Lobbying Opportunities, Confusions and Misrepresentations in the European Union

Abstract

Lobby activities are often likened to the misuse of authority and bad practices. Such parallels generate problems that easily spiral down into crises and conflicts, and the symbiosis of politics and business turns into an ambiguous platform. Why should we look into the core of the suspicions regarding the intertwining and overlapping interests of political and business communities? The answer: because in Romania public interest is often defined in a private or personal framework, whereas private interests are defined in markedly public terms. Confusion sets us clearly apart from the effective Israeli, American, British, Czech, Polish or Magyar lobbyists. The same confusion has a damaging effect: we are unable to efficiently handle institutional relations and public-private relations, be they national or international, that is, European. To what extent is the politics-business relationship deemed appropriate in US and EU? Which are its constraints, prerequisites and possible sanctions? These are the questions which accompany our dilemmas that we clarify in this paper. We conclude with proposals on what can be done in promoting efficiently the Romanian private interests within the European institutions.

Keywords: interest groups, NGOs, lobbying pressures, advocacy, EU public-policy making

JEL Classification: H10, L31, L38