ABSTRACT
Like other governmental and intergovernmental organizations, the European Union has adopted in the 1990s the participatory turn in its decision-making and communication policy. The official introduction of the “new European governance” aimed to find a lasting institutional solution to the problem of controlling the interactions between European policymakers, experts and representatives of interests. The failure of the ratification referendum of the Constitutional Treaty in 2005 opened a new window of opportunity. Adopting a historical-sociological perspective on modes of government in Europe, this chapter sets out to revisit this paradox of a European democracy, which initially functioned as a democracy by proxy before inventing, in fits and starts and by a succession of corrections, its own model. By examining the various rationales and categories of the actors which, between the start of the 1990s until the consecration of European Citizens’ Initiatives (ECI) in 2012, contributed towards the forging of a participatory theory of European democracy, the authors analyse how a field of European government reform was constituted and structured as well as the paths taken by its action. They explore the European reform laboratories, where this new procedural theory of the European power has been imagined.
