The contentious role of civil society in reconstituting democracy in the European Union

Abstract

Assuming that an EU supportive civil society is neither a preconditions nor a “quantité négligeable” in the EU's struggle for a democratically legitimate constitutional settlement, the article explores the contentious role of civil society in the EU's “would-be democratic” polity, arguing that this offers opportunities for European political information and reasoned communication that provide uninformed and disgruntled citizens with democratic alternatives to post-democratic withdrawal, and politically accountable and responsive leaders with necessary feedback. An Europeanisation perspective is adopted to develop a framework for analysing the domestic politics of European constitutional treaty reform. This analytical framework rests on three key components: first, the “misfits” between member states’ and EU democratic norms in the context of the “fragmented democratic legitimacy” of the composite EU polity [Schmidt, V. A. (2006). Democracy in Europe. Oxford: The EU and National Polities]. Second, a typology of practices chosen by civil society actors for responding to EU treaty reforms, categorised in terms of “exit, voice, and loyalty”. And third, as a key for explaining variations in organised civil society's strategies in EU reform politics, the different kinds of ideas that intermediary actor cherish regarding their preferred model of European democracy. The article derives a number of empirical propositions from this framework, leaving it to future research to systematically test how the impacts by national democratic contexts on the contentious role of civil society in EU politics are shaped by competing ideas about a primarily national, supranational or a cosmopolitan-transnational model of democracy in Europe.