Changing Political Opportunities for Civil Society in the EU: Effects on the Field, the Public Sphere and Governance Functions

Whereas the jury is still out about the potential of EU participatory tools, existing assessment of the effective openness of the agenda via online tools (Bozzini 2011) or of the contribution of participation to direct legitimacy (Kohler-Koch 2013) are very nuanced. The aim of this paper is not to assess the contribution of the re-balancing of the objectives of article 11 from those it had assumed originally (see Bouza 2015). Previous work had anticipated that the openness of the agenda could transform the opportunities for organisations able to use different registers of collective action thereby attracting to Brussels organisations emphasising the direct mobilisation of citizens rather than lobbying via specialised channels. Results show that the change in participatory opportunities has the potential to make more citizens interested in the EU (Bouza 2013), enhance the activism of multipositional organisations using their ability to mobilise citizens to compete with insider Eurogroups (Oleart and Bouza 2017) and to foster a more adversarial debate that moves issues beyond the traditional consensus politics (Bouza and Greenwood 2015, Oleart and Bouza forthcoming). Instead, this conceptual paper discusses different potential effects of the ongoing distribution of political opportunities for civil society to interact with EU institutions upon the logics of interaction, coalition building and competition among civil society groups in the EU. The paper does so by introducing firstly how the change in participatory structures changes the opportunity structure for civil society to be involved in the EU. Then it discusses three different conceptual and theoretical approaches to these emerging opportunities: European civil society as a field of cooperation and competition, European civil society as a segmented public sphere and European civil society as part of the ongoing internal administrative and governance structure in the EU institutions.