Democratic Aspiration Meets Political Reality: Participation of Organized Civil Society in Selected European Policy Processes

From the very beginning of European integration, the European Commission has been the one institution eager to consult external interests and experts. Besides its constant need for expertise, the Commission’s chronic understaffing attracted it to the idea of gaining diverse stakeholders as allies for its legislative proposals. This inclusion of interest organizations was meant to serve at least three purposes: first, a functional purpose, to increase the effectiveness of policy-making; and, second, an instrumental purpose, to gain public support — that is, social legitimacy for its own work, as well as for the integration process as such. Third, in the aftermath of the Maastricht Treaty (1993) and its defeat in the first Danish referendum, an additional normative purpose became prominent and important for the whole European Union (EU), not only for the European Commission. Many EU policy-makers felt that the permissive consensus among the European citizenry about the integration process was faltering: a heated political and scientific debate about the EU’s deficit in democratic legitimacy has since been taking place.