Europe, Autumn 2007. A few dozen members of the campaign group No More Prestiges have gathered in front of the Berlaymont, the renovated headquarters of the Commission in Brussels. They are there to hand over a legislative proposal demanding a ban on the transport of dangerous materials in single-hulled cargo ships within EU waters. The initiative committee has collected exactly 1,489,320 signatures in eighteen member states.
In mid-June 2003, the European Convention, composed of 105 representatives from twenty-eight European countries, presented its proposals for a new EU Treaty, the basis for the first European Constitution. But despite the polite applause by Brussels and member-states for its good compromise, many commentators have given the first draft constitution in history for a transnational community of states rather less than a thumbs-up. The Economist, which has long campaigned for a European Citizens Constitution, asked where the 400-article text could be binned, while conceding that it contained one or two good ideas.
According to the Hamburg-based Die Zeit, these ideas included the unexpected, last-minute insertion into the Big Book of the citizens initiative. Yes, there they are, modestly hidden in Article 46, paragraph 4 of Part I, the freshly-plucked and still not yet sun-ripened sentences:
A significant number of citizens, no less than one million, coming from a significant number of Member States, may invite the Commission to submit any appropriate proposal on matters where citizens consider that a legal act of the Union is required for the purpose of implementing this Constitution. A European law shall determine the provisions for the specific procedures and conditions required for such a citizens request.
What does it all mean? Its fairly safe to assume that these six lines will have provoked some debate only in the better-informed newspapers; they are hardly likely to have stunned readers of the tabloids. As Die Zeit correctly observed, the citizens initiative was inserted in the text unexpectedly and at the last minute and yet it is the reflection of a growing recognition on the part of leading European politicians that they simply cant do it on their own any longer.
European democracy: beyond the parliaments?
The model of democracy limited to national borders and parliamentary sovereignty has evolved over centuries, but reached its high point long ago. It is now well past its sell-by date despite still being hotly defended by people from both the right and the left in many countries, especially in relation to the EU, as the only viable form of democracy. It has been abundantly clear for decades through the European integration process, which itself questions the sole claim to power of nation-states, that the pure parliamentary model cannot work any longer. Fewer and fewer Europeans have voted in direct EU parliamentary elections since they began some twenty-five years ago.
By contrast, direct participation in substantive decision-making (in the form of initiatives and referendums) has grown in importance over this period. After forty referendums in twenty-two countries, it has almost become the norm on the question of joining the EU or the Euro. There are also a growing number of countries in which citizens can have the final, sovereign word on important questions of reform.
It is now certain that there will be referendums on the EU Constitution next year in Portugal, Spain, France, Luxembourg, Ireland and Denmark, as Dan OBrien and Daniel Keohane suggest. The issue of a referendum is still contentious in Germany, the UK, Italy and most of the new member states. But there is a good chance that here too, despite what Messrs Blair, Hain & Co would like to think, the new partnership between the rulers and the ruled will be allowed to express itself.
The road from Laeken and Ireland
The almost 300-page constitution turned out not to be as easy to read as the commissioning clients the governments of the EU member states had imagined in their courageous and famous Declaration of Laeken. At their summit meeting in December 2001, the heads of state and government had demanded an EU that was more transparent and closer to its citizens.
A strange mixture of shock and courage caused the Laeken summit to make its declaration. The courage came primarily from Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt. But the shock came from citizens the citizens of a supposedly EU-friendly country: Ireland.
There, as Paul Gillespie explained on openDemocracy, the people had said No in a referendum on 7 June 2001. They said No to the ugly horse-trading which had gone on six months before on the Côte dAzur and which had for once despite the traditional secrecy and grandiose gestures exposed the desperate inability of European leaders to tackle the question of EU reform.
Too much power often makes people forget that they have to occasionally share some of it, if they dont want to lose it all hence the Laeken Declaration. But the fact that Chirac, Berlusconi, Blair, Schröder and company were not entirely happy with the whole business was shown by the choice of president for the Convention.
In former French president Valéry Giscard dEstaing, the Laeken summit had chosen a political old-age pensioner to be the most senior founding father of a European Constitution, a man who had always felt much more at home with elitism and centralism than with such fundamental democratic values as participation and the sharing of power. At the close of its work, Luxembourgs prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker referred to Giscards Convention as the darkest of all darkrooms.
Beyond the lobbies
But the European Citizens Initiative brings a whole new dimension into European politics. Until now, well-resourced NGOs with a strong presence in the EU ghetto had the best chances of making their mark on the growing stream of directives issuing from Brussels. Such lobby activity had little to do with democracy.
So it is not surprising that it was our democracy initiatives from outside Brussels which over the last eighteen months, thanks to tireless work and conviction, finally persuaded the Convention and its presidium to put some flesh on the bones of participatory democracy. The citizens initiative will in future allow people all over Europe to present their own legislative proposals to the Commission, and will thereby help to create a European polity.
Experiences with citizens initiative rights, which already exist in several countries, send a clear message: the consequences of this royal instrument of direct democracy are mainly indirect. In Switzerland, where 100,000 citizens can demand a change to the constitution, very few citizens initiatives actually succeed at the final referendum stage.
But most of these citizen-initiated proposals set off processes of thinking and learning. They force the established political forces to engage with issues which, often for financial reasons, they had previously ignored. Whereas referendums are typically used by citizens as a brake on developments, the initiative right is used as an accelerator.
Experience also teaches that the successful use of direct involvement of citizens in decision-making depends on design. If initiation and participation thresholds are set too high, or if referendums are given only consultative status, it is not only the specific right of participation which is discredited; it is democracy itself, which cannot function without the citizens. The vague one could also say open wording of the draft text of the European Citizens Initiative is to be welcomed. The struggle now moves to the precise design of this new tool of European policy-making.
The devil is in the detail
There is no shortage of issues for the first direct initiatives: organisations concerned with environmental and traffic issues, peace or health (GMOs, for example) will want to use the mechanism. One thing is clear: for the time being, the initiative will be dependent on the goodwill of the Commission, as it is up to it to feed citizens initiatives into the legislative process by making concrete proposals.
The Commission ought to welcome and support the citizens initiative as an expression of European politics as should the European Parliament, which should also be given a role in the new initiative process. Under favourable circumstances and with the right support, the citizens initiative can help to create something neither European Parliament elections nor counter-summits can: the emergence of a transnational democratic polity.
This polity is needed when more than half of all the laws in every member state come from Brussels. But democracy needs more than modern instruments it also needs time. Not the two weeks which are allowed for the collection of signatures for an initiative in Austria, but plenty of time (up to a year) to allow an initiative group to campaign for their issue, debate it and organise the collection of signatures across Europe. Everyone interested in more European democracy must now try to make sure that new obstacles are not placed in the way of the European citizen (a title which has existed in principle since Maastricht).
Pleasures in store in Copenhagen and Budapest
I look forward, perhaps in only a few years from now, to being approached by a farmer from the South Tirol in the central station in Copenhagen and asked to sign a European Alps initiative which he and many others have launched to put heavy goods vehicles onto trains for their journey through the Alps; or to have a discussion with a Polish Catholic woman over a beer by the Danube in Budapest on an initiative to strengthen the protection of mothers in the EU for which she is collecting signatures.
That is for the future still. But it is not so very far away, if we can succeed in pushing even further open the window which the EU Convention opened ever so slightly in mid-June. For we know that the fresh air which can stream through the window into the Brussels corridors and into the coffee houses and living rooms from Palermo to Helsinki will do us all good.
