By Anthony Barnett in Brussels
While Jessica was down here in the hall where we are now, talking to the participants of this Citizens Consultation, I was upstairs in the session for Observers.
There were over a 120 observers, and the session was opened by Luc Tayart de Borms, who runs the King Baudouin Foundation, who inspired the whole idea. He introduced four speakers: Tony Venables, Jacki Davis, Pierangelo Isernia and the most interesting, Claus Sorensen who is the DG of Communications in the EU. What does this mean? It means that he is the Director General, i.e the Head of this section of the Commission that runs communication policy for Europe. There are about a dozen DGs who run the EU as a whole. Jessica thinks it is quite a good job, but she is not asking for it herself (yet).
Sorensen is an engaging Dane who is wearing a bright green shirt. He promised that he would deliver a synthesis of this citizens process to a meeting the European commissioners in June. He said that the process is not being designed to circumvent representative democracy, but an addition to it. Like other speakers, he emphasized that this is a great experiment.
At the moment, two hundreds regular people, 8 from each of the 25 countries of the EU, have come here to set an agenda of what they think are the most important topics for the future of Europe. This agenda will then go to deliberative meetings of citizens in each of the 25 nations. The results of these discussions will come back to a meeting here in the capital of Europe where another session like this weekend¹s will arrive at a synthesis. So the results that Mr Sorensen will be communicating to the leaders of Europe will have come from a cross-sample of the people themselves.
Expensive? You¹re telling me. The Commission has just put up 1.9 million euros to make it happen, but that is the price of a many nationed beast deliberating.
