Abstract
The Brussels-based civil society organizations (CSOs) have been conceived by the EU to act as a bridge between the bureaucratic elites and the citizens of Europe. The institutionalized presence of the major EU-based CSOs has, however, called their legitimacy into question, as exemplified by notions such as ‘revolving doors’ implying homogeneous social, educational, and professional backgrounds shared by both EU officials and CSO leaders. This article therefore asks the following questions: To what extent do the leaders of EU-based CSOs merely reproduce the types of capital that mirror those of the political elites in the so-called ‘Brussels bubble’? To what extent do the CSO leaders bring in other sets of capital and forms of recognition that are independent of the Brussels game? How can we explain differences in the salience of EU capital found across policy areas, types of leadership positions, and types of organizations? Empirically, this article qualitatively analyzes the career trajectories of 17 leaders of EU-based peak CSOs that are active in social and environmental policy areas. Despite the highly integrated and institutionalized characteristics shared by all organizations, we find diversity in the composition of the leaders in terms of the extent to which their career trajectories are embedded in the EU arena.
Highlights
The project of European integration has entailed the creation of new institutional actors such as the European Commission, European Court of Justice, and European Parliament, and a new constellation of collective actors such as interest groups and civil society organizations (CSOs) established at the EU level
What other sets of capital and forms of recognition do we find in the career trajectories of the CSO leaders that are rather independent of the Brussels game?
Despite the fact that our sample includes EU-level CSOs who are characterized by a high level of integration into EU institutions’ formal and institutionalized ways of involving civil society, we observe diversity in the composition of the leaders in terms of the extent to which their career trajectories are embedded in the EU arena
Summary
The project of European integration has entailed the creation of new institutional actors such as the European Commission, European Court of Justice, and European Parliament, and a new constellation of collective actors such as interest groups and civil society organizations (CSOs) established at the EU level This new socio-political space has attracted the interest of social scientists seeking to analyze these new interactions and power relations (Coen & Richardson, 2009; Fligstein, 2008; Georgakakis & Rowell, 2013; Johansson & Kalm, 2015; Magone, Laffan, & Schweiger, 2016). By studying the (broadly-defined) career trajectories of the leaders, we can derive a set of skills, types of capital, and forms of recognition and status that are relevant in the field of EU civil society and discuss the extent to which the fault line between the insiders and outsiders is observed at the level of individual leaders’ career trajectories
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