Luis Bouza Garcia

The ECI as a Democratic Innovation: Analysing its Ability to Promote Inclusion, Empowerment and Responsiveness in European Civil Society

Abstract This article analyses the effect of the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) in the EUs participatory model. It considers first its origins in the process of participation of civil society in the Convention to point out the importance of considering the debates on participation in the last decade. It then builds on the expectations of other papers in this special issue that the main users of the ECI will be a constituency of civil society organisations so far weakly involved in European affairs and focuses mainly on the ECIs innovative effects on the relations between the European institutions and organised civil society. The article analyses whether the ECI may make the EU participatory model more inclusive, empowering and more oriented towards the public sphere than it has been so far. It finds that the ECI may make European civil society more diverse, representative and oriented to the public sphere, although it is not clear that the initiative grants them a more salient role. In this sense the financial, organisational and political costs associated to the initiative seem more important than the potential gains it offers, although it is also expected that the ECI will become a sufficiently salient tool in political terms to be neglected by the EU institutions.

Introduction: a narrative turn in European studies

AbstractIn recent years, there has been a tendency to explain the successes or failures in formulating and justifying policy or polity-building proposals for the European Union (EU) in terms of the difficulty in articulating narratives appealing to the contemporary European public. However, narrative analyses are an emerging approach and the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of these debates are sometimes not made explicit. This special issue contributes to debating the potential of narrative analyses for understanding the EU, their methodological and thematic approaches as well as their limits. The articles that follow address three issues. Firstly, they consider how narratives have become prominent in academic interest and political practice in recent years. Secondly, they consider how the EU institutions have embarked in explicit or implicit attempts to build narratives of European political and cultural union through debates on the state of the Union, through cultural committees seeking to ...Abstract In recent years, there has been a tendency to explain the successes or failures in formulating and justifying policy or polity-building proposals for the European Union (EU) in terms of the difficulty in articulating narratives appealing to the contemporary European public. However, narrative analyses are an emerging approach and the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of these debates are sometimes not made explicit. This special issue contributes to debating the potential of narrative analyses for understanding the EU, their methodological and thematic approaches as well as their limits. The articles that follow address three issues. Firstly, they consider how narratives have become prominent in academic interest and political practice in recent years. Secondly, they consider how the EU institutions have embarked in explicit or implicit attempts to build narratives of European political and cultural union through debates on the state of the Union, through cultural committees seeking to give the European project a cultural or artistic ‘soul’ or through designing euro banknotes. Finally, they analyse societal narratives of ‘Europeanness’ in relation to history, memory or cultural diversity.

The ‘New Narrative Project’ and the politicisation of the EU

Abstract The notion that the European Union (EU) lacks a narrative for its contemporary challenges conveys a general explanation for this disconnection with its citizens. This ‘narrative turn’ encompasses previous reflections on the EU’s democratic deficit, identity issues and the lack of a European public sphere. The turn of politics towards narratives – in the EU and beyond – adds to the debates on unity and diversity, legitimacy and the politicisation of the EU by focusing on the sociopolitical dynamics. This article discusses whether the recent narrative turn is compatible with the increasing contention on EU issues. It shows that the increasing use of the notion of narrative to account for political debates in the EU seems to ignore a significant part of the existing literature and debates on the emergence and limits of the ‘infrastructure’ of such narrative, the European public sphere of communication. By analysing the recent interest of the European Commission in narratives, this article finds that the current focus on narratives by EU institutions is so far explained by an attempt at re-creating a broad consensus on what the EU is and ought to be, which is, however, not addressing the dynamics of politicisation of the EU.AbstractThe notion that the European Union (EU) lacks a narrative for its contemporary challenges conveys a general explanation for this disconnection with its citizens. This ‘narrative turn’ encompasses previous reflections on the EU’s democratic deficit, identity issues and the lack of a European public sphere. The turn of politics towards narratives – in the EU and beyond – adds to the debates on unity and diversity, legitimacy and the politicisation of the EU by focusing on the sociopolitical dynamics. This article discusses whether the recent narrative turn is compatible with the increasing contention on EU issues. It shows that the increasing use of the notion of narrative to account for political debates in the EU seems to ignore a significant part of the existing literature and debates on the emergence and limits of the ‘infrastructure’ of such narrative, the European public sphere of communication. By analysing the recent interest of the European Commission in narratives, this article finds that ...

Agenda dynamics in Spain

At the end of the book, Field discusses the new situation at the national level, where we find the two traditional large parties (PP and PSOE) are being challenged in parliament by two newcomers, Podemos, generally considered to be on the left, and Ciudadanos on the right. At the national level, when four relatively large parties now compete for power and discuss possible government coalitions, the direct influence of the regionally based political parties might become less obvious. In any case, we already know that the government formation process immediately became more complex. The large-scale changes in the party systems in Europe and elsewhere that we are currently witnessing are impacting on coalition politics – in Spain, in Europe and beyond. Regardless of this, I very much recommend the book. It shows how in-depth analyses of country politics can inform crossnational studies and vice versa. It also demonstrates one of the core insights of non-cooperative game theory, namely, that actors do not have to share the same preferences to find cooperation useful. In that respect, the historical record of Spanish minority governments to date provides a lesson for both analysts of and politicians involved in the politics of compromise.

