Empowering consumer-citizens: changing rights or merely discourse?

Where in the past the orientation of the internal market was always on economic growth through removing trade barriers, the 21st century vision seems to be more impact driven, guided by consumers’ and citizens’ needs, not just from an economic perspective but also in terms of satisfaction of citizenship norms and values such as solidarity, inclusion and sustainability. The re-orientation also reflects on the role of the consumer and the citizen: they should be more active through participation in both the design and the enforcement of economic regulation. A parallel reflection of the re-orientation can be found in the EU ‘empowerment’ discourse linked to the consumer and citizenship concepts, as deployed by the Europe 2020 Strategy. The basic question that feeds this paper is what kind of social and economic governance model is behind the new empowerment tools and strategies? The paper is an initial attempt to explore this new consumer citizen centered governance model and its effects on law making and law enforcement. Putting citizens and consumers in the driving seat differs from the traditional way of decision-making through elected representatives and the traditional perception of consumers and citizens as passive receivers of rights and benefits.