eurealist.co.uk

Margot Wallstrom is getting her knickers in a twist about the St Georges day splash in some of the British news papers, she mentions it on her Blog, suggesting it must be April fools day! and judging by the denials appearing from as far away as China and India the Ministers propaganda department must have been working flat out to dampen down the story.

Yes Minister we do know its old news, and yes we do know that these maps have been around for a long time, but it is silly to try to argue that this is nothing to do with the EU, yes the maps were produced by one of the cross border administrations but was working to an EU agenda and it was financed by the EU.

The cross border regions and also the regions are not simply a bottom up movement that have sprung up independently of any EU involvement or actions they are formed as direct consequence of EU actions in financing theses sub national and transnational regions. The Funding for transnational regions is only given on the basis of interregional co-operation between the regions under the EU Interreg programmes, and the funding for the regions is only given on a regional basis to a regional administration that were set up explicitly to receive and distribute the payments thus creating a sub national network of regional EU actors mainly bypassing the nation state.

The report on INTERREG I I I C :
FIVE YEARS OF BRINGING EUROPE’S REGIONS TOGETHER

Even the title makes the EU involvement and it is intentions clear but the introduction is quite explicit when is says;

Its main aim was to encourage regions from around the continent to work together in order to promote sustainable regional development and to lay foundations for future inter-regional cooperation in this area.

And

Another significant result of INTERREG IIIC has been the development of networks of regional authorities, and other local and regional actors, who can continue to work
togeather for mutual benefit under the future Objective 3 of the Cohesion Policy, focused on territorial cooperation.