European civil society: Between participation, representation and discourse

Opening EU-Governance to Civil Society: Gains and Challenges.

The December judgments of the ECJ in Viking and Laval on the compatibility of national collective labour law with European prerogatives have caused a quite heated critical debate This paper seeks to put this debate in constitutional perspectives In its first part it reconstructs in legal categories what Fritz W Scharpf has characterized as a decoupling of economic integration from the various welfare traditions of the Member States European constitutionalism, it is submitted, is bound to respond to this problematique The second develops a perspective, within which such a response can be found That perspective is a supranational European conflict of laws which seeks to realize what the Draft Constitutional Treaty had called the motto of the union: unitas in pluralitate Within that framework the third part analyses two seemingly contradictory trends, namely first, albeit very briefly, the turn to soft modes of governance in the realm of social policy and then, in much more detail, the ECJ’s hard interpretations of the supremacy of European freedoms and its strict interpretation of pertinent secondary legislation The conflict-of-law approach would suggest a greater respect for national autonomy in particular in view of the limited EU competences in the field of labour law

On the Social Deficit of the European Integration Project and its Perpetuation through the ECJ-Judgements in Viking and Laval

Besides the more conventional top-down leverage and bottom-up linkage approach, the European Union (EU) uses a third way to promote democracy in third countries: promotion of democratic governance through functional cooperation in policy sectors. This governance model of democracy promotion has so far been studied only with regard to its effectiveness in target countries. In contrast to earlier research, this contribution takes an ‘input’ perspective and asks whether adverse sectoral economic interests prevent the EU from consistent democratic governance promotion. Based on three case studies from the two policy sectors of environmental and fisheries policy, the contribution concludes that EU democratic governance promotion is indeed inconsistent when sectoral economic interests are at stake. The governance model is thus subject to the same pattern of inconsistency as the leverage and linkage model with regard to economic interests.

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The promotion of participatory governance in the EU's external policies: compromised by sectoral economic interests?

This paper shows that the main pattern of European democratisation has unfolded along the lines of an EU organised as a multilevel system of representative parliamentary government and not as a system of deliberative governance as the transnationalists propound. But the multilevel EU has developed a structure of representation that is theoretically challenging. In order to come to grips with this we present an institutional variant of deliberative theory, which understands democracy as the combination of a principle of justification and an organisational form. It comes with the following explanatory mechanisms: claimsmaking, justification and learning which in the EU also program institutional copying and emulation mechanisms. We show that the EU has established an incomplete system of representative democracy steeped in a distinct representation-deliberation interface, which has emerged through a particular and distinct configuration of democratisation mechanisms. This article is forthcoming in Constellations. It is pre-printed here by permission of the journal.

Representation through deliberation. The European case

Political science literature often claims that the participation of civil society organisations increases the democratic quality of policy-making in international governance arrangements. However, it remains unclear under what conditions such a democratic value can be achieved and how the empirical reality of this participation relates to the alleged democracy-enhancing quality. In recent years, the European initiatives to establish a civil dialogue, to improve the consultation with civil society organisations and above all the White Paper on European Governance have triggered some scientific expectations that the EU seeks to establish a participatory regime which possibly improves the democratic character of EU policy-making. The central hypothesis put forward in this paper is that the participation of civil society organisations is only then of democratic value if it takes place in an environment of clear rules; thus, an argument is made for a regulated model of participation which is both normatively meaningful and practically feasible. The safeguarding functions of legally enforceable rights to participation ensure democratic instead of lobbying-like participation. Based on normative theoretical reflections on the democratic value of participation of civil society organisations as well as on empirical research in the fields of environmental policy (chemicals, REACH) and migration policy (family reunification), this paper argues that the EU has not yet established an approach to participation that increases the democratic quality of EU policy-making but that it rather follows a voluntaristic and instrumental approach. Nevertheless, some developments in the environmental area give reason for cautious optimism that the EU might move towards a more democratic participatory regime of policy-making.

Dawid Friedrich

Papers

Old wine in new bottles? The actual and potential contribution of civil society organisations to democratic governance in Europe