Regional mergers: new bottle, same vintage?

Life sometimes offers compensations that are as unlikely as they are unexpected. The inhabitants of Gruissan, Lézignan-Corbières and Narbonne can testify to this. After spending half a century on the outskirts of the Languedoc-Roussillon region, in 2015 they were suddenly teleported to the center of the new Occitanie region, the product of the merger between Languedoc-Roussillon and Midi-Pyrénées.

Emmanuel Négrier, University of Montpellier and Vincent Simoulin, Toulouse - Jean Jaurès University

Every week, hundreds of coaches bring not tourists, but civil servants and elected representatives to the region to meet their counterparts and partners from the former region with which they have just merged. The restaurants are full to bursting, and the conference halls (or whatever takes their place in these places formerly far removed from the decision-making centers) are seeing unbelievable booking rates.

But life is also disappointing. Elected representatives and agents from Mende, Figeac or Tarbes now have to leave the evening before to attend a meeting which, being held at the other end of the region, is now over five hours away.

They were already at the edge of a large region, Languedoc-Roussillon or Midi-Pyrénées, now they're at one of the borders of a huge region, Occitanie.

Long before the Covid-19 pandemic, they had learned to concentrate several appointments in a single trip, and discovered the advantages (but also the limitations and frustrations) of videoconferencing and carpooling.

In fact, as the elected representatives who initiated and implement these mergers like to proclaim, regional mergers are also a matter of men and women. They involve moving around, questioning work routines and inventing new policies adapted to a territory twice the size. To change one's reference points is to weaken one's networks and legitimacy. Merging also means inventing a new way of doing politics, in an often difficult context, as shown in a collective work we coordinated.

The region, the weak link in public action?

And yet, nothing suggested such complexity. When it came to French-style regionalization, researchers tended to focus on the intrinsic weakness of the regional level. What's more, since the main policies of the regions were developed in partnership with the State, a high degree of homogeneity was to be expected.

Take Occitanie. It is the result of the merger of two regions that were thought to be all the more similar because they were both in the south of France, long dominated by the Socialist Party, more affected by unemployment than the national average, but at the forefront of cultural policies and investment in research.

But this apparent proximity doesn't stand up to closer scrutiny. Languedoc-Roussillon had developed the performing arts and introduced one-euro train (and bus) fares and free computers for all schoolchildren, while Midi-Pyrénées promoted heritage and made all aid means-tested.

In terms of research, Languedoc-Roussillon has strong specialties in biology and healthcare, while Midi-Pyrénées has focused more on aeronautics and space.

The first result of this merger is paradoxical, to say the least: it shows us just how much the regions, which were thought to be mimetic, actually differed and even developed policies that were sometimes quite opposed to each other.

For culture, for example, developing a policy based first and foremost on sectors (and its delegated regional agencies for entertainment, cinema and books) or first and foremost on territories (and its "territorial" cultural contracts and projects) is obviously totally contradictory, as we show in our chapter dedicated to culture.

On the one hand, the decisive criterion is the project's location. On the other, it's its place in a sector of activity. In the field of education, it's a political choice whether to roll out computers for all, regardless of resources, or to do so according to household means.

Differences beyond regional councils

The second, and perhaps even more intriguing result, is that the differences between regions are not confined to regional councils.

As early as the end of 2015, the State was saying that the "political" regions would take some time to merge, but that the State's regional departments would do so as of January¹, 2016, with their fingers on the seam of their pants.

In reality, five years on, the merger has still not been clearly implemented. The schemes of the former Midi-Pyrénées and Languedoc-Roussillon regional directorates coexist within a regional government policy that is far from harmonized.

Take the "Réussite éducative" scheme , designed to combat school failure and dropout. The two rectorats (which remain separate) have developed distinct versions, because the school populations in each ex-region are different.

The former Languedoc-Roussillon region suffers from severe difficulties, with a low school enrolment rate, a more limited vocational training support network and less obvious educational expectations on the part of parents. Not only do these systems remain different, but their coordination across the new region is totally superficial. In a way, it's still "every man for himself", as if Occitanie didn't exist.

The regional contingency of the State, which applies different policies and organizational principles from one territory to another, has made the merger even more complex, and all the more interesting to study.

