I sneaked out of the office this evening for an hour and went to Scotland House for the launch of the third edition of Justin Greenwood’s Interest Representation in the European Union. As a former Professor at the College of Europe, I still see the author as a colleague, but I did not only go to the launch for academic reasons. In professional terms, what Justin and his guest speaker, European Commission Vice-President Marius Sefcovic, had to say was of great interest to me, particularly in the unfamiliar use of terms, such as ‘participatory democracy’, with which I am perhaps over-familiar. Justin, for example, spoke about the evolution from ‘lobbying’ to ‘participatory democracy’, with ‘representational organisations as democratisation agents’, a ‘ teeming population playing the game of checks and balances’. His vision was of ‘participatory democracy based upon interest organisations’. This different perspective – mine, for obvious reasons, is habitually institutional and structural – was a welcome reminder that there are others out there who are also trying to flesh out the somewhat amorphous concept of participatory democracy as it ultimately emerged in the Lisbon Treaty. Sefocvic, meanwhile, put great emphasis on the transparency initiative. Concurring with him, Justin pointed out that the simple change in nomenclature, from the vaguely commercial ‘interest representation’ to the more positively normative ‘transparency’, had in itself done much to change the culture of representation and lobbying in Brussels.