To a campaigner, blogger and academic with a mixture of tech skills and a passion for transparency like Ronny Patz, Brussels – where opacity rules the day – may seem like fertile territory. 

Or is it? Patz, a communications and policy officer in Transparency International’s liaison office to the EU, questions the accuracy of the popular image of the Union as a secretive organisation far removed from its citizens and paranoid about exposing its inner workings. While many EU institutions are reticent about revealing information, others provide reams of data about their work and the policy and legislative process, he insists.

“The EU gives out more information than many governments do,” he says. “But it is inconsistent across directorates-general [of the European Commission] and institutions. There is more information, but it is less structured and there are fewer people trying to make sense of it” than in many national capitals, he suggests.

Early interests

Patz traces his interest in transparency to his youth. “I’m part of the first generation born behind the Berlin Wall but growing up without the Wall,” says Patz, who was born in 1983 and was raised near Magdeburg. In his late teens he decided to become a diplomat, and enrolled to study political science at Free University in Berlin in 2003, completing his MA in 2008.

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In the spring of 2009, Patz joined the University of Potsdam as a research and teaching assistant and later became a doctoral fellow. He spent the autumn of 2006 in Strasbourg as an intern at the German mission to the Council of Europe and was subsequently hired for three months to support the mission as Germany took over the rotating presidency of the EU’s Council of Ministers.

“That’s when I realised that I was perhaps not made to be a diplomat,” he says. “You learn so much, see so many problems working behind the scenes, but there is so little shaping that you can do.” It is only in his current job that Patz feels he has some real power to affect the issue he studies.

He started blogging as a student activist in 2004, primarily about university politics, and, soon afterwards, about the EU. In 2009, he became a co-editor of Bloggingportal.eu, which serves up blog entries from around the EU selected by volunteer editors.

The following year, he set up ‘Polscieu’ (polscieu.ideasoneurope.eu), a blog that aims to “translate between political science and political practice in EU matters”. Last year, Patz became – together with two peers – one of the first bloggers to be accredited to a meeting of the EU’s Council of Ministers.

Patz is about to submit the final draft of his PhD thesis, on information flows in EU policy-making, using the Common Fisheries Policy as a case study. In the thesis he studies around 1,000 people, and he conducted interviews with some 70 of them.

In analysing the links between them, he found a more nuanced picture of policy-making than by simply consulting an organisation chart; the committees that take decisions under the EU’s comitology system became a particular focus of concern, since they operate in almost complete obscurity.

“Civil servants often don’t feel that they are decision-makers,” he says. “But there is no difference between technocratic and political decisions. A comitology committee might deal with billions of euros and a committee of the European Parliament with thousands.”

Though he enjoys academia, Patz does not see his future there. “It is nice to blog and to do research, but in the end you need a full-blown team with expertise and some influence” to affect policy.