European social movement organisations and their members: Legitimacy and representation. The participation of Flemish women's groups in the European level organisations - a case study

Interest groups have been mobilised at the European level from the beginning of the European project onwards and have known an exponential growth in the 1980s and 1990s (Greenwood, 1998). These 'euro groups' are mainly federations of national peak organisations and have the advantage of being an easy communicator vis à vis the European institutions as they can give a direct and single opinion. In case of the public interest groups the European Commission did even take an active role in the mobilisation of these groups (Michalowitz, 2004). Nevertheless this means that this single opinion at the European level is ideally a result of a 'bottom-up filtering process'.

The preference of the European Commission to consult these euro groups and their concerns about the openness and representativeness of these euro groups as formulated in the White Paper on European governance (2001), has urged the question if and how effective these groups do consult and represent their own constituencies. This question is even more important because we are dealing with organisations composed of members who are most of the time federations of national and/or local organisations theirselves.

The paper will deal with this question by using of the results of an empirical study of European and Flemish women's organisations. The field of women's organisations is particularly interesting to observe this question of representativeness. There are indeed not only national differences, but also differences in ideas and ideology on women's specific themes between different sorts of women's organisations, and this could complicate the European 'bottom-up filtering process'.

On the basis of a social network analysis of women's organisations on the Flemish, European and Flemish-European level, I will discuss how local Flemish organisations can and do participate in euro groups. Presenting these results, I want to show that social network analysis has the advantage of focussing not on internal democracy issues of euro groups but taking into account the larger picture of the whole field of an interest constituency.