Back on 9 and 10 March 1994, the EU’s Committee of the Regions (CoR) held its constitutive session in Brussels. Fifteen years on, this consultative body - created by the 1992 Maastricht Treaty - was celebrating its anniversary with pomp and circumstance on 21 April for its 79th plenary session. In fifteen years, many things have changed. Thanks to three treaty reforms (Amsterdam in 1997, Nice in 2003 and Lisbon in 2007), the CoR has gradually seen its place strengthened in the institutional structure of the EU to such an extent that today it considers itself as a ‘quasi-institution’. Little by little, it has also succeeded in imposing its presence where it was not necessarily expected, as in the external relations of the EU, for example, at the origin of the creation of a Euro-Mediterranean Regional and Local Assembly (EMRLA) which is to work in the framework of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. The CoR is at the root of original initiatives, such as the setting up of a Subsidiarity Monitoring Network or a Lisbon Monitoring Platform. It is also the CoR which placed on the European agenda the creation of the European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation (EGTC), a new legal instrument designed to facilitate cooperation between the territorial authorities of the various member states. And it is the CoR, in cooperation with the European Commission, that organises the ‘Open Days’, a not-to-be-missed annual meeting of hundreds of representatives of regional and local authorities in Brussels.

In fifteen years, the Committee of the Regions has grown and developed, and even if it is far from being the «third chamber» (next to the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers) of which the German Länderused to  dream, it has acquired a visibility and a place which people no longer dispute today. In 2009, the CoR upholds the message of a Europe which can only be built in partnership with the regions and other territorial authorities and lauds «multi-level governance», the genuine political credo of its very regionalist President Luc Van den Brande. This is the message of the new ‘mission statement’, adopted on 21 April, precisely on the occasion of this fifteenth anniversary, and a white paper in the process of being drafted (see Europoliticsn°3706). «We claim to bring the fruit of our experience of daily life and to have great influence on the main political orientations,» said Jacques Blanc in 1994, during his election to the first presidency of the CoR. « We need to be daring enough to develop ideas and concepts that, although not feasible today, nonetheless lay the groundwork for tomorrow,» said Luc Van den Brande in his inauguration speech in February 2008. Between the two: 15 years ... and the acquisition of political maturity.