The Green Paper on the modernization of public procurement policy of the EU: Towards a socially-concerned market or towards a market-oriented society?
Keywords:
Public procurement, Green Paper, free competition, horizontal policies, economistic rationale, Contratación pública, Libro verde, libre competencia, políticas horizontales, enfoque economicistaAbstract
The Green Paper on the modernization of public procurement policy of the European Union launched a reflection on how such EU rules can contribute to fulfill the objectives proposed in the Europe 2020 strategy. This paper analyzes its proposals and identifies its inconsistencies. In particular, it is stressed how European integration has subverted the order of priorities in public procurement rules, upgrading the promotion of the free market to the top of the list. An economistic approach to the legal issue of public procurement seems to be the reason behind such reorganization of priorities. The conflict between political and economic rationalities, which underlies the Green Paper, gives rise to a number of questions, such as how targets other than free competition –mainly the social and environmental ones– shall be taken into account in public procurement; as well as to some proposals, for instance concerning the joint procurement by different administrations (in both the vertical and horizontal sense, and even encouraging a cross-border component), which seems to point to a reorganization of bureaucracy according to economic rationality. The paper, in a final step, aims at describing the (European) social model that implicitly underlies these proposals.
El Libro Verde sobre la modernización de la política de contratación pública de la Unión Europea propone una reflexión acerca de qué modo las normas comunitarias sobre la materia pueden contribuir a hacer realidad los objetivos propuestos en la estrategia Europa 2020. En este trabajo se analizan las propuestas recogidas en el Libro Verde y se identifican sus incoherencias. En particular se hace hincapié en cómo el proceso de integración europea ha alterado el orden de prioridades de las normas de contratación pública, elevando la promoción del libre mercado a la cúspide de las mismas. La razón de esa reorganización de prioridades parece radicar en la aplicación de un enfoque economicista a la cuestión jurídica de la contratación pública. El conflicto entre las racionalidades económica y política, que también subyace en el Libro Verde, da lugar a una serie de preguntas tales como cómo deben ser tenidos en cuenta objetivos distintos a la libre competencia (fundamentalmente los sociales y medioambientales) en los procedimientos de contratación pública, así como a algunas propuestas, por ejemplo referidas a la contratación conjunta por varias administraciones (tanto en sentido horizontal como vertical, e incluso fomentándose el componente transfronterizo), lo que parece apuntar a la reorganización del aparato administrativo conforme a la racionalidad económica. El trabajo, en último término, pretende describir el modelo social (europeo) que tácitamente implican estas propuestas.
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