Towards a Europe of Subregions? – Investigating the Drivers of Subregional Actorship in the EU

Subregions have received increased attention both in the media and the academic literature over the past decade due to their increased visibility in EU decision-making. They managed to induce multiple negotiation stalemates, even though none of the groups achieved real blocking minority under qualified-majority arrangements. Examples of the recent flare in subregional activism include the New Hanseatic League, its spinoff the Frugal Four, and the Visegrad Group. Hitherto, the literature on subregionalism remains under-explored, scattered, and it fails to offer feasible explanations to when subregions rise to prominent actorship. Do subregions become proactive on an ad-hoc basis, or are there specific triggers, which increase the likeliness of subregional actorship? As an extract of my PhD thesis, this paper will investigate the following research question: "Under what circumstances do subregions become effective actors in EU-level negotiations?" via examining a case of subregionalism within the EU, namely the Visegrad Four (Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia). In the time frame of 2015 – 2022, four policy processes have been selected for analysis: the 2015-2020 reform attempts of the Dublin Agreement, the Rule of Law conditionality mechanism, the EU’s green transition, and the EU’s response to Ukraine. The case selection keeps crisis response cooperation as a constant for a higher validity of comparison, while it also accounts for a range of different policy categories, such as redistributive, regulative and constitutive, as well as internal and foreign policy perspectives. This paper will employ process-tracing in the selected negotiations to identify the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a subregional organisation becomes a prominent actor in EU-level negotiations. Since EU integration theories dedicate little attention to subregional actors, and their main focus remains on individual member states and supranational institutions, I hope to contribute with a valuable research to the literature.