Decentralisation has an important meaning in the context of European integration, since a Europe composed of subsidiary spatial units is to be constructed and a “Europe of regions” is on the agenda of many political discussions. From the early 1990s, the European Communities, later the European Union, promoted the idea of administrative decentralisation also in transformation countries. For EU accession decentralisation was made one of the prerequisites. But it met centralistic traditions originating not only in the Communist era and could partly be enforced only with considerable difficulties. The paper investigates in a comparative way into the efforts made and the results achieved so far in the Visegrad countries to establish local as well as regional self-government. A special focus is laid on the regional level. It is also observed to which extent administrative regionalisation has respected historical regional and cultural identities.