Connecting to publics: challenges and possibilities for the European Citizens’ Assembly
Melisa Ross (Universität Bremen) and Andrea Felicetti (Università degli Studi di Padova)
The debate on the introduction, precise design, and function of a European Citizens’ Assembly (ECA) is not merely an academic exercise. In a few years, theoretical reflections on multinational and multilingual deliberation have become concrete proposals embodied in campaigns like Citizens Take over Europe and the Democratic Odyssey. Direct citizen engagement in European governance has been proven feasible by the European Citizens’ Panels and the Conference on the Future of Europe. Most importantly, the European Union and European practitioners may be in an unparalleled and privileged position to effectively advance such a democratic experiment.
Nicolaïdis’ proposal for such an ECA is ambitious, multifaceted, and meticulously articulated. We, too, see the introduction of deliberative and democratic bodies as an important means to reinforce democracy, including in the EU. This debate is thus both timely and necessary. Contributions so far have focused on the composition, selection mechanisms, and legitimacy of the citizen body (Seubert, Bellamy, Sintomer) and on the connection – or what we have called ‘docking’ in previous research – between an ECA and existing European institutions, such as the European Parliament and the European Commission (Dzankic, Lafont and Urbinati).
Our intervention instead foregrounds a less explored aspect, namely the relationship between the ECA and the diverse publics that make up the European space, thinking in particular about existing organised sectors, such as civil society and social movements.
Transnational publics, plural
Nicolaïdis points to the centrality of the ECA’s relationship with the public sphere throughout her initial contribution to this debate, referring to the current fragmentation of the European public sphere. Following Nancy Fraser, we would go further and instead think of transnational public spheres in the plural. In the European space, these public spheres are articulated at the national level, and/or along linguistic lines, and then further fragmented within these spaces. This presents specific challenges. For example, Nicolaïdis states that in the ECA, ‘a German worker or a Latvian teacher can feel closer to respectively a Spanish worker or an Irish teacher than to their co-nationals’. This is a great quality of citizens’ assemblies. However, outside of that assembly, a German worker will be part of public spheres overwhelmingly made of fellow Germans. Though European publics are finding new ways to connect across countries, national borders and languages remain a real barrier to the construction of transnational public spheres.
The implication is that, while the ECA recreates a truly European (mini-)public, the effective publics where transnational issues are debated remain national, and even (hyper)local. The assembly member will have an exceptional opportunity to participate in a miniature transnational public sphere for a time, but their fellow countrypeople will not. This brings back the issue raised by Jelena Dzankic, namely, ‘How would the ECA engage with the place and the people that host it at different points, and what would be the essence of this exchange?’.
From our perspective, the broader question at hand is how the ECA can foster connections between and across different European publics and their demoi (Bauböck, Oleart) beyond the still very few selected assembly members.
From Issue Salience to Issue Ownership
We agree with Nicolaïdis that fostering the relationship with public spheres is key to avoiding that the ECA becomes a form of co-optation and ‘citizen-washing’. We think, however, some of the offered solutions deserve greater scrutiny. The idea that ‘choosing topics with high political salience’ could lead to more agonistic engagement, foster constructive disagreement, and, in so doing, create more public attention to the issues at hand is a case in point. It seems unwarranted to expect that issue salience alone will earn the support of already mobilised civil society and social movements already active in the respective policy space.
Public sphere actors are generally strategic actors, not unlike other political agents. Some might have an interest in transforming existing institutions in more deliberative directions. Others might not. High stakes might exacerbate other logics in actors’ behaviour than deliberation, including among civil society actors. In turn, less pressing issues might be irrelevant enough for publics and their actors to disregard the process altogether. So, choosing topics is an uphill struggle, regardless of salience.
Moreover, public sphere actors are a very mixed set of actors, and so the ECA is bound to leave some publics unhappy. Take social movements. They are capable of deliberating and favouring societal deliberation. Yet, they are informal networks with a distinct collective identity and involved in conflictual relations. This is quite at odds with the procedural buy-in required by mini-publics. We agree with Nicolaidis that if the ECA were just a consultative body, its democratic effectiveness would be limited. Something ‘actionable’ would be desirable, as Daniel Freund explains, and connecting the ECA in some ways to referendums or initiatives seems promising, according to many, including Rainer Bauböck. However, if it were to make decisions, more challengers may rise, as Urbinati and Lafont argue. This may be the case with organised sectors that have ‘ownership’ of a policy issue, such as climate policy, and all the more so if the ECA’s recommendations are not in line with their advocated outcomes.
In such context, Nicolaïdis is rightly wary of the risk that an ECA might be perceived as an agent of disintermediation. She proposes, therefore, that this body should be part of an ‘ecosystem of connected spaces of direct democracy which the ECA could help support and interconnect’. This is crucial because it implies that the ECA should ultimately be grounded in public spheres, not just attached to institutions. However, it is not for the ECA to decide how it will be received by others. It is to be hoped that an ECA does not fail ‘to engage with [organised civil society’s] own campaigns, movements, and civic dialogue’. How this is to be attained is thus central to the proposal. The following section outlines some considerations in this regard.
