Postări
Dacă Grecia nu este exemplul tipic de stat corupt din UE, nu ştiu care altul ar putea fi (poate Sicilia, dar nu-i stat; ori Turcia, dar nu-i ţară UE). Nu daţi repede replica - "România !", mă refeream la volumul sumelor deturnate, nu la mulţimea locurilor în care dai bacşiş, de la gunoier şi frizer până la doctor şi funcţionar public.
Grecia sau Republica Elenă (Ελληνική Δημοκρατία / Ellinikí Dhimokratía) a avut mai multe reforme administrative în trecut, mai importante fiind - sub aspectul regionalizării - cele de după căderea "regimului coloneilor" (1974), şi cele de pe la sfârşitul anilor '90.
În prezent, Grecia este organizată în 13 regiuni (diamerismata - periferii, districte), care sunt împărțite la rândul lor în 51 de prefecturi (nomoi, nomos la singular - νομοί, νομός). Pe lângă acestea există o republică monastică autonomă Muntele Athos (Ayion Oros - Muntele Sfânt), un stat monastic sub suveranitate grecească.
Grecia a beneficiat de fonduri structurale din partea CE/UE de decenii, adaptându-şi structura administrativ-teritorială în consecinţă, prefecţii sunt aleşi locali, etc.:
Greek nationalism in Thrace and its entrenchment in clientelistic relations cultivated by political parties, which so thoroughly skewed the region’s economy and development, were made possible by, and in turn reinforced, the centralized administrative and territorial structures of the modern Greek state. Historical reasons related to the slow process of unification of different areas and a sense of nationa linsecurity, led to and found expression in the formation of a highly centralized state. After the Greek transition to democracy in 1974 and particularly following the advent to power of the socialist government of PASOK in 1981, growing demands for, and professed commitment to decentralization met resistance from entrenched party and national interests. Regional development was for the first time in the 1980s directly linked to the issue of redistribution of administrative power (Lavdas 1999: 226), yet attempted reforms failed to redress the imbalance between local level and the centre (Ioakimidis 1996).
By the mid-1990s however, a combination of domestic and European factors led to a wave of reform characterized as groundbreaking, which enhanced sub-national structures and crystallized the territorial organization of the Greek state (Lavdas 1999: 230). The reforms of the 1990s introduced two major changes. The first one was the transformation of the prefecture from an arm of the central administration into an institution of local government with a directly elected prefect and Prefecture Council, defining its goal as “the economic, social and cultural development of the region”. Local governments and prefectures became recipients of increased funding under the CSF, which in 1991-5 more than tripled in Rhodope and Ksanthi. For the first time, the minority was depicted as a resource rather than a threat or burden, and its integration as a precondition for the region’s development (I Anaptiksi tis Thrakis – Prokliseis kai Prooptikes 1994).
Secondly, Law 2218/1994 also upgraded and expanded the role of the 13 administrative regions (dioikitikes perifereies), each of which was to establish its own Regional Development Fund and to participate as partners in formulating regional policy and administering national and European projects and funds.
The ensuing conflicts over the redistribution of functions between different levels of governmen tled to the adoption of a “corrective” law (L. 2240/1994) that undercut the large array of powers originally envisioned for prefecture self-government. Nonetheless, the strengthening of regions further continued with Law 2503/1997 that established the centrally-appointed Regional Director and upgraded the role of the 13 regions, with their personnel no longer subordinate to central ministries (Chlepas 1999: 170-1).According to an authoritative scholar of Greek local government, the reforms of the1990s paved the way for the transformation of the 13 regions into decentralised and cohesive units of administration and governance, despite their non-elected character,and expanded their capacity for coordinated action in development planning and fiscal management (Chlepas 1999: 186).
Regional administrations and councils draft the Regional Operational Programs (ROPs) before giving it for approval to the central administration, they play an important role in managing and supervising structural funds implementation, and are responsible for the highest possible absorption of funds. In drafting and planning the ROPs, regional authorities accept or reject applications for individual projects submitted by local government or private bodies. Day to day implementation of the individual projects included in the ROPs, however, rests with the prefectures, as well as with local government at the level of communes and municipalities (Getimis and Economou 1996: 135). The latest wave of territorial reform in 1999, the “Kapodistrias Plan” initiated a massive reconstitution, merging fragmented local governments units into larger entities of administration and local government in order to enhance their capacity of assuming greater responsibilities and a more active role in development (Chlepas 1999: 399).
