The New Politics of European Civil Society

Ulrike Liebert, Hans-Jörg Trenz, Ulrike Liebert, Hans-Jörg Trenz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136865206
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Over the past two decades, civil society has played a pivotal role in Europe, from the demise of Communist rule to the reunification of Europe, followed by the expansion of the single market to the reconstitution of democracy in the enlarged European Union.

European civil society has emerged as a social space between EU governance and the citizens of the member states, populated by non-state agents claiming to represent, speak for or participate on behalf of the most varied social constituencies in EU decision making. This book consolidates European civil society research by re-viewing its conceptual, normative and empirical-analytical foundations. With contributors from political science to sociology to law, it captures the evolving practices of European civil society that stretch across the national (local), the European and the global realm. Developing an analytical framework that highlights the interplay between civil society building and polity building from above as well as from below, within the legal and institutional framework of the EU, they examine whether and how civil society can contribute to making democracy work in normative democratic theoretical perspectives.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of civil society, European politics, political science and sociology.

1 The ‘new politics of European civil society’

Conceptual, normative and empirical issues

Ulrike Liebert and Hans-Jörg Trenz

Introduction

This book is about ‘the new politics of European civil society’ – a new subject area within European studies and comparative politics that will be critically assessed in a collective effort by 12 scholars. Over the past two decades, this topic has triggered one of the most rapidly expanding research streams in European integration studies. Civil society has played a pivotal role, from the demise of communist rule and the third wave of democratization and economic transformation of half a continent – East-Central Europe – to the end of the Cold War, and from the dissolution of the iron curtain that divided Europe for over four decades, to the reunification of Europe followed by the expansion of the single market to the reconstitution of democracy in the enlarged European Union. The growing publication outputs suggest that Europe – despite its many backlashes – continues to be a laboratory of political and social experimentation, where new transnational forms of interaction between the state, governance and civil society emerge, are tested out and contested, refined and eventually adopted. However, in order to become an integral part of the social and political science mainstream, European civil society research needs to overcome the deficiencies that are typical of any new research area: conceptual incoherence, normative ambiguities and analytical confusion. An important goal to which our book seeks to contribute is to consolidate European civil society research by reviewing its conceptual, normative and empirical-analytical foundations. To accomplish this aim, the authorship of this book has brought together multidisciplinary expertise from several of the most innovative international, comparative and empirical research projects that have contributed to European civil society research over the past decade.

The new politics of European civil society in particular came to the fore in the wake of the spectacular changes that the European Union has experimented with over the past decade. It took off in what was still a Western European community of 15 longstanding democratic member states in 1999 and expanded within the 27-member community by 2007, coping with the challenges from 12 post-communist states, with their only recently established democratic regimes and market economies. In this historical and geographical context, ‘European civil society’ has emerged from conflictive processes and unfolded into a new transnational intermediary sphere, a pluralist social space between EU governance and European citizens that is populated by non-state agents claiming to represent, speak for or participate in EU decision making on behalf of the most varied social constituencies. If these norms and practices of European civil society were not taken into account, important developments of European integration and crisis would be missed that have been shaping – or hampering – the reconstitution of the European Union since 1989, and particularly after the eastern enlargement in 2004. Aimed at consolidating such an account of European civil society, our contribution seeks to advance three objectives: conceptual clarifications, normative reassessments and empirical-analytical explorations.

In conceptual terms, the book’s foremost purpose is to enhance clarifications in the European civil society debate, taking stock of different disciplinary fields, from political science via sociology to law. With a view to capturing the evolving practices of European civil society that stretch across the national (local), the European and the global realm, a multilevel conception of European civil society (or societies) is proposed, operating across different territorial levels and closely interacting with European governance.

