Construction of Corporatist State-Society Relations and Its Democratic Weakness: An Interpretation of Current Discourses on the European NGOs.

This paper analyzes recent developments and legitimating discourses in the relationship between the "civil society", especially the NGOs, on the one hand, and the EU institutions. After briefly reviewing the developing involvement of NGOs in policy areas such as environmental policy or development policy, the paper examines recent attempt by the Prodi Commission to involve civil society actors as an Commission-wide strategy of constructing "Citizen’s Europe". Further, it analyzes discourses of several NGOs to remedy "democratic deficit" by their participation in policy processes. Based on these descriptive findings, the paper contends that: (1) current policy developments and discourses contains a bias toward what I call "corporatist state-society relations" model, which leans toward deeper direct involvement of civil society actors in policy processes; (2) this model lies behind discourses of NGOs, too. This is because there exists partial congruence of interests between NGos and the Commission; i.e., the need of the Commission to restrict the number of participants for the sake of efficiency and inconvenience for the NGOs of applying strictly pluralist criteria of "representativeness" based on "number"; (3) but this model has its inherent weakness in the dilemma of governance and legitimacy, exemplified by the difficulty defining "representativeness" of the NGOs. The Commission seems to advance efficiency of consultation process by inducing civil society actors to form coordinating framework such as the Social Platform. But, this strategy put the very legitimating potential of NGOs at risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]