Cohesion policy, multilevel governance and democracy

This chapter seeks to draw the contours of a new ‘model of democracy’ for interconnected political settings like the European Union (EU) and argues that Cohesion policy multilevel governance already foreshadows some features of this new model. The distinctive traits of this new way of governing are that public and private actors and multiple levels of government cooperate in the making of policy decisions by engaging in relationships and procedures which defy existing distinctions and hierarchies. Multilevel governance, in other words, calls into question two constitutive elements of the political order of the modern era: the distinction between the public and the private, and the hierarchical or nested nature of governments at different territorial levels. The possibility of articulating voice within nation-states is often argued to be premised upon the ability of national governments to regulate exit from their physical, economic, social and political borders and could, therefore, eventually result in the development of bonds of loyalty among the citizens of each nation-state. In other words, the international order based on the fully sovereign state was instrumental to national democracy: as the former has been called into question, the latter must also be thought anew, and this is what this chapter seeks to do.