Linking Disconnected Spaces or Venue Shopping? Trade-Offs in Participatory Opportunities in the EU

This article discusses why national civil society organisations (CSOs) use or abstain to use the participatory opportunities that the EU has developed in the last years. This is done by analysing the role of French and Spanish civil society groups in the debates on participatory democracy during the drafting and the referendum debates of the European Constitution (2002–2005). The paper departs from existing assessments of the role of national civil society in the Convention and demonstrates that national organisations built on their expertise on certain EU policies, on access to EU-level political actors and on contacts and alliances with other CSOs. It also differs from previous studies in finding that participation does not entail sharing the interpretive frame promoted by the EU. The finding that access opportunities do not fundamentally influence the frames of the organisations is related to their ability to strategically choose to participate in European and national venues. The paper finds that because of their scepticism on the constitutions participatory framing, French organisations preferred a stronger role at the national level, whereas Spanish organisations did not have real incentives to develop a campaign at the national level. While it is expected that dialogue with CSOs can contribute to bridging the gap between the EU and its citizens, this paper finds that the institutional setting provided incentives for national organisations to get involved only in one of the levels rather than to link them.

A Decade of Debate about Participatory Democracy

This book has reviewed the evolution of the debate about participatory democracy in the EU over the last decade. It has been characterised as a process of frame bridging according to which pre-existing demands and mechanisms were re-oriented towards new goals: the claims from citizens’ interest groups to obtain a secure role in the EU are equated with demands by civil society to make the EU more participatory. The decisive moment of this “participatory turn” (Saurugger 2010) are the years from 2000–2003, when the debate about the future of the EU (Habermas 2001) coincided with the administrative reform of the Commission following the collapse of the Santer Commission.

The Development of the Participatory Agenda in the Aftermath of the Convention (2003–2011): Consultation and Direct Participation

The expectation of those organisations that promoted the article on participatory democracy was that recognition of the principle of consultation in the Treaty would grant them secure access to EU institutions. Furthermore, they expected to unify consultation practices across different departments and institutions and to avoid competition with outsiders, because of the recognition of the principle of representativeness that had been elaborated on territorial grounds. In this sense the publication of minimum standards for consultation (European Commission 2002c) could appear as an implementation mechanism of the 2001 White Paper on Governance and of Article 47, in that it defined common rules for all Commission departments and seemed to secure the principle of civil dialogue.

The Contribution of Civil Society to Bridging the Gap with EU Citizens: Reviewing a Decade of Debate

The Europa web portal — the European Union’s official gateway on the Internet — contains a series of arguments aimed at convincing Europeans of the merits of the Lisbon Treaty. An entire section is entitled “A more democratic and transparent Europe”, and one of the central arguments is that the Treaty brings more participatory democracy via new mechanisms of interaction.1 However, when one searches for the words “participatory democracy” in the Lisbon Treaty they are nowhere to be found. This anecdote tells us much about the EU’s agenda in this field. It conveys the way in which the EU has tried to regain legitimacy by complementing representative democracy with participatory tools. It also demonstrates the importance that political actors attach to the way in which they frame their discourses. Finally, the anecdote indicates changes in the agenda during the last years, when notions have appeared and disappeared at different times.

From the Regulation of Lobbies to Participatory Democracy: Agenda Setting and Civil Society in the EU

The EU’s relations with interest groups have evolved with the course of EU integration, in particular as the EU has won competencies in new areas. Until the 1970s most organisations in Brussels were general business or agricultural groups. The 1980s saw an expansion and diversification of business interest groups in Brussels as the EU left the euro-sclerosis years behind and started to deliver credible targets regarding the completion of the single market. However, during these years the EU also developed policies in new areas such as social affairs and the environment, attracting activists in these fields to Brussels. The EU system of interest intermediation has a number of salient features.

Influence on the Agenda and Field Effects

So far it has appeared that policy debates between 1997 and the Convention contributed to the emergence of an agenda of civil society participation strongly shaped by a small number of civil society organisations and the European Commission. Citizens’ organisations sought to obtain legal recognition of their access to EU institutions. This demand by civil society does not seem exceptional in the context of EU and civil society relations, as “the degree of institutionalisation of interest groups in the EU political system is what makes it unique” (Greenwood 2011b, 206). However, it has been highlighted that the objective was not the creation of access opportunities but the institutionalisation of existing practices (Perez Solorzano-Borragan 2007, Lombardo 2007). As this relevant distinction is rarely highlighted, it is important to make sense of its significance.