CEU Jean Monnet Lectures: Professor Michelle Cini on Ethics and Lobbying in the European Commission

As part of the 2010 Jean Monnet Guest Lecture Series, Professor Michelle Cini presented her public lecture: “Ethics Reform and Lobbying in the European Commission”, on March the 5^th. The lecture and subsequent discussion were chaired by Uwe Puetter, Professor, Department of Public Policy.

Professor Cini began her talk with an overview of the history of ethics reform in the European context, touching upon the historic Kinnock Reforms that followed the resignation of the European Commission in 1999, which led to a period of intensive reform; and the 2005 European Transparency Initiative, which focused on financial transparency, the regulation of lobbying, and the ethics of officials.

She went on to examine the broader context of ethics as a set of moral principles operating at the individual, policy or system levels; and more specifically, the relationship between the concept of ethics and that of good governance, which she understood as a set of key principles encompassing accountability, transparency, responsiveness and participation. For Cini, ethical governance actively involves the input and output of the policy-making process, as well as the process itself.

A focus on European ethical governance underscores the fact that the manner in which interests engage with EU institutions is not only relevant for democracy or policy effectiveness, but also for understanding how interactions occur between public servants and private interests. In this manner, the European Transparency Initiative was premised upon a set of critiques of the European lobby system that highlighted its perceived favoring of business interests; its openness to potential abuses; and the principle that lack of transparency breeds mistrust amongst institutions and citizenry alike.

Cini concluded that it is still premature to asses the extent of the impact of reform in the Commission and other European public institutions, and listed some remaining concerns regarding vested interests, potential inconsistencies in the system, and the limits inherent in any self-regulatory process.

Michelle Cini is a professor of European Politics and Head of the Department of Politics, University of Bristol. She originally joined the University of Bristol as a Jean Monnet Lecturer in 1991. Cini  has also been an Executive Officer at the British Ministry of Agriculture and has held academic visiting positions at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Grenoble, 1995; the New York Consortium for European Studies (Columbia and NYU), 1998; the Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Lille, 2002; the College of Europe, Bruges, 2003-2004 and Nanjing University, China, 2007. She has been a Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre, European University Institute, Florence, 1999-2000.