Intercommunalités versus communes : actualité des luttes d'institutions autour de l'apprivoisement municipaliste des institutions coopératives françaises.

Fort the most part, and unlike many European countries that have experienced municipal mergers, the French response to municipal fragmentation has been to resort to cooperative logics, a kind of soft alternative to mergers. The progress of intermunicipal cooperation and the preservation of a municipal order of intermunicipality have long been the subject of institutional struggles, both at the local level and in the more general framework of national and parliamentary political debate. In the context of territorial reform, these struggles seem to have intensified and unfolded in a context marked by a form of competitive autonomization of intermunicipalities facing municipalities. Observed in the field of representation (associations of elected officials), they reveal a tightening of the legal lock that is eroding the capacity of local elected officials on the ground to shape the cooperative framework themselves. But these struggles also highlight the capacities of municipalist safeguards, which are deployed both in a defensive mode (statutory and electoral issues) and, from now on, in a counter-offensive mode ("communes nouvelles", "Engagement et Proximité" Act). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]