45

— Transparency and participation : a vista of democratic principles for EU administration — This article aims to determine whether, and if so to what extent, the current rules and legal practices of the European Union concerning transparency and participation do indeed encourage the democratic principles recently embedded in the Treaty on European Union. It focuses essentially on the way in which the principles governing transparency and participation have been formulated and, more importantly, put into practice, in order to examine what they mean in terms of democracy. It then looks at the question of whether a set of democratic principles of European administration really exists.