Bridging across publics
Demoicratic theory, as formulated by Nicolaïdis and others, maintains that the European Union’s mandate rests on ‘a polity of multiple distinct but interdependent peoples committed to the ‘mutual opening’ of their respective democracies’. Considering the challenges listed above, how can that ‘mutual opening’ take place, exactly?
Concretely, we see potential for an ECA to contribute to existing European governance by informing institutional and public debate with the granularity of experiences as directly expressed by individuals and felt by their communities, harnessing the assembly for ‘deliberation-making’ rather than decision making, as proposed by Simon Niemeyer. This can take place in two directions: by bringing the plurality of lived experience across European communities to European institutions and by creating bridges across those communities. Let’s take a look at each possibility.
The first implies harnessing the richness of deliberation in an ECA ‘vertically’ to inform debates in European institutions. For example, thinking about ‘how to systematise discussions from thousands of citizens across languages and cultures’, Iñaki Goñi proposes that citizen contributions can indeed complement debates on highly complex, science-based policy debates. He advocates for spotlighting little data along with the big data that informs decision-making arenas. Such an approach foregrounds contributions from ‘everyday people’ that can shed light on how global issues concretely affect communities. In the realm of climate policy, the Global Assembly has shown how stories that emerge in deliberative forums can powerfully illustrate the stakes in transnational governance, such as the cost of inaction for peripheral communities that will bear the brunt of too-slow climate policy or the epistemic transformation in communities once they’re granted access to climate education.
This is the added value of iterative, localised deliberation: it makes policy debates tangible. Yet, informing debates at transnational institutions with local stories may move listeners but may not suffice to counter power-holders. Even when building vertical strategies, the ECA will continue to grapple with the limit of who gets a seat at the table, namely those select few who are drawn from the civic lottery to join the assembly, as rightly pointed out by Cristina Lafont.
The second possibility is that an ECA can advance the horizontal connection among European demoi and across multi-level publics. As highlighted by Álvaro Oleart in this debate, transnational social movements have long created strategies to both ground structural problems in and inform transnational strategy with the experience of local communities. An ECA can draw inspiration from them. In the realm of climate governance, Nicole Curato suggests that global climate assemblies can connect ‘deliberations of everyday citizens from around the world on climate action’. The infrastructure of citizens’ assemblies can help create bridges among the lived experience of the policy problem at hand, but also of resilience and affect despite differences in context. Similarly, recent research led by Lucas Veloso suggests that existing citizens’ assemblies often represent a ‘missed opportunity’ in terms of connecting deliberations with existing, ongoing mechanisms for participation, community leaders and movements, and mobilised civil society already active in the policy field at hand.
Where assemblies are ad-hoc, their potential connection to those existing mechanisms for advocacy and community mobilisation may create the otherwise missing bridge with the so-called ‘maxi public’. This form of intermediation may be undesirable from the perspective of those already mobilised public actors, especially those who claim issue ownership, as argued above. But an ECA could present itself as an opportunity for networking those actors across publics, potentially opening up spaces for alliances rather than confrontation.
The cost of experimentation
Procedural questions regarding how an ECA should be run, with how many participants, from what kinds of pools, and in what precise function with regard to existing institutions are all questions that can be tackled from existing experience with citizens’ assemblies across Europe or from expansive imagination, as suggested by Graham Smith and David Owen. But consequentiality and impact remain one of the thorniest questions in democratic innovations in general, and increasingly with deliberative forums in particular. Proposers of an ECA must then clearly articulate the advantages of an ECA in Europe-wide policies and polities.
While there is broad support for citizens’ assemblies within certain communities of inquiry and practice, this does not necessarily translate to the wider society, as highlighted by Anthony Zacharzewski in this debate. Citizens’ assemblies are often targeted by critics because they are high-cost, low-stakes processes. They demand significant financial and organisational resources to mobilise relatively few citizens for a short period of time. Intense epistemic, emotional, and political labour is demanded of assembly members to produce recommendations that, more often than not, fail to find their way into political decision-making. Nicolaïdis does not shy away from also listing technocratic deliberation at the EU level as a pitfall; similar problems are found at national and local levels too. Moreover, given the contemporary political climate worldwide, one must consider that the relationship with public spheres would have to be nurtured in contexts that might be less than amenable to deliberative democracy’s premises and core values.
Inspiring cases are often paid attention to in the media, as was the case with the Irish Assembly or Extinction Rebellion’s endorsement of Citizens’ Assemblies. Yet, these experiments coexist with a much larger set of cases with very limited impact that, taken together and over time, can wear out activists and supporters, and easily move out of the news cycle. We agree these are useful learning experiences, but they might come at a price. We are not so free to experiment if this is more than an academic exercise, as it is. See, for instance, Extinction Rebellion’s withdrawal from Scotland’s Climate Assembly, given the assembly’s narrow scope. The more ‘failures’, the more disillusionment towards democratic innovations.
We see potential in Europe-wide, permanent deliberation infrastructure – if it can advance the connection with and among publics and meaningfully engage locally anchored actors and demands. This makes careful reflection along any strategic institutional experimentation all the more relevant.