by Oli Henman
Back in the European Commission for the Concluding Conference of the Plan D projects on 7-9 December - it seems that the Commission is keen to keep the follow-up process going even after the main headlines have happened.All the groups were present, including the continent-wide European Citizens' Consultations, the Notre Europe Deliberative Poll and the European Movement's Speak Up Europe. The idea this time was to draw together some conclusions from all the Plan D projects and offer an overview to be presented to the European leaders at the Council of Ministers in Lisbon.
Throughout this project the central question has been: what is a citizen of Europe?
On the way back on the Eurostar I spoke to Helen Duffett who had been invited at random to take part in the UK part of the European Citizens' Consultations and has since been invited back several times by the Commission to offer her views on what matters to citizens at the EU level.
‘"Nothing matters until it's personal" These were British actor Timothy Spall's words to explain his affinity with the ordinary, even mundane characters that he plays. Now, I write as an "ordinary character" myself; I'm not here with an NGO or in an official capacity. Earlier this year I was randomly selected to add my voice to those of hundreds of others in the European Citizens' Consultations (ECC). This was an ambitious, pan-European project, which linked simultaneous national debates in all Member States, with the agenda set by the citizens themselves.
‘How best to represent and aggregate the views of European people?' Well, that's a subject for an enjoyable debate, and one which came up many times last weekend in Brussels at the European Commission's conference: "Future of Europe - The Citizens' Agenda". This brought together organisers and participants from the Commission's six "Plan D" projects designed to stimulate democracy, dialogue and debate.
The EU is huge. Nigh on half a billion citizens, many are as far flung, ideologically, from the centre of government as they are geographically. There are many ways of "cutting the Europe cake." (apologies to our friends at the project, "Our Europe"!) The conference surprised me as it combined the results from projects which consulted both NGOs and unaffiliated citizens. NGOs represent a honeycomb structure of many small groups within bigger groups - a model for Europe, perhaps?'
The question of citizenship has been looked at from many points of view and at the final event organisers and participants were grouped together face to face; there is no average ‘ordinary citizen', instead we are all citizens in our own way, from the Commissioners to the participants.
So although the final statements may seem a bit clumsy with so many different viewpoints, the great strength is the process itself; it has indeed brought together the many smaller groups that make up Europe and allowed people to see for themselves how they might work together.
You can see the final statements here.
