Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine.
For all the disparagement of Europe by Americans for not being innovative when it comes to technology and entrepreneurial prowess, it is, in fact, the most innovative place on the planet when it comes to governing institutions.
In the wake of the Second World War and then the Cold War, Europeans embarked on the first effort ever to peacefully integrate sovereign nations once divided against each other as enemies into a single entity — while striving to preserve the autonomy and historical diversity of its member states.
Now, just when one of the most unsettled episodes in American history kicks into high gear as the presidential election approaches, a pilot experiment of citizens’ deliberation in Europe harkens back to democracy’s founding in Athens as a way to reboot politics going forward.
Governance of the European Union is divided among several institutions. The Commission is the executive body which initiates union-wide policies. Its current president, Ursula von der Leyen, is the top policymaker and the EU’s face to the world. The Council is made up of the heads of the member states, akin to the role of a senate in federal systems. The Parliament, elected union-wide, represents local constituencies across the continent. Its role is to debate and pass legislation proposed by the Commission, codifying policy into law. But it cannot initiate legislation.
The point of the pilot project is to test out the potential of a permanent assembly of citizens institutionalized as a complement and balance to the powers-that-be in Brussels. The aim is to reduce the “democratic deficit” between those distant authorities and ordinary citizens who lack any direct voice in what many regard as an overbearing technocracy that sets the rules that govern their lives from on high.
Closing The Democratic Deficit
The anti-EU populist insurgencies in recent years, from the UK Brexit departure to the left-leaning upstart Five Star Movement in Italy, followed by the Mussolini-descendant Brothers of Italy to the far right and far left in France and Germany, has made the Commission cognizant of the widening legitimacy gap in European governance. To help mend the breach, the EU executive has sponsored “consultations” with citizens directly through a series of deliberative panels first convened across its member states as part of the Conference on the Future of Europe, tasked with charting a course ahead for the coming decades.
A key legacy of the Conference, which ended in 2022, is a commitment by the Commission to “embed deliberative democracy in EU policymaking.” Since then, a new generation of panels, composed of randomly selected citizens in groups of 150, have been held to address topics such as “tackling hatred in society,” energy efficiency and food waste. The sum of the panels’ sentiments and recommendations will be taken into consideration by the Commission when formulating policies.
Bottom-Up And Top-Down Citizen Engagement
The next step beyond these periodic assemblies convened at the Commission’s behest would be the aforementioned permanent citizens’ assembly, formally established as a core pillar within the ecosystem of the EU’s governing apparatus.
The project to concretely flesh out this idea, called Democratic Odyssey, is a collaborative and decentralized endeavor led by the European University Institute’s School of Transnational Governance located in Fiesole, just outside Florence. As part of its democratic innovation program, the Berggruen Institute has provided major support to this effort.
The top three objectives of Democratic Odyssey are to:
- Design a blueprint for a Standing Peoples’ Assembly for Europe composed of randomly selected citizens across the continent on a rotational basis.
- Explore a “theory of change” through citizens’ engagement that involves not only a top-down process of consultation on Commission policies but the capacity as well to initiate action from the bottom-up.
- Conduct a pilot assembly to serve as “proof of concept” for such a vision.
Highly symbolically, the pilot assembly will take place at the end of September at the Pnyx, a hillside in central Athens near the Acropolis where, around the 5th century BC, the first popular assemblies — from which an institutionalized process of democratic self-government first emerged — were held.
Like the mythical Odysseus returning home after facing so many daunting trials as he wandered over the known world, there is no better time than now to return to a place of origins as a much-needed spur to help reinvigorate and renew the animating spirit of democracy that is today so widely troubled.
While the world holds its breath over the momentous implications of the impending American election, the path being blazed (once again) in Athens may well prove more significant for the long-term fate of democracy, wherever it is practiced.
