The public service

In the French tradition, behind the expression "public service" there is a strong intermingling of ideas on public service roles, tasks or missions, monopolies, public enterprises, the status or statute of public servants and the State. Here we are concerned particularly with the tasks and roles of public services, the types of organisation which carry them out, and their regulation.

Public service brings together at each level (local, regional, national) three notions:
- the guarantee of individuals' rights to access to goods and services essential for their needs, as the exercise of fundamental personal rights, and the condition of linking individuals into social life (universality, continuity of supply),
- the expression of the collective general interest, to ensure social and territorial cohesion (equality of access, supply, service and quality; the search for minimum costs, geographic cross-subsidy of tariffs, adaptability),
- an essential tool with which public powers can regulate the market, implement public policies (for example energy policy, security of supply, research and development, environmental protection, etc.), and which contributes to economic and social development - jobs, participation in local development, etc.

Thus, it can be said that public service makes the link between the individual and society; the economic, social and political; market and non-market; local, regional, national and European; and the needs of the consumer, the citizen and society.

European integration

The Europe we are considering corresponds to the integration implemented after the second world war, in particular with the Treaty of Rome in 1957, following that of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, for which the argument was basically economic, offering the prospect of a common market, then the single market, that is to say, based on free trade, competition and the market.

European integration was thus defined by three characteristics:

- a progressively supranational entity, in particular after the Single European Act 1986;

- an intrinsically legal nature (treaties and directives of direct and superior effect);

- an economic liberalism with its principles of free trade, then of free circulation (of people, goods, services and capital) and of free competition, thus making the market the principal regulator of European construction.

Nevertheless, for the founders of Europe, the economy was only a means to integration, serving a political end, of a federal type.

Therefore, the relationships and interactions between public services and the European Union spring from two developments that are closely linked: