Transparence et démocratie : analyse d'un principe de gouvernement

The PhD. I completed in political philosophy asks the following question: to what extent transparency is desirable for democracy? To what extent the conditions of a desirable transparency can help us to define a legitimate political regime? The thesis begins with the most common meaning given to political transparency: political publicity. Leaning on the discourse of the European New Public Governance, I tried to analyze the possible objects and functions of publicity. I took up then the tensions and limits of the concept. For some, secrecy is preferable to publicity when it responds to a state of political exception or when it favors the capacity of the government to take a rational decision. For others, publicity would not meet the conditions of democracy and particularly the expression of the sovereign will. Both lines are riddled with inconsistencies mostly due to the limited theories upon which they are based, namely Reason of State, the deliberative model, and the ideal of political similarity. The work then examines European Public governance discourse and it attempts to surpass these theories through the notion of inclusive transparency, where transparency relies on the participation of all actors in the decision-making process including the recursive integration of different phases and spaces in political decision-making. This model of transparency develops a « deliberative and reflexive » discussion which tries to bridge the modern ideal of rationality with the recognition of a pluralist and dynamic social space. I analyzed the characteristics of the deliberative reflexive model via the practical case of the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), a governance process designed to implement a common social and economical model within the European Union. The Open Method of Coordination (OMC) however demonstrates that the deliberative reflexive model can not be both efficient and legitimate, and that its failure relies on a problematic conception of transparency: the idea that the legitimacy of transparency is related to its hability to promote a common good through the production of a right and representative political outcome. Finally, the thesis generates principles for desirable transparency and, more largely, the criteria of a legitimate political regime on which these principles could rely on: the approach my thesis tries to give of transparency helps to radicalize the legitimacy conditions of democracy and political liberalism, and the statute that democracy could have in the absence of an epistemic justification. To this end, I began to contest the ambition that the deliberative theories sustain to constitute both a justificatory model of the political decision - the reason why a decision is supposed to be fair, moral or justified - and a legitimation model of a political regime - the reason why citizens must obey to the decisions. I tried then to define what could constitute a legitimate political regime. I defined it as the access for each citizen to a chance of same nature to assert his claim to power – such a claim understood as a capacity to form, express and impose to the social world a proposition that the citizen think desirable to be universalized to his environment. I imagined the conditions under which this definition of a legitimate political regime could be reached: a condition of expression – for which each citizen must have an equal prerogative to impose his point of view; and a condition of exit – which implies to give each citizen the possibility to quit the public discussion in order to protect his capacity to form and express his political judgment. I finally tried to apply these conditions to the particular case of political transparency.(ISP 3) -- UCL, 200