The Green Paper on the modernization of public procurement policy of the EU: Towards a socially-concerned market or towards a market-oriented society?

The recent Green Paper on the modernization of public procurement policy of the European Union launches a reflection on how such EU rules can contribute to fulfill the objectives proposed in the Europe 2020 strategy. In this paper, the new way of dealing with contractual relationships between public and private actors will be analyzed, paying particular attention to the priorities and main interests of public procurement rules; the way targets other than free competition –mainly the social and environmental ones– are considered; the proposals 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; and the (European) social model that implicitly underlies these proposals.