The Role of Civil Society in the Construction and Life of the European Union

At various important moments in the life of the European Union, the role of organized actors in civil society has been mooted as a possible pillar for the construction of stable and socially legitimated institutional arrangements. Testifying inter alia to this is the presence of the expression ‘civil society’ in some of the most significant documents produced by the European institutions: the Treaty of Maastricht, the 2001 White Paper on Governance, the Treaty of Nice, and the European Constitutional Treaty. The failure of the European Constitutional Treaty with its rejection by the referendums held in France and Holland has highlighted the great distance separating the institutions of the European Union from the people who live in it; a distance which some observers (even within the European institutions themselves) maintain that the action of civil society organizations can help reduce. The article presents the preliminary results of an ongoing study on the role of civil society in the construction and life of the European Union. It considers in particular the actions by the EU institutions to promote the involvement of civil society actors in their decision-making processes. Such actions often do amount to no more than mere declarations of intent characterized by considerable ambiguity, by perhaps excessive expectations, and by a marked vagueness as to the real meaning of the expression ‘civil society’ and its range.