Conclusion: Lessons Learned – Challenges Ahead

5 Conclusion: Lessons Learned – Challenges Ahead

This essay had the aim to detect the origins and layers of the current discourse on civil society in European governance. Two scholars who refer to ‘civil society’ do not necessarily mean the same thing and this is even less obvious if journalists, politicians or public officials allude to civil society. In order to enhance the basis of our discussion, we should seek to identify the conceptions they rely on. This will help us to understand where different arguments come from. There are, in fact, different academic discourses which refer to different conceptions of democratic legitimacy: an output-oriented approach seeking to explore the contribution of citizens’ associations to effective problem-solving on the one hand and an approach that is inspired by the quest for input legitimacy and governance ‘by the people’ on the other.

The reference to ‘civil society’ in EU affairs is a rather recent development which gained momentum around the turn of the millennium. However, the current discourse on civil society in European governance is rooted in (1) the debate of ‘participatory governance’ and (2) the exploration of interest groups in European governance which have both thrived in EU integration studies since the 1980s. These approaches have been dominated by an output-oriented conception of societal involvement exploring the contribution of civil society organizations to effective political problem-solving.

Advocates of out-put oriented approaches are interested in the impact of citizens’ groups and organizations on EU policy making. However, ‘participatory governance’ approaches explored the whole range of citizens’ groups, organizations, and associations we have come to refer to as ‘civil society’. They are, in addition, motivated by a normative interest in the contribution of participation to effective political problem-solving or, to put it differently, in the output dimension of democratic European governance. Interest group research, on the other hand, initially focused on ‘special interest groups’ in market related policies and it was dominated by a purely explanatory research interest in the conditions of interest groups’ impact on EU policy making.

Research on interest groups in EU affairs, however, has integrated new research questions and new explanatory frameworks throughout the 1990s which demarcate a considerable overlap with the emerging academic discourse on civil society. Interest group researchers shifted their attention towards public interest groups in fields such as human rights, women’s rights or consumerism. They thus started to incorporate the whole range of societal actors that proponents of the emerging academic discourse on civil society consider as their object of investigation and generated a normatively motivated research interest in equal representation which, I would argue, is motivated by an emerging interest in governance ‘by the people’.

This shift has spawned comparative research exploring strategies and influence of different types of civil society actors in EU affairs. Explanations for unequal representation and varying degrees of influence of different types of interests were found at the level of interest groups’ material resources. But the investigation of public interest groups also supported the incorporation of sociological explanations as advocated by proponents of the new social movement approach. They highlight cognitive capacities to explain the influence of NGOs in the EU system of governance. However, this broadening of the research programme has also revealed the difficulty to define and measure political ‘impact’. Impact can mean different things depending on the research programme. Interest group research traditionally sought to explain why and to what extent the demands and positions of different interest groups had been incorporated in EU policies. Proponents of the new social movement approach would argue that ‘impact’ can also be defined in terms of public mobilization which, however, might be even more difficult to measure.

Interest group research has proved to be particularly open towards the new social movement framework which, due to its focus on popular control via contentious politics, also shows substantial overlaps with the emerging academic discourse on civil society in European governance. This discourse was a reaction to the growing dissatisfaction with output-oriented approaches to democratic legitimacy and is more concerned with popular control and the authenticity of democratic life than with effective problem-solving. Most proponents of the civil society terminology in EU affairs are in fact motivated by an interest in enhanced governance ‘by the people’ at the EU level. They usually refer to a model of participatory democracy such as deliberative democracy, associative democracy, or models inspired by the Tocquevillean school of thought, thus assigning certain democratizing functions to civil society.

Deliberative democracy turned out to be a particularly fruitful model for discussing the promises of civil society participation in EU affairs. Advocates of deliberative democracy are concerned with the contribution of civil society to the emergence of European public sphere. From this stance, civil society organizations that focus on EU issues and articulate societal interests in the public sphere link the EU political system to the ‘lifeworld’ of its citizens. Civil society thus introduces an element of popular control to the EU system of governance which complements existing elements of parliamentary control. However, critical voices have argued that selected empirical case studies, which proponents of deliberative democracy have analyzed to prove the emergence of a European public sphere, are far too optimistic and cannot be generalized. We might, moreover, need additional research on the interaction of parliamentary democracy and deliberative democracy in the compound EU political system to put these case studies into a broader perspective.

It is not surprising that a broad range of authors have applied deliberative democracy to EU affairs because it relies on what I have called a ‘procedural’ conception of civil society in this Living Review: Civil society is composed of voluntary groups, organizations and associations which articulate the variety of societal voices in the EU multi-level system. This conception matches, one could argue, the Brussels landscape of civil society organizations seeking to make their voices heard in EU policy-making. However, authors who invoke a more substantial conception of civil society by highlighting citizens’ virtues and skills as basic ingredients of civil society have been less successful in conferring their concept to the EU multi-level system. Civil society organizations should assume a socializing function and build citizens’ skills and capacities in EU affairs from this point of view. Research has shown, however, that societal groups which have specialized in lobbying the EU are far too elitist to allow supporters a role in shaping policies, campaigns and strategies.

I would argue that this result is not at all surprising and it might in fact be worth investigating if this does not also hold true for civil society organization engaged in policy making at the national level. To enhance our respective knowledge, research that compares the democratizing functions and performance of civil society organizations in the EU to organizations engaged at the level of national political systems would be necessary. The social capital approach in fact suggests that local, rather apolitical groups such as neighbourhood associations or sports clubs contribute more to the enhancement of active citizenship and democratic life than civil society organizations engaged in national or transnational policy making. However, we might also need more studies that analyze the internal structures, such as internal decision-making and communication, of civil society organizations from this point of view.

This leads us to an ambiguity in the concept of civil society as being introduced to EU affairs: The concept incorporates, in fact, both the involvement of citizens’ organizations in policy-making and active citizenship. Since the publication of the White Paper on European Governance, the European Commission has sought to implement both objectives: While the participation of civil society organizations has continuously been valued, the Commission has also introduced the Online Platform ‘Your Voice in Europe’ which addresses organizational actors and individual citizens inviting them “to play an active role in the European policy-making process” (at http://ec.europa.eu/yourvoice /index_en.htm, May 22, 2007). However, it might be worth asking if both objectives can be implemented at the same time or if they rather contradict each other. This question has recently been discussed by Stijn Smismans (2007 ) and might be a site for further research.

Many different aspects of civil society in EU governance have been explored since civil society became a research focus in EU studies towards the end of the 1990s, some of them in empirical rich case studies. The European Commission and its relationship with civil society organizations in EU policy-making has become one focus of this research. For studies which are motivated by the quest for enhanced governance ‘by the people’ in the EU deliberative democracy has become an important point of reference. The integration of findings, frameworks, and results is a challenge for future research. We might, for example, ask what implications the involvement of civil society organizations in the European Commission’s policy making has for the compound system of European governance and the institutional balance between Commission, Council, and Parliament. And we could advance our knowledge by further integrating the results of different research strands such as studies on interest groups, new social movements, or third sector organizations.

Finally, I would like to point to the natural limits of this Living Review which has sought to reflect on the ‘mainstream’ of current research on civil society in European governance, mostly published in international journals. This selection represents that section of academic research which is being perceived and discussed by an international academic community. However, we should be aware that there are national academic, administrative, and popular discourses on civil society and European governance which have not been incorporated in this ‘mainstream’ academic discourse.²⁵