather, it is because diagnoses of the unlikelihood of a ‘Europe of the Regions’ ultimately rely on a federal model of EU governance that must in fact be taken as only one among the several possible conceptual frames for the process. I therefore argue that adopting a flexible frame for the integration process might lead to very different conclusions about the viability of a ‘Europe of the Regions’, albeit at the cost of rethinking what we mean by that concept in turn. Subsequently, I set out a typology of flexible ‘Europes’ and an argument that one model in particular, the à la carte variant, offers a means by which a ‘Europe of the Regions’ based on variegated patterns of subnational actor engagement with the integration process might be created.