European Commission’s White Paper on European Governance (2001) (The)

In 2001, the European Commission published European Governance: A White Paper, after six years of preparatory work conducted by civil servants and academics. The notion of participation by civil society plays a fundamental role in the work. A genuine discourse of European participatory governance is established, one of whose primary functions, we believe, is to confer a kind of democratic legitimacy onto Commission civil servants and experts at a key moment in its history.