CSOs and Identity Building: Cheerleaders for European Integration?

Abstract

It’s not surprising that the European Union (EU), like many other donors, has promoted New Public Management (NPM) and administrative rules among civil society organizations (CSOs). Much more peculiar is the emphasis placed on the promotion of Europe. The EU has funded CSOs to raise its profile as an international donor and, more interestingly, to diffuse European values and ideas and to increase its legitimacy and reputation. In sharp contrast to member states and to most international organizations, the EU has always had a double mission. As the first referral of the Treaty of Rome says, European Economic Community (EEC) member states were ‘determined to lay the foundations of an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe’. Given this imperative, many EU policies pursue several often incompatible objectives (Majone 2010). On the one hand, EU policies are passed to solve problems and, on the other hand, they are also a means to promote European integration. It is often assumed that EU officials consider CSOs to be vehicles for selling the EU to its citizens or to be cheerleaders for European integration (Cullen 2010). A closer analysis of this presumed function shows that such instrumentalization of CSOs is far from obvious. From the perspective of EU officials, many members of the Parliament and CSO representatives, the EU promotes information and communication activities to raise awareness of EU policies and civic participation and engagement.KeywordsEuropean UnionNetwork GovernanceEuropean Union PolicyEuropean IdentityIdentity BuildingThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.