The decentralizing potential of the reforms of the 1990s triggered powerful reactions among segments of the opposition, as well as broader local and nationalist constituencies across political parties, which declared prefecture-level local government 'superficial and nationally perilous'. Pointing to the case of Thrace, they alarmingly warned that it would 'fragment the state' and strengthen Turkish nationalism, which could gain political control in Ksanthi and Rhodope where a Muslim prefect could be elected (Kontos and Pavlou 1994; Marinos 1994). To pre-empt this possibility and the consolidation of a Muslim-governed area, the law on prefecture local government was modified in the case of Ksanthi and Rhodope, which were placed in a special category of so-called “enlarged prefectures” (dievrimenes nomarchies) (Law 2218/94, Article 40). Essentially a form of gerrymandering targeting the minority, in effect, it incorporated the largely Muslim prefectures of Ksanthi and Rhodope to the Christian-populated prefectures of Kavala and Evros respectively, thereby consolidating two predominantly Christian areas and pre-empting the election of a Muslim prefect.
4.4 The EU, regional change and minority politics
A series of studies have inquired into the influence of the EU, particularly through structural funds, in the reform of regional policy and sub-national structures in Greece over the past fifteen years, as these are reflected in the creation of prefecture councils and 13 administrative regions in the 1980s, as well as the prefecture self-government in the 1990s. Authors, largely specialists on Greece, advance diverging arguments onthe following questions: a) has the EU cohesion policy been an instrumental factor in promoting regional reform in Greece, and b) have the regional administrative and institutional reforms reinforced a restructuring of the centralized territorial structures of Greece in the direction of decentralization?
Furthermore, a number of studies have explored local- and regional-level changes in the patterns of involvement and perceptions of local actors, taking place within the frame and in the course of implementing structural funds. Reflecting a more bottom-up approach, this latter set of studies is more directly relevant to the EUROREG project, and helps us formulate a number of research propositions that are put forth in the last section of this report.
Some scholars attribute to the EU structural policy a catalytic role in regional change even as they concede that through the mid-1990s at least, reforms brought limited, if any, transformation of the highly centralized Greek regional administrative and territorial structures. The experience with implementing the IMPs in the second half of the 1980s pointed to the endemic weaknesses and unsuitability of the country’s centralized structures to plan and coordinate integrated development projects (Papageorgiou and Verney 1992). Being premised on partnership and subsidiarity, structural funds arguably made it imperative to create new regional institutions (administrative regions) and to modernize existing subnational structures as to render them capable of engaging in regional planning and qualify for finance under the CSF (Verney 1994; Featherstone and Yannopoulos 1996). The doubling of structural funds in 1988-89 and the establishment of the principles of subsidiarity and partnership between European, national and sub-national actors, as essential for programming and implementing of regional policy, signalled the emergence of a full-fledged EUstructural policy.
In light of Greece’s inclusion under objective one areas, the need for regional administrative reform could no longer be safely or entirely shunned. While the EU did not dictate reforms towards decentralization, the institutional-procedural requirements of its structural policy emphasizing planning and subsidiarity, made imperative the creation of subnational structures competent to implement and coordinate the Regional Development Programmes (RDP) of the CSF (Christofilopoulou 1997: 52). Albeit established only in paper, the 13 regions were intended to be the structures cardinally responsible for the implementation of the Community Support Frameworks (CSF). By the first half of the 1990s, as the first CSF was well under way, it was clear that the partnership arrangements of the EU structural policy would in practice be impaired without the strengthening of regional structures, while the comeback of the Socialist PASOK to power with a fresh mandate in 1993 presented an opportune moment to bypass opposition against reforms.
On the other hand, while acknowledging the European factor and the difficulties of implementing the IMPs in supplying a stimulus for reform, Ioakimidis argues that the regional institutional reforms of the 1980s were a product of domestic party-policy commitments rather than influences emanating from the EU (Ioakimidis1996: 348). Similarly, Greek scholars of local government explain the reforms at the prefecture in the 1980s and 1990s (creation of prefecture councils and prefecture self-government, respectively) as government responses to strong endogenous demands. Prefecture self-government was arguably, largely a victory of middle-level party cadres of PASOK and their strong independent assertion vis-à-vis the central government and party leadership in the 1990s (Chlepas 1999: 343; Christofilopoulou1997: 56). Such an assertion was not merely an instance of personal-political ambition but also symptomatic of a new generation of political cadre who came of age in Greece’s post-1974 democratic system with a mature and growing consciousness around local problems.
Some scholars dispute the role of the EU structural policy in regional reformin Greece, and challenge views about an incipient or ongoing decentralization process. They attribute the 1980s shift away from top-down regional policy characterized by centralization to one emphasizing local initiatives and endogenous potential not to structural funds, but instead to a broader process of deregulation and reduction of central state controls, related to the common market and the EC‘paradigm’ (Andrikopoulou and Kafkalas 2004: 40). In fact, the declining trend of the Public Investment Budget (including those for regions) in the second half of the1980s, in comparison to its upward trend in the first half of the decade, was a result of the EC-induced stabilization program to reduce public deficits (Plaskovitis 1994:119).
http://www.scribd.com/doc/55257148/41/Regional-administrative-reforms
Dr. Dia Anagnostou, Dr. Anna Triandafyllidou, (2006), Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, printed in 2006, EUR 21916. (PDF)
EUROREG – State of the Art reports
EUROREG – State of the Art reports
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