Normatively speaking, our reassessment of ‘European civil society’ puts its potential for constituting democratic legitimate European governance centre stage. The question is whether and how civil society can contribute to making democracy work in transnational and supranational perspectives. The democratizing and legitimizing role of civil society beyond the state can be approached from different vantage points, namely deliberative, participatory or representative democratic norms. This debate focuses on three issues: civil society participation as an alternative, more inclusive venue compared to liberal or representative democratic processes; the civic and cosmopolitan promises of transnational civil society vis-à-vis the perceived perils associated with ‘uncivil society’; and European civil society’s double role as a partner of effective and inclusive European governance as well as a constituency of an emerging democratic EU polity. In these respects, this book aims to make a critical contribution to the debate about the legitimacy deficit of the European Union by putting normative assumptions about the role of European civil society in EU governance to the test. For instance, many authors call for alternatives to the model of representative parliamentary democracy. It is a matter of normative assessment whether civil society’s contribution to reconstituting democracy in Europe is more adequately conceived of in the normative terms of ‘participatory democracy’, ‘associative democracy’ or ‘deliberative democracy’ – or other alternatives.

Finally, regarding the empirical-analytical explorations, the new politics of European civil society with its (self-)images, practices and performance has been understood as an outcome of top-down ‘activated’ in contrast to bottom-up ‘mobilizing’ perspectives, each claiming to better explain ‘real civil society’ dynamics. As part of the larger field of comparative political, sociological analysis of Europeanization and European integration, European civil society research benefits from studies of pluralism, of cultural diversity as well as multilevel governance. These complexities of the research field notwithstanding, there is a common theme that runs through all these approaches, namely the ‘constructedness’ of European civil society (either through bottom-up claims making or through political framing) that is – arguably – closely related to the transformations of the European Union’s political order. An adequate analytical framework is needed to highlight the interplay between civil society building and polity building from above as well as from below, within the legal and institutional framework of the Union.

In short, this book helps consolidate European civil society research by defining it at the intersection of the European political and the European social-science research agendas. At the same time, we suggest that the conceptual, normative and analytical controversies surrounding it are also part of the struggles about an ‘appropriate’ role of European civil society; in other words, they reflect the ongoing negotiations about the reconstitution of democracy in Europe.

What is ‘new’ in the ‘new politics of European civil society’?

It would be misleading to introduce ‘European civil society’ as a new concept that breaks with the nation-state-centric tradition in normative political thought. Rather than auguring a conceptual revolution, this notion points more to the revival of a key term in political and scientific parlance (Rumford 2003), and its adaptation to European integration research. However, academics who allude to the concept of civil society in the European context do not necessarily always mean the same thing. Civil society is an ambiguous and strongly contested concept, the meaning, application and implications of which are being debated at the very moment of writing these contributions. This book comes up with new propositions about how to consolidate this conceptual field. First, we argue that the tensions that are inherent in notions of ‘European civil society’ can be overcome by distinguishing between more specific concepts with more coherent meanings. Second, a new feature of ‘European civil society’ is that it is justified in normative terms and that this normativity is linked to European integration. As a consequence, the functions of civil society in European Union governance can be assessed, correcting technocratic understandings that dominate the existing literature. One example is civil society as a tool of ‘good governance’ providing expertise for and increasing the input legitimacy into EU institutions, namely the Commission, the European Economic and Social Committee, and the European Parliament. Third, we present new analytical frameworks for empirically advancing cumulative research on the ‘new politics of European civil society’. To help clarify how and under what conditions and constraints European civil society evolves, cognitive mechanisms, discursiveness and performativity need to be highlighted. In all three respects, the ‘deepening and widening’ of European integration has demonstrably challenged civil society, has provoked its decline, but has also enhanced its dynamic unfolding.

The new contentious politics by civil society to engage with the process of European integration is most outstanding in this respect. The terrain within which this is unfolding has been changing rapidly, not only with regard to the categories of people that civil society addresses (such as gender or ethnicity), but also in terms of territorial reach, the boundaries of the social and the possibilities of institutional empowerment. These terms relate to the non-economic ways of expressing solidarity among the people of Europe that interfere with the allocation of political authority and the establishment of new modes of participatory and representative governance within the legal and institutional framework of the European Union. In this broader sense, the contentious politics of ‘European civil society’ can be understood as referring to all attempts to establish the European Union as something more than a common market.

