Perceptions and Practicalities of a Standing European Citizens’ Assembly
Anthony Zacharzewski (Democratic Society)
In this response to Kalypso Nicolaidis’ article, I want to focus on two issues that have not yet been extensively considered in this series – the political and the practical aspects. I also acknowledge the depth and value of other authors’ contributions; as a late contributor I have benefited much from reading them.
By way of background, I have worked for Democratic Society on participation and governance since 2010 and have run and designed numerous deliberative democracy events. Before that, I spent fourteen years in national and local government, and I have been active in a political party for over twenty-five years. I therefore bring several different angles to the politics of participation, and specifically to a standing European Citizen Assembly (ECA).
There is much to like in Nicolaidis’ proposals. I am a supporter of deliberative democracy as a complement to representation, not a replacement, and while (like Kristina Lafont and Nadia Urbinati) I think the division of responsibilities needs to be clear, I believe that it is not difficult to devise terms of reference for a deliberative process that runs alongside and feeds into traditional legislative activity (as is imagined for the ECA).
I also support Nicolaidis’ call for continuity, in this case, by building a standing ECA. At every level of participatory practice, it is widely understood that we need to use our work to build long-term democratic instruments rather than single events, as the issues we face in Europe and the world surpass any political cycle. A standing assembly (at any level) helps to meet that need. However, I think that the politics of an isolated ECA may be more difficult than Nicolaidis expects.
Media reporting: between invisibility and inaccuracy
Whatever the systemic arguments for change, political understanding must always start from the individual citizen. Does an initiative enhance or at least not decrease any given citizen’s sense of power or agency? Does it give them greater confidence in the systems that govern them?
Nicolaidis argues that an ECA would enhance a citizen’s sense of ownership of the European political space, but I would argue that this depends on trust in the new ECA and the process that cannot be assumed. Even if they had heard of it at all, there would be a risk of it being a negative rather than a positive impact for citizens’ sense of democratic agency.
The heart of the issue is representation. Given the number of citizens in Europe, and the ECA selecting each year six hundred citizens, the average European would have to live ten thousand lifetimes to be selected once, and perhaps a hundred lifetimes even to receive an invitation.
Nicolaidis’ argument is that this risk can be mitigated, in part by the “roaming” nature of the ECA, giving it a more media-friendly story and a higher profile, in part by the process itself being an education in sortition.
I find it hard to imagine that public media that barely covered the Conference on the Future of Europe will do more for an ECA, even in instances where a meeting is taking place in a particular place. Editors seek stories that have a clear link to readers’ interests, and since their readers can have no concrete impact on the ECA and the issues under deliberation are likely to be abstract, I suspect that coverage would be minimal. This may be a blessing in disguise, as I think it more likely that coverage would be skewed against the ECA than towards it. This is not just because editors prefer bad news to good and scandal to democratic innovation, as Brett Hennig suggests. Two aspects of the ECA risk providing a hook for negative stories.
Nicolaidis says that the ECA would be drawn from willing participants, with attitudinal questions being used to prevent a repeat of the attitudinal skew seen in the Conference on the Future of Europe. Even with that, the participants are by definition those who want to make a significant commitment of time to discussing European issues, and so are at least to some degree unrepresentative. It is not hard to imagine the caricature that they are “hand-picked Europhiles”. This framing would, of course, be deeply unfair both to the intention and the reality of the ECA, but we must take public media as they are, we cannot assume fair framing and serious enquiry. More generally, the media would likely emphasise edge views and differences rather than fairly reporting the selection logic and process or telling balanced stories about individual participants.
The legitimacy challenge: Who selects the questions?
Second, the more binding power the ECA has, the more it will face the accusation that it is an undemocratic or anti-democratic – a small group taking power away from ordinary citizens (an argument with which some contributors to this series would agree). The lightning-strike odds of selection will be highlighted, and a comparison will be drawn with the regularity of participation in electoral cycles. Unfamiliarity and pervasive distrust make this darker reading likely, at least in a significant part of the population and, as suggested in the previous section, a fair public understanding of sortition is unlikely to be brought about by the public media.
A post-ECA referendum (suggested by Nicolaidis) addresses but does not solve this problem. Referendums are popular democratic instruments (more than they deserve to be), but from a democratic perspective, the problem remains: The referendum questions have been selected from all other possible policy issues that could have been put to a vote. The choice of the question is itself a decision which would be taken by an unaccountable group.
This is to leave aside the huge questions of how a Europe-wide referendum would be organised, what the threshold and criteria for victory would be, and how effectively binding it would be. It is notable that the oft-cited Irish example had a parliamentary stage between the citizen assembly and referendum, and in Ireland the rules for constitutional referendums are widely accepted and understood.
On political grounds, therefore, I would argue that an ECA should be consultative, and that its organisers need to devise better approaches for publicising it than relying on media coverage. The scale of the challenge this opens up – building understanding of deliberative processes using a remote under-reported process dealing with European policy – leads naturally to my second point: practicality.
Not running before we can crawl: ECA as the goal, not the starting point
On practical grounds I would argue that the ECA should be seen as a goal, not the starting point in the creation of a European infrastructure for democracy which Nicolaidis and I agree is needed.
Nicolaidis’ own description of the horizontality of European politics and her demoicratic theory acknowledges the need for a governance system that reflects the lives of multiple, overlapping ‘citizenships’ that each of us inhabits. Such a demoicratic approach needs to rest on a broader public understanding of deliberation, informed by practices at local scale, and needs to be actively supported by a network of organisations that extends across the continent.
However, in starting with an ECA, we are jumping to the end of a long process. No clear-eyed observer would say that participatory and deliberative processes were widely understood or widely embedded in governance at local and national level, even in the most advanced regions.
The problem of fragmentation and underfunding in the sector is well known. Trained facilitators are hard to come by, particularly those with experience of large-scale processes and working in multi-lingual environments.
Various network-building and capacity-building initiatives are currently underway, for example, the Networks for Democracy project, in which both my own organisation and the Democratic Odyssey are members. There are also numerous organisations supporting democratic innovation and participation at the local level. For all their good work, years or decades of work lie ahead to build the civic trust and structures on which deliberative democracy and sortition at the European scale will depend.
An ECA under current conditions risks skimming across the surface of Europe’s democracy without having an impact and potentially creating more political disillusionment than it overcomes. In five or ten years, we can hope that it will be able to be supported by multiple structures of multi-level democracy and collective policy making, and a democratic culture at citizen level that has built citizen trust in deliberative processes from regular local experience.
Focusing on building that infrastructure and practice will also create some of the practical elements that a successful ECA will need – multi-lingual networks of facilitators and independent guarantors, groups of independent experts and experts-by-experience to share their stories, and a set of connected digital environments to ensure that the ECA can be actively transparent as it is happening, using the networks established for trusted and local national processes as its underpinning infrastructure.
Finally, longer and deeper experience will build the robustness of processes in the sector, which needs to be improved before big issues are handled through continental-scale deliberation. The absence of a standardised process for the working groups of the Conference on the Future of Europe plenary is just one example of where deliberative initiatives fall short of the predictability, transparency and accountability that any effective parliament would take for granted.
I do not believe we should rule out a standing ECA on principle, but we should create it with a cautious approach, aiming to build the right conditions first (including through piloting and other initiatives). I believe, like Nicolaidis, that a standing citizen body deliberating alongside MEPs and the other European institutions could provide a valuable source of ideas and a sounding board for proposals, as long as the powers and responsibilities of such a body are well defined, and the role of deliberative democracy has broad support and understanding among the public.