From European Spatial Development to Territorial Cohesion Policy

Part Three: French Roots

The official translation of the name of Datar is ‘Delegation for Spatial Planning and Regional Affairs’, but it has little to do with spatial planning in the sense of regulatory planning. The ambition of aménagement du territoire is rooted in the French concern for maintaining national unity. It is about public action concerning the disposition in space of people, activities and physical structures based on a balanced notion reflecting the geographical and human situation in the area under consideration. (DUPUY, 2000, 11)

The historic roots lie in the centralising efforts of the French kings, efforts enforced by the French Revolution. Thus, a recent collection of classic planning texts published at the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of Datar starts with one that is more than 300 years old and is described as foundational by the editors. (ALVERGE and MUSSO, 2003, 25) It is an excerpt from instructions issued to his roving inspectors by Louis XIV’s minister of finance, Jean Baptiste Colbert. The inspectors were to survey national resources and to assess the performance of provincial dignitaries in administering them. French post-war reconstruction, too, was orchestrated from the centre.

However, towards the end of his term as President of the Fifth Republic, in 1968, Charles de Gaulle pushed for decentralisation. Seeing his proposal rejected in a referendum (which also concerned reforms of the French upper house, or Senate), De Gaulle resigned, and it took until the early 1980s for decentralisation to happen, when President François Mitterand put it on the agenda, where it has remained ever since. Having elevated it to a constitutional principle, the government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin (a former regional president and the one who lost his job recently over the French no to the Constitution) if anything put even more emphasis on it.

Decentralisation has led to regions becoming involved in aménagement du territoire. The mobilisation of regional and also local actors around territorial policies, what is called territorial projects, is one of its features. Thus, aménagement du territoire is another embodiment of the contemporary paradigm of regional development. Originally, the emphasis has of course been on economic development, but now sustainability is being factored in.

Aménagement du territoire relies on covenants with the regions (contrats de plan Etat-Région, or CPERs). Datar is involved in formulating them and it renders advise to the Prime Minister – so it depends on his or her willingness to avail him/herself of its services. Beyond that, Datar has taken to drawing up spatial scenarios, including scenarios of the doomsday-type, the earliest example having been the ‘Scenario of the unacceptable’ (Le Scénario de l’inacceptable) of 1971 (LÉVY 1997, 230; PEYRONY, 2004, 36) envisaging a dislocated and poorly articulated territory. This is “inconceivable in a republican vision of the territory” (ALVERGNE and MUSSO, 2003, 171, translation AF) which gives a glimpse of the depth of feeling which republican ideals evokes. The scenario articulates the aims of aménagement du territoire: to reduce inequalities in wealth and financial potential, to abate the demographic haemorrhage affecting certain rural areas and small towns and to control the growth of Paris. In similar fashion, when Olivier Guichard, first delegué – a politically appointed director – to DATAR, was re-called to chair a commission on the future of aménagement du territoire in the mid-1980s, he presented as one of the elements of a new policy: “poles of new development organised in networks safeguarding for France that geographic unity which guarantees the unity of its historic destiny.” (ALVERGNE and MUSSO, 2003, 248, translation AF). It is easy to discern in this the notion of polycentrism as applied on a European scale in the ESDP. However, the term as such has been introduced in the French discourse later, by GUIGOU (1995) writing amongst others (in a book that has been translated into German; see GUIGOU, 2000) about the polycentric system of cities in Germany giving that country a competitive advantage.

The essence of aménagement du territoire is the will to manage the national territory overall, if only no longer exclusively in top-down fashion. Rather, regional and local stakeholder participation is expected to help re-balancing the French centralised system by reducing the dominance of Paris, not only economically, but also in terms of access to decision-making.

The French have a strong presence at Brussels. The administrative and political élite accepts loss of autonomy in the wake of integration in exchange for greater dominance in Europe. (EISING and KOHLER-KOCH, 1999, 281) Datar, for instance, can take pride in having exported aménagement du territoire to Brussels. (LÉVY, 1997, 230-231; see also BAILLY, 2001, 195; BALME and JOUVE, 1996, 231) At the time, Datar’s future was threatened by decentralisation and the lukewarm attitude of Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, former mayor of Paris, and as such having been at the receiving end of decentralisation policies. Focusing on France’s position in an expanding and changing Europe was Datar’s forward defence. As the then minister responsible, Jacques Chérèque, explained during a parliamentary debate on aménagement du territoire in 1990, the map of Europe was changing, posing the challenge of the core of Europe – the ‘Blue Banana’ – moving east and thereby threatening French regions with marginalisation. (ALVERGNE and MUSSO, 2003, 259) Since that time, Datar sees articulating the French position in Europe as one of its missions.

Jacques Delors’ terms as President of the European Commission (1985-1995) were particularly important in injecting French thinking into Community regional policy. He was responsible for introducing new principles, partnership amongst them. He was driven by the conviction that local knowledge and the forces of ‘auto-development’ were important. One of the members of the Delors cabinet responsible for working out these policies, Jean-Charles Leygues, subsequently joined the directorate-general of the European Commission responsible for regional policy, where to this day he fills the position of director. A one-time staff member of Datar, Jean-François Drevet, was appointed to work on a spatial vision for Europe, eventually to become ‘Europe 2000’. (CEC, 1991) Arguably, this couple was the single most important force behind the scene in the early days of the ESDP process.

