European civil society: Between participation, representation and discourse

Institutional designs of governance in the European Union frequently underlie a dichotomy between participation as the realm of civil society and representation as the realm of national governments and parliaments. The aim of this paper is to consider organised civil society not as distinct from but as part of the multi-level representative field that is emerging in the EU. This is done by distinguishing two distinct mechanisms of political representation in aggregating individual preferences or in integrating the political community of the EU. In order to spell out this latter integrative function of political representation as a creative practice, the notion of representative claims-making will be introduced. The practice of representative claims-making can then be analysed, first of all, as a way of distributing the social capital of the actors and institutions that populate the European field of civil society activism. Secondly, the practice of representative claims-making can be analysed as a way of building new forms of cultural and symbolic capital of civil society that are needed to occupy the new transnational positions that are made available by European integration.