Book review: Participatory Democracy, Civil Society and Social Europe. A Legal and Political Perspective
| DOI | 10.1177/1388262718798218 |
| Date | 01 September 2018 |
| Published date | 01 September 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Author biography
Wim Van Lancker received his PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Antwerp, Belgium.
He is currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Social Work and Social Policy at the Uni-
versity of Leuven, Belgium. His research focuses on the effectiveness of social policy in general
and family policies in particular in reducing poverty and inequality.
Gautier Busschaert, Participatory Democracy, Civil Society and Social Europe. A Legal and Political
Perspective, Intersentia, Cambridge 2016, 238 pages, ISBN 9781780683959.
Reviewed by: Matteo Fornasier, University of Augsburg and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and
International Private Law, Hamburg, Germany.
DOI: 10.1177/1388262718798218
Not only opponents but also supporters of the EU criticise its democratic deficit. In fact, the model
of representative democracy, on which the EU is founded, suffers from a number of flaws. The
Council, for instance, together with the European Parliament the main legislative body of the EU,
consists of representatives of the governments of the Member States, thus blurring the traditional
division of powers between the legislative and the executive branches. The European Parliament,
on the other hand, whilst directly elected, still lacks the power to initiate legislative procedures,
which is exclusively reserved to the European Commission. Moreover, the European Parliament is
far from being a genuinely European, i.e. transnational, representative body since its members,
contrary to what Art. 223(1) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU)
stipulates, are still elected subject to divergent national rules and procedures at Member State level.
As a result, MEPs are, in the first place, national representatives of EU citizens, paying particular
attention to the specific needs and interests of their own national electorate at the expense of a
common European political agenda.
To compensate for its democratic deficits, the EU has shifted towards strengthening the invol-
vement of citizens in its decision-making processes, thus supplementing the model of representa-
tive democracy with elements of participatory democracy. Art. 11 of the Treaty on European
Union (TEU), which was enacted through the Treaty of Lisbon, promotes citizen participation,
inter alia, through public consultation. More specifically, Art. 11(3) TEU provides for the Eur-
opean citizens’ initiative. This new instrument empowers EU citizens, provided they are not less
than one million in number and nationals ‘of a significant number of Member States’, to invite the
European Commission to take legislative action on a particular issue.
It is the above-mentioned ‘participatory turn’ in the system of governance of the EU that Gautier
Busschaert sets out to analyse in his book, both from a political and from a legal perspective. In
more general terms, Busschaert seeks to explore the relationship between the EU and civil society.
By the latter, drawing on the conceptual framework developed by Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato in
their seminal work Civil Society and Political Theory, he refers to a pluralistic sphere of partic-
ipation between state (i.e. the realm of political power) and the market (i.e. the realm of economic
power).
298 European Journal of Social Security 20(3)
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