Moreover, the contentious nature of bringing civil society into the emerging European polity suggests a paradigm shift from a formalistic to a culturalist civil society research agenda (Alexander 2006). If we accept that civil society is not a Dingwelt (reality as it is) but a Kulturwelt (reality as it ought to be), we make an analytical turn from ‘real civil society’ to ‘normative civil society’. The latter does not need to be materialized, but serves as a utopian ideal from which great regulatory impact can be derived. This culturalist account diverges from a ‘civic community’ that is substantiated in socio-structural terms or organizational forms (Anheier 2004; Putnam 1993). From the culturalist perspective, ‘European civil society’ is a utopian ideal that is not impossible per se, because it lacks a cultural substrate or a homogeneous social body. It also differs from formalistic accounts that link ‘European civil society’ to a specific organizational form that is differentiated from those of the state or the market. ‘European civil society’ is not merely the sphere populated by formal organizations, such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and interest associations. It is also, and very significantly, a realm of normative contestation and symbolic communication among individuals and groups where the validity of their collective projects and the grounds for common solidarity are at stake (Alexander and Jacobs 1998: 24; Eder, Chapter 3 in this volume). ‘Civil society’ is a regulatory device; it indicates a sphere of discourse about solidarity in which universal criteria of justice come gradually to be defined and seek to be enforced (Alexander 2001: 20; 2001; Calhoun 2002).

Finally, in the contemporary context, speaking of the ‘new politics of European civil society’ is to recognize the normative and political implications of transposing a traditional concept from social theory into a new legal and institutional setting. In this setting, the normativity of civil society is intrinsically political – that is, it contributes to reshaping the economic, legal or institutional nature of European integration in the terms of a political community. In this sense, European civil society is always contentious (see, in particular, the contributions of Kohler-Koch and Quittkat, Chapter 2; Liebert, Chapter 6; and Trenz et al., Chapter 7 in this volume). To put it in a nutshell, ‘the new politics’ of European civil society is about putting the normative ideals of civil society into practice, thus expanding or creating new social and political habitats within the established procedures and institutions of governance in the multilevel European polity. In this sense, ‘the politics of civil society’ is part of the processes of political integration at three substantial levels of social and political relations (Balme and Chabanet 2008: 14): the territorial, the relational and the ideational. At the territorial level, civil society politics of allocation and redistribution of resources among territorial units impinges on the centre–periphery relations in the political space; at the relational level, civil society is an agent of distributive politics – that is, the allocation and distribution of resources among social actors, thus affecting the power relations within the political space; and at the ideational level, the normative politics of civil society is about competing cognitive models, values, ideas and justifications – it is about the principles of justice and the appropriateness of the exercise of political authority, about the collective representation of a common destiny and the foundations of community.

Now that we have laid down the multiple facets of how to understand ‘the politics of civil society’, our more specific argument is twofold: we argue, first, that there is a specifically new politics of European civil society; and second, that there is a new politics of a specifically European civil society. In the following, we will explicate, first, the ‘newness’, and second, the ‘Europeanness’ of the politics of civil society.

