What Future for the European Administration Space?

This report of mine is entitled "What future for the European Administrative Space?" But wondering about this possible future implies a preliminary question: What do we understand by European Administrative Space? Further on I shall try to formulate a possible definition.
The answer to the question I have just asked cannot but take account of the past, the things so far achieved by what we are wont to call "informal European cooperation in public administration matters". Furthermore, before we can formulate an answer, we have to adopt an interpretative key. The interpretative key I prefer �" perhaps obviously so, but probably also the most fruitful �" is the one of the relationship between State and Economy.
The organizational entity we call State has performed the function of governing social and economic phenomena and keeping them under control for many centuries past. For many centuries society and economy have developed predominantly within territorial ambits corresponding to those of individual States. This made it possible for the state powers to orient, promote, manage and control the changes both in the social and the economic field. In this century-old historical phase even the institutions and administrative systems �" which, from a certain moment onwards, were referred to as "public" �" were able to develop in a substantial autarchic and protected manner within the selfsame state frontiers that represented the protection of the individual societies and national economies. In other words, for many centuries, certainly throughout the 19th century and also for a goodly part of the 20th, the administrations of the individual states not only were never exposed �" from the point of view of organization, efficiency and general capacity of acting �" to a confrontation or competition with their counterparts in other countries. The only exception, the sole occasion of a real confrontation/competition between the administrations of different countries was represented, albeit in dramatic and violent form, by the conflicts of war.