There is of course a logic in merging complementary rather than similar regions, but the political cultures themselves appeared dissimilar.

Palpable differences in political cultures

In all areas, the Midi-Pyrénéens were the good students, keen to establish explicit criteria and multi-year programs, sometimes at the risk of appearing rigid, while the Languedociens boasted a political art and dramatization that they likened, not without a certain coquetry, to comedia del arte.

We know, for example, the art of political provocation that former president Georges Frêche maintained, and which led to a lasting rift with his own party before his death in office at the end of 2010. In contrast, Martin Malvy, his counterpart in the Midi-Pyrénées region, was one of the most influential Socialists in Parliament, the party and the local authorities.

This was reflected in specific policies, routines and standards of behavior that were neither limited to stereotypes (the "cassoulet" radicalism of the Midi-Pyrénées) nor to picturesque cultural differences. Thus, the Midi-Pyrénéen penchant for financing regional contracts is a concrete expression of this taste for stable compromises between levels of action. On the other hand, in the former Languedoc-Roussillon region, a marked preference for sector-based agencies reflects a desire to exert influence on different scales, without becoming lost in interdependencies.

So how did this unexpected merger work out? What results did it produce? Does it bear out the observations we've often made about mergers, those labile moments when improbable reforms suddenly (and briefly) become possible? Three observations stand out.

Logical consequences of harmonization

The first is obviously the lack of economies of scale, despite projections made by André Vallini, the minister in charge of the reform in 2015, who indicated that the merger would result in savings of around 10 billion euros.

But the extra costs generated are not so much attributable to management excesses as to the logical consequences of harmonization: the harmonization of staff salaries; the generalization of certain policies considered advantageous for everyone, but active in only one of the former regions; investments (transport shuttles, videoconferencing equipment, maintenance or creation of new sites) directly linked to this merger.

The Cour des Comptes estimates the cost of harmonizing staff salaries and allowances at around €50 million.

In a way, merging the regions is akin to Sacha Guitry's definition of marriage: trying to solve problems together that you couldn't solve on your own.

The second observation is the intensity of the work involved in carrying out such an operation. This intensity is partly due to the fact that it's not just a question of organization. Merging a community brings with it challenges that are well known to merger specialists: managing human resources through numerous meetings between counterparts, trying to limit the duplication of positions as much as possible; dealing with the structural nostalgia of the old order to gradually make the new acceptable, etc.

But there are others, more specific to the merger of political bodies: the acceptance of domination by a "leader from elsewhere", the justification of a change of model which, by setting things alight, compromises the position of elected representatives. Behind the operational functions of public policies, there's a political consent issue that's always tricky to handle.

In December 2015, the same majority - a coalition led by the Socialist Party - that governed the two former regions won. Political alternation is out of the question. The legacy of the two former regions must be accepted.

An effective merger

The final observation is that despite these difficulties - numerous and sometimes unexpected - the merger has indeed taken place. It will have taken much longer than expected to become a reality.

Certainly, at the dawn of a new mandate, regional policies everywhere are still very much imbued with compromises between the two or three former merged regions. It will have taken one mandate to see the emergence of a radically new policy. And the first steps in the campaign for the regional elections on June 20 and 27, 2021 show that the sensitivities and attachments linked to the former regions still have to be reckoned with.

Thus, the fact that all the currently known heads of lists for the Occitanie elections are of Midi-Pyrénéenne origin is particularly underlined... in the east of the region.

Last but not least, the merger is far from giving the regions the European dimension that President Hollande had called for.

A region's European capacity is not just geographical. It is above all political, and a matter of competences and autonomy. Occitanie is bigger than neighboring Catalonia. But its new budget is only 10% of that of its Spanish neighbor, which really counts on a European scale.

These aspects will undoubtedly have to be reconsidered one day if the blending of grape varieties is to produce a grand cru, and not simply a larger volume of a substantially identical beverage.

Emmanuel Négrier, CNRS Research Director in Political Science at CEPEL, University of Montpellier, University of Montpellier and Vincent Simoulin, sociologist, Director of CERTOP (Centre d'Etude et de Research Travail Organisation Pouvoir), Toulouse - Jean Jaurès University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.