L’Europe d’après sera citoyenne (ou elle ne sera pas)
Alberto Alemanno is Jean Monnet Professor of EU Law at HEC Paris and the Founder of The Good Lobby.
The European response to COVID-19 has revealed a tragic flaw: the gap existing between our interdependent, European lives and our respective siloed national political systems. The ensuing lack of coordination among European countries has left nations short of crucial medical equipment. This eventually costed lives. As such, the COVID-19 pandemic is set to go down in Europe’s history as a major catalyst for more – and a different kind of – integration. By rendering dramatically visible the costs of a clumsy response to the spread of the virus, the pandemic has unveiled - more than any other crisis before – several other major flaws of our incomplete union. Some of them seem to have been promptly addressed.
After displaying a slow, uncoordinated response to the sanitary crisis, the EU is rapidly moving towards the creation of a European Health Union, entailing the transfer of national competences to the union. When it comes to the COVID-induced financial crisis, the EU has responded with a major recovery plan, by quadrupling its annual budget and financing it through new EU-based taxes, such a digital, a plastic or even single-market access tax. This may ultimately address the inherent contradiction of having an almost complete monetary union and a weak fiscal union.
These are taboo-breaking developments that occurred in record-time.
Yet behind the health and financial crisis caused by COVID-19 lies a deeper and overlooked democratic emergency, which predates the pandemic, within the Union.
Europe’s “constitutional moment”
As the EU’s political influence has grown significantly on citizens’ lives, their expectation to influence EU policy and gain a say in it also expanded. However, this demand remains largely unmatched today. This mismatch between the EU impact on citizens and their respective ability to shape EU action has been further exposed by COVID-19.
Millions of Europeans have been directly affected by the lack of coordination and solidarity among European Union member states. The patchwork of national uncoordinated measures has already costed lives, and it has certainly damaged livelihoods. Not to mention the impact on the European project itself.
As such, Covid-19 has produced a unique emotionally shared experience that might potentially translate into a shared political response. In other words, the pandemic could truly prompt a long-overdue constitutional moment for Europe.
At least since 2000, there is a widespread conviction that without greater and more effective involvement from its citizens, the European Union is condemned to fail.
Yet no serious attempt has been made to address citizen demand for greater participation and integrate it into the EU day-to-day operation. If the last decade has witnessed new commitments to participatory democracy, existing channels - from public consultations, petitions to complaints to the European Citizens Initiative (ECI) - are not intended to have a direct impact on the decision-making process. Worse, while unknown to most EU citizens they are overused by corporate lobbyists. The challenge is to be able to gauge the strength of the often chaotic popular demand for direct involvement and to accommodate it within the EU’s rigid institutional framework.
This is key insofar as, unlike its member states, the EU draws its democratic legitimacy and accountability, not only from representative democracy, but also from participatory democracy. Under the former, citizens take part in the political process through their elective representatives—the European Parliament and the governments gathering in the Council—whereas under the latter, citizens participate directly via a multitude of channels of participation.
EU’s future largely depends its ability to devise a mechanism that is capable of capturing the most relevant of citizens’ proposals and turning that into a permanent channel to feed into EU decision-making. For this to occur, the EU does not need a large-scale, standalone and pre-cooked exercise – such as the propose ‘Conference on the Future of Europe’ –, but it should instead set up an accessible, permanent and safe space in which citizens, from all corners of Europe, can regularly engage with EU decision-making and their elected representatives.
Time for participatory democracy to steer the Union
Time has come for the EU needs to draw from alternative, unconventional forms of participation. There are dozens of democratic innovations already taking shape across the continent. Those include citizens’ assemblies, such as the Irish citizens’ Constitutional Convention, which reviewed the constitution, the Ostbelgien Citizens’ Council in the German-speaking community in eastern Belgium – a permanent mechanism and the first of its kind, letting randomly chosen ordinary citizens take part with parliamentarians in developing recommendations for the local parliament.
They also include citizens’ initiatives, citizen lobbying as well as regulatory gaming. These democratic innovations are emerging from the bottom-up across the continent and getting traction at local, national and EU level in a new era powered by technology.
These alternative models being complementary and not antagonistic to representative democracy may be capable of channeling citizens’ pluralistic and increasingly chaotic input into the political conversation. They may also contribute to bring citizens closer to their representatives—and they may be able to do this between elections and across countries.
Yet this might not suffice.
Making participatory democracy everyone’s reality
To unleash EU participatory democracy entails breaking the agenda-setting monopoly enjoyed by the European institutional apparatus, notably the European Commission and the European Council. It involves supporting unorganized citizens and facilitating their access to participatory opportunities within and outside EU channels. These avenues should also trigger a feedback loop so as to guarantee that input from citizens and grassroots organizations be considered in tangible ways within EU decisionmaking.
To thrive, this streamlined and revamped participatory framework will require a set of positive, supportive measures to level the playing field with other interests so as to build a pan-European civic grid. That is an infrastructure for local and transnational citizen engagement. To improve civic literacy and build civic capacity, citizens must benefit from a range of supportive actions, such as:
civic time off, enabling citizens in their working time to focus on civic engagement beyond voting;
citizen lobbying aid, a form of advocacy assistance modeled on the system of legal aid;
opening up parliamentary research services—such as the European Parliament Research Service—to grassroots campaigners in need of advocacy advice;
skill-sharing advocacy platforms, such as the Good Lobby, which provide legal and advocacy pro bono support to citizens, grassroots groups, and NGOs; and
lobbying stimuli, enabling citizens to receive tax breaks or subsidies to let them support the causes they deeply care about.
In sum, the EU needs to increase access and multiply the opportunities for citizens to participate in problem-solving. To this purpose, public input must be allowed during the entire policy process, from agenda setting through to monitoring and evaluation of existing policies. While there exists embryonic forms of citizen participation at virtually every stage of the policy cycle, they remain unknown, scattered, and underused by average European citizens.
Given the complexity of the EU institutional apparatus, it is unrealistic to expect EU citizens to understand it and be fluent in its workings before they have a chance to voice their opinions. Therefore, any meaningful attempt to make participatory democracy work in Europe requires drastically simplifying the institutional operations in the eyes of the public. Yet doing so does not necessarily entail embarking on complex institutional reforms. A new EU participatory agenda could instead be established through inter-institutional decisionmaking to re-discover, re-imagine existing avenues of participation and amplify their collective power.
While this participatory framework would not magically fix the European accountability deficit, it may compensate by making the system responsive to citizen-driven issues and eventually making the system more intelligible and accessible to the many. More immediately, its implementation would mark a change in the EU institutional attitude toward the role of citizens in the union.
Europe’s future is now
The clock is ticking: either the EU institutions and its Member States provide meaningful participatory, user-friendly opportunities to their citizens or the EU as it exists now could soon all be over. There is no better incentive for current and future EU political leaders than to be forced to listen their electorate through a pan-European, informal framework animated by citizens.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the way to solve the challenges of the twenty-first century, as nations across the world become more interconnected, is by involving the people in shaping the policies that affect their lives.
Europe could and should become a leader in promoting and realizing such a citizen-driven model of governance to renew itself and set the standard for other nations, notably its own member states.