thanks for your reply.

As you point out different member states have different cultures of and attitudes towards government secrecy and therefore possibly a different take on how transparent the Council should be.
It should be relatively easy to find support for a more transparent Council in those countries with a tradition of transparent government.
In member states with more secretive governments one would have to identify ngo-s, cso-s and campaign(er)s who work towards more transparency in their domestic political system.

So I guess what I am talking about would be a pan-European campaign played out on the national stage, with people asking their governments why they won’t let their citizens know what their ministers are up to in the Council.

Played correctly and supplemented with a couple of embarassing case studies, whistle blowers, freedom of information (or equivalent) requests I am pretty sure, this could be built into a powerful narrative which could develop an interesting momentum of its own.

What do you think?

While some member states might even opt for more transparency, other political cultures prefer working behind the scenes and defining the Council as a diplomatic organisation – or bureaucratic body at best – that isn’t supposed to work in public.

And if you pledge for more transparency like I did in this recent post, you get the standard counterarguments against transparency from those who think they will lose as soon as the system starts getting transparent.

But in any case: Whom to address to demand a more transparent Council – especially considering that even with Lisbon we will keep a rotating Council presidency next to the permanent President of the European Council who will rather not be the one promoting this kind of change…