French thinking continued to evolve. In the early and mid-1990s, a national debate took place under Charles Pasqua, Gaullist minister of the Interior and Territorial Development. This resulted in a revised French policy of what was from then on called aménagement et développement du territoire. (LÉVY, 1997, 231) In 1999, a leftist government (‘co-habitating’, as the saying goes, with Gaullist President Jacques Chirac) got the ‘Law Voynet’, after the planning and environment minister Dominique Voynet from the Greens, through parliament. It foresees in nine so-called schemas directeurs, one each per public service cluster, from network services, like railways, to higher education and recreation. This foreshadows the present concern of the EU with the role of such services (dubbed ‘services of general economic interest’ in EU-parlance; see BERROD, 2003) in promoting territorial cohesion.

At that time, Datar was asked to formulate an indicative vision of France in 2020, which it did, stressing amongst others the European context and the ESDP message. This is the study already mentioned for promoting so-called networked polycentrism. It was followed through in a series of scenario exercises for various French macro-regions, like the ‘Grand Sud-Ouest’ etc., etc. The study also encouraged regions to look to the ‘pétites europe’, or transnational regions, of which they form part. In the French case, these are the Atlantic Arc, the Pyrenean Space, the Mediterranean Arc, the Alpine Space and an area straddling the North of France, the Benelux and parts of Germany called Transfrontalier. (LACOUR and DELAMARRE, 2003, 116). This is a good example of how Datar continues to put the French territory into its European context. In 2003 it proposed strengthening the position of French cities in Europe (DATAR, 2003), a policy which the Comié interministériel pour l’aménagement et le développement du territoire (CIADT) chaired by the Prime Minister approved

What does territorial cohesion add? As indicated, it made its first appearance in Art. 16 of the Treaty of Amsterdam (Art 7 D following the old numbering system) recalling “…the place that ‘economic services of general interest’ have in the common values of the Union and the role they play in the promotion of social and territorial cohesion of the Union.” In this light, state support for services in areas where they would otherwise be unprofitable must be allowed, is the French view.

As indicated, the ‘Law Voynet’ addresses this concern by focusing on public services. The schemas directeurs foreseen by it relate to traditional public utilities, like transport and energy networks, but also to higher education and research, rural and nature areas and sports and recreational facilities (thus echoing ESDP themes). They are twenty-year frameworks for the next round of the contrats de plan with the regions and also (this being an innovation) with so-called agglomérations (urban area communities) and pays (towns with their surrounding rural hinterlands). Agglomérations and pays are areas characterised by geographic, economic, cultural or social cohesion, where public and private actors can be mobilised around a territorial project (projet de territoire). There is a link with regulatory planning in that the pays are invited to formulate new-style structure plans, called ‘Schéma du cohérence territoriale’. Clearly, in French eyes the sense of purpose generated by participation in territorial projects is important.

The meaning of territory in French has a bearing on this. As DAMETTE (1997, 18) points out, it is different from that of space. Territory is positively loaded. It relates to the social formation which has shaped it and which is at the same time being shaped by it, the prime example being the Republic as such which the French celebrate as their spiritual home. Thus, territory is constitutive for the identity of a social formation, an element of its innermost history and part of its distinguishing characteristic. According to GUIGOU (2002, 12), territories are ‘warm-blooded beings’ (“êtres à sang chaud”). Spaces, as against this, follow a functional logic. They are ‘cold-blooded beings’ (”êtres à sang froid”). According to ALVERGNE and MUSSO (2003, 13) territory is a construct of the collective imagination.

What is also important is French resistance to the ‘Anglo-Saxon model’ being imposed through European competition policy. SIEDENTOP (2000, 136) identifies this as one of the strategies of the French political class. (See also HOOGHE, 2001, 9) There is a cultural dimension to this. Europeans, it is argued, are rooted in the soil. They are not footloose, as “…the much more nomadic peoples of the North American Continent…” (GUIGOU, 2001, 4) a fact that HUNTINGTON (2005, 50), otherwise keen to defend the American record, confirms. In their desire to continue to live where they have for generations, Europeans deserve public support. So, subsidising services is justified for the sake of the ‘European model of society’, a concept that Delors was also fond of invoking and which is gaining prominence in the current debate about the direction of European integration. Opponents of the Constitution, in particular on the French left, claim that in its present form it is harmful to this model.

Like with territorial cohesion, the French can thus claim to have injected the concept of a European model of society into debates about EU integration. Habituated to being proactive in European affairs, they have also taken a lead in thinking about the future of cohesion policy. As early as 2003, Datar submitted a memorandum for the consideration of the ‘Spatial and Urban Development’ Committee. Amongst others, the memorandum proposed for the Open Method of Co-ordination (OMC) to be invoked. (FALUDI, 2004a, 1358) With this the paper turns to discussing the making of territorial cohesion policy.