Region (Europe)

The European Union created a Committee of the Regions to represent Regions of Europe as the layer of EU government administration directly below the nation-state level. The Committee has its headquarters in Brussels.

Reasons given for this include:

The term 'region' as used here includes England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland which are non-sovereign countries, referred to as separate countries, even though collectively they form the country known as the United Kingdom they are recognised as countries by the UK Government and are not referred to as regions.

Some nation states which have historically had a strong centralized administration have transferred political power to the regions. Examples of this include the devolution of power in the UK (the Scotland Act 1998, the Government of Wales Act 1998) and the current negotiations in France concerning increased autonomy for Corsica. Some other states have traditionally had strong regions, such as the Federal Republic of Germany; yet others have been structured on the basis of national and municipal government with little in between.

European

European, or Europeans, may refer to:

See also

Region

In geography, regions are areas broadly divided by physical characteristics (physical geography), human impact characteristics (human geography), and the interaction of humanity and the environment (environmental geography). Geographic regions and sub-regions are mostly described by their imprecisely defined, and sometimes transitory boundaries, except in human geography, where jurisdiction areas such as national borders are clearly defined in law.

Apart from the global continental regions, there are also hydrospheric and atmospheric regions that cover the oceans, and discrete climates above the land and water masses of the planet. The land and water global regions are divided into subregions geographically bounded by large geological features that influence large-scale ecologies, such as plains and features.

As a way of describing spatial areas, the concept of regions is important and widely used among the many branches of geography, each of which can describe areas in regional terms. For example, ecoregion is a term used in environmental geography, cultural region in cultural geography, bioregion in biogeography, and so on. The field of geography that studies regions themselves is called regional geography.