Strategic or Principled? The Engagement of Civil Society Organizations with the EU

ABSTRACT

This article links the literature on the Europeanization of civil society organizations (CSOs) with the literature on the contribution CSOs can make to democracy in the EU. To do so, it asks which are the pull factors that support CSOs’ Europeanization: are they mostly strategic and linked to where law-making and the money are? Or are they likewise linked to a desire to contribute to EU democracy? To explore this question, the article looks at agricultural, environmental and anti-poverty groups and combines fresh qualitative with quantitative data. The findings suggest that we need to distinguish strategic Europeanization, on the one hand, from the identification with supranational democracy, on the other. They also show that the most Europeanized organizations need not be the most interested in EU democracy, whereas organizations with a comparatively low degree of Europeanization can still be interested in EU democracy.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil society organizations
• Europeanization
• democracy
• European Union
• interest groups

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The reason for the substantially lower figure of questionnaires and interviews in the agricultural sector is their organization structure under COPA-COGECA which differs from the two other sectors, in that it only allows for 1–2 national members, whilst in the environmental and anti-poverty field, the European umbrellas at times have a multitude of national members which in turn have a multitude of regional members.

2. The related questions were: (1) In your organization, what importance does dealing with EU processes have? (High–medium–low) and (2) Is the EU an issue in your work? (regularly–irregularly–rarely–never).

3. The figure is 50 per cent for the agricultural actors and 42.9 per cent for the environmental actors.