Abstract
Whereas state actors from new EU member countries receive formal representation and voting rights that safeguard against their marginalisation in the system of EU governance, civil society organisations from new member states find it much harder to gain access to decision-making processes at the EU level. However, as many of them work on issues that are now (at least partly) decided at the EU level, participation in EU governance should become an integral part of their strategy. Based on a quantitative assessment of membership data for European umbrella organisations and on case studies for which interviews with leading civil society actors were conducted, this article gives a first comparative assessment of the actual participation of civil society organisations from the Central and East European member states in EU governance.
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Notes
The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia joined the EU in May 2004. Bulgaria and Romania joined in January 2007.
According to its own mission statement ‘the EU Civil Society Contact Group brings together eight large rights and value based NGO sectors – culture, environment, education, development, human rights, public health, social and women. The ETUC, representing European union workers is an observer to the group. The members of these sectoral platforms are European NGO networks. They bring together the voices of hundreds of thousands of associations across the Union, linking the national with the European level, representing a large range of organised interests. Jointly we aim to represent the views and interests of rights and value-based civil society organisations across the EU on major issues, which affect us across our sectors of activity. Our objective is to encourage and promote a transparent and structured civil dialogue that is accessible, properly facilitated, inclusive, fair and respectful of the autonomy of NGOs’ (www.act4europe.org, accessed 22 August 2008).
The study on environmental NGOs has been conducted as part of the Integrated Project ‘New Modes of Governance’ (www.eu-newgov.org), financially supported by the EU under the 6th Framework programme (Contract No CIT1-CT-2004-506392). Interviews in Prague were conducted by Kristýna Bušková (then Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen, now Cambridge University) and in Brussels by Brigitte Krech (independent consultant). The study of trade unions and employers’ associations has been funded by the Otto-Brenner-Foundation. Interviews were conducted by the Institute for Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, the Institute for Sociology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and the Koszalin Institute of Comparative European Studies. Brigitte Krech was responsible for the interviews in Brussels.
The representatives of Czech environmental NGOs, interviewed in autumn 2007, considered the pre-accession support measures from the EU to be sufficient. As the most important measures they named financial support, trainings, international networking and supply of information. However, only two out of seven NGOs claimed that their organisation was well prepared for work at the EU level at the time of accession in 2004. But most of the others stated that the situation has improved since then (Project Questionnaire, Autumn 2007, Questions Q6 – Q10).
Nevertheless, two-thirds of the interviewed trade union representatives consider an office in Brussels important (Project Questionnaire, Summer 2007, Question Q21).
Two trade unions – the Confederation of Arts and Culture (KUK) from the Czech Republic and the Union of Workers in Mines, Geology and Oil Industry (OZ PBGN) from Slovakia – are not represented at the European level at all (Project Questionnaire, Summer 2007, Question Q17, open responses).
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Pleines, H. Is this the way to Brussels? CEE civil society involvement in EU governance. Acta Polit 45, 229–246 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2009.23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2009.23