Taking Europe beyond the ‘Brussels bubble’ through the ECI

The involvement of civil society in decision-making has been one of the cornerstones of the EU institutions legitimacy-seeking strategies since the late 1990s. Whereas the EU policy-making process has traditionally favoured institutionalised Brussels-based peak associations and umbrella groups that aggregate and represent diverse interests at EU level, the European Commission has attempted to formally open the policy process to diverse civil society groups. Brussels-based organisations tend to focus their messaging and work towards EU institutions, and, consequently, are likely to act within the framework provided by the European Commission. This implies that these organisations react to the ideas and frameworks that resonate within EU institutions and have fewer channels available for other subjects. In contrast, the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) encourages a fundamentally different type of civil society involvement in EU policy-making. The main innovative aspect of the ECI is that actors can set the agenda themselves. This is unprecedented, because it was previously the European Commission who framed all issues, and civil society actors had to engage within them.

The ECI has received both political and academic criticism as a toothless mechanism unable to affect policy-making. Indeed, some ECI organisers have been dissatisfied with  what they consider to be superficial consideration by the Commission. Nevertheless, in our own empirical analysis of five Citizens’ Initiatives (STOP TTIP, One of Us, Wake Up Europe, Media Pluralism and Right2Water), we found that several EU-level and national entrepreneurs managed to successfully politicise EU issues and bring a wide range of new actors into the EU policy-making process.

This also provided strong incentives to some Brussels-based institutionalised actors to join them (e.g. Greenpeace joined the STOP TTIP campaign once it was successful). By bringing new actors into policymaking by politicising an EU issue, the ECI can greatly contribute to the democratic legitimacy of the EU as a polity. It contributes to making participation in civil society more competitive, lowering ‘entry fees’ to EU policymaking. The analysis found that ECI campaigners were able to rapidly transfer issues traditionally seen as national (such as abortion and media ownership) to the EU level by investing resources in pan-European grass-roots campaigns.

Normatively, the politicisation of EU policies beyond the 'Brussels bubble’ would then be a symptom of the normalisation of the EU as a playing field, where the dominant arguments are EU-critical (to ‘Stop TTIP’), rather than anti-EU. The process by which EU issues become politicised at the national level would also contribute to the formation of a European public sphere. Such a process could be understood as an ‘empowering dissensus’, a concept that refers to the situation in which EU issues become a matter of controversy in national public spheres. While not questioning the European project as a whole, an ‘empowering dissensus’ implies putting forward competing political narratives (such as social democrat vs. liberal narratives) in a polity that has a tendency towards consensus.