Home | Databases | WorldLII | Search | Feedback Edited Legal Collections Data

Cram, Laura --- "Inventing the People: Civil Society Participation and the Enhabitation of the EU" [2006] ELECD 140; in Smismans, Stijn (ed), "Civil Society and Legitimate European Governance" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006)

Book Title: Civil Society and Legitimate European Governance

Editor(s): Smismans, Stijn

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781843769460

Section: Chapter 11

Section Title: Inventing the People: Civil Society Participation and the Enhabitation of the EU

Author(s): Cram, Laura

Number of pages: 19

Extract:

11. Inventing the people: civil society
participation and the enhabitation of
the EU
Laura Cram

The political world of make-believe mingles with the real world in strange ways,
for the make-believe world may often mold the real one. In order to be viable, in
order to serve its purpose, whatever that purpose may be, a fiction must bear some
resemblance to fact. If it strays too far from fact, the willing suspension of disbelief
collapses. And conversely it may collapse if it strays too far from the fiction that we
want them to resemble. Because fictions are necessary, because we cannot live
without them, we often take pains to prevent their collapse by moving the facts to
fit the fiction, by making our world conform more closely to what we want it to be.
We sometimes call it. Quite appropriately, reform or reformation, when the fiction
takes command and reshapes reality.

(Morgan 1989: 14)



INTRODUCTION

The central thrust of this chapter is that one of the most interesting features of
the involvement of civil society in EU level activities and structures is the
implication it has for the creation of a `people' for the EU. The increasing
involvement of civil society actors at the EU level has been encouraged in
large part by a self-interested `fiction'1 developed by, for example, the
Commission and EESC2 (see, for example, Smismans 2003) concerning the
relationship between civil society involvement at EU level and participatory
democracy. Drawing upon empirical evidence ...