On the one hand, as regards the ‘newness’ of ‘the politics of civil society’ we do not suggest that the core concept and its normative implications have changed. On the contrary, our contributions indicate that despite the hotly debated viability of the concept in the context of the European Union, the nor-mativity of civil society has remained relatively stable and its validity has been sustained over time. It would also be wrong to assume that ‘the politics of civil society’ was a latecomer in the evolution of European integration, a kind of adjunct to the market logics that was added some decades later. Quite to the contrary; as Ruzza and Cram have noted, the utopian vision of civil society had been inscribed into the project of European integration from its very beginning (Cram 2006; Ruzza 2006). In fact, European integration has been perceived by its founding fathers very much as a continuation of modernity’s promise to create a ‘more civil society’ against the barbarism of excessive nationalisms in twentieth-century Europe. The rationale of integration, its basic justification, is based on a code of civicness, a sphere of universalizing social solidarity based on justifications of a common good (Eriksen and Fossum 2007; Gajewska 2009; Morgan 2005).¹ Moreover, the expansive dynamics of European integration and the rules of enlargement can be read as an application of the civil society script: who deserves membership is determined on the basis of compliance with the universal criteria of justice, democracy and the rule of law. The European Union symbolically and legally acknowledges individual and minority rights and the protection of diversity within the ‘unity’ of its political body, thus facilitating constructions of a collective identity and of solidarity among the Europeans. As a consequence, the ‘newness’ of the politics of ‘civil society’ should be sought not in its core content, nor in its cultural expressions, but rather in the surprising appropriation of these principles by EU institutional actors as part of their official discourses. These have led to a rather paradoxical constellation, where the European Union had incorporated civil society into its discourse while the citizens and their associations still remained excluded from the Union’s institutional settings. Not without irony, it can be stated that the promotion of civil society discourse went hand in hand with the marginalization of civil society organizations. In the long run, however, and especially as a consequence of the long-term constitutionalization of the European Union, the reinvention of civil society by European official discourse was followed by institutional and legal changes, applying civic principles to community policies and creating procedures and institutions for citizens to be guided and bound by mutual obligation, solidarity and trust.² The newly salient normative discourse of civil society had to be placed in a dialogue with ‘real civil society’: the politics of organized interests that mobilized primarily at the centres and much less so at the peripheries of the European Union gradually brought the citizens and their associations into play. In the expanding polity of the Union, the ‘newness’ of the ‘politics of civil society’ and the ‘Europeanness’ of civil society are in this sense twins.

On the other hand, the Europeanness of ‘the politics of civil society’ can be specified by the unique setting of political authority that is characteristic of the European Union. The question is not whether a European civil society exists as a separate sphere that is distinct from national and global civil society. Rather, the question here is how a ‘politics of European civil society’ can be initiated and institutionally anchored within the political spaces that have been opened up – or also withheld – by the European Union. The conquest of institutional spaces is a central aim of ‘the new politics of European civil society’ in analogy to global NGOs that have already attained recognition and a permanent status within the UN system (Joachim and Locher 2008). European civil society is more than the other side of government: it takes organizational form within particular political and legal arrangements that are set up to socially re-embed the market and to promote positive integration beyond the nation-state (Caporaso and Tarrow 2008). The prospects for strengthening re-regulation and redistribution through EU policy making have thus become a prime mover for the Europeanization of civil society. Moreover, European civil society focuses on the ‘normative power’ of the European Union as an ideational force that projects its norms into the international system (Manners 2002). Given these far-reaching normative ambitions, European civil society cannot be reduced to a counter-movement against the union of states, but has become an ally for – if not the principal that drives – effective and legitimate governance beyond the nation-state. In this sense, the ‘politics of civil society’ is about effectively universalizing civic claims within and beyond particular institutional settings. To implement ‘the politics of civil society’, the rule of law and the allocation of political authority are needed (Caporaso and Tarrow 2008; see also Trenz et al., Chapter 7 in this volume). Regarding Europe, the utopian promises of civil society have gained institutional anchorage and legal backing that are necessary – even if not yet sufficient – to put its claims for civicness, justice and solidarity ‘effectively’ into practice.

In summary, by emphasizing the ‘new’ politics of European civil society we intend to conceptualize and normatively and empirically analyse the innovative ways in which civil society has made inroads into EU governance, be it as a loyal partner or a critical counterpart. Research on civil society has emphasized a quantitative and qualitative shift from the old ‘interest group politics’, in terms of strategic lobbying and particular interest organization, articulation and intermediation, to new inclusive and participatory regimes of governance (Marks and McAdam 1999; Kohler-Koch and Finke 2007; Saurugger 2006). Couched in this new framework, ‘the politics of European civil society’ points ...