Democratisation through Europeanisation: the Case for a Permanent EU Citizens’ Assembly
Alberto Alemanno (HEC – École des Hautes Etudes Commerciales de Paris)
If European democratic theory has traditionally been a theoretical rather than a practical endeavour among scholars working in isolation, this forum breaks with these traditions. It brings together academics and practitioners around not just an idea but a tangible transnational democratic experiment: the introduction of a permanent and itinerant citizens’ assembly composed of randomly selected EU citizens and residents.
As such, this proposal cannot be judged solely against standard scholarly considerations, as most contributions do. Instead, as suggested by Sintomer’s call for ‘careful reflexive analysis’, it must be assessed according to the realities of citizens’ democratic life in the EU and against growing democratic expectations vis-à-vis the Union at a time of accelerating transformations.
This is precisely what this contribution intends to do. Rather than discussing issues related to institutional design – I have had the opportunity to present two models, one for the European Parliament and the other for the Bertelsmann Foundation, both connecting the proposed assembly with existing participatory channels –, it situates such a proposal within the wider EU democratic realities (Alemanno/Nicolaidis, 2021). It then provides a key complementary argument that has been missing in its support so far: the unique ability of a permanent citizens’ assembly to ‘Europeanise’ the politics of the EU in the current political and constitutional juncture.
The realities of EU democratic life
After seventy years of unprecedented socioeconomic integration, the EU continues to evolve through processes that largely neglect people’s participation (Patberg, 2020). It is still virtually impossible for an EU citizen or resident (Abizadeh, 2008) – let alone those living in candidate countries or other regions under EU influence – to express a desire to change the direction of the Union and hold its institutions to account. In these circumstances, citizens are deprived not only of influence at the EU level, but also of any knowledge and understanding of EU politics that would allow for popular scrutiny and effective democratic control. This deficit is by no means new.
The EU has always struggled with standard (representative) democracy due to a combination of history (Müller, 2017) and institutional design (Berman, 2019). What has changed, however, is the growing reluctance to accept fatalism about the EU’s democratic deficit (Nicolaïdis/Liebert, 2023), a catch-all term that has not only captured the attention of academics but also the imagination of the broader public, and recently that of the ubiquitous Elon Musk, and which has also driven the debate into a dead end.
If the European public has initially accepted integration, despite being ill-informed and uninterested in such developments (Hutter/Grande, 2014), that was a temporary, and potentially self-correcting status. The neo-functionalist logic underpinning EU integration predicted that “economic problem-solving was to be merely the first step towards broader and more intensive forms of union” (Lindberg, 1970). As EU issues would have penetrated the national political debate, the politicisation of the EU and the resulting controversiality of its decision-making were supposed to increase European citizens’ attention toward enhanced information and concern for the EU project. This logic was projected to lead to both “further integration” (Haas, 1958) of the Union and its ‘democratisation’ over time (Schmitter, 1969; Hix, 2006).
Fast forward to today. The politicisation of the Union has undoubtedly occurred (Kriesi, 2016), as did its further integration. However, contrary to initial predictions, these processes themselves have not triggered — or translated into — a parallel one of democratisation, which has in turn meant that its legitimating potential for EU action has not been realised (Alemanno, 2024). Why did democratisation not develop further, and what could a citizens’ assembly do about it?
Europeanisation: the missing link between politicisation and democratisation
I argue that politicisation did not produce the expected results because this process was exclusively allowed to play out within—and not across—the EU Member States’ national boundaries. EU issues got trapped within the nation state. If politicisation pushed Europe into national politics (top-down) and national politics into EU decision-making (bottom-up), those two phenomena never synchronised. This artificial distinction between the national political arena and the EU political arena has been preventing EU integration from accommodating and experimenting with new dynamics of change capable of generating new forms of political organisation and procedures and potentially transforming its underlying political order. That is what I referred to as Europeanisation, a political development that could have made Europe a more distinct, intelligible and autonomous political space (Alemanno, 2024). Such a space would allow disputes over EU decision-making processes to divide and unite people across borders, rather than being fought artificially along existing jurisdictional boundaries. This new political locus, characterised by continuous transnational interactions between actors, could help promote practices of “mutual attention, communication, perception of needs, and response in decision-making” (Bremberg et al., 2014).
When one approaches the establishment of an EU-wide citizens’ assembly from this perspective, this proposal acquires a new meaning. It may address, possibly overcome, most of the criticisms that have been moved against such an idea. Being potentially able to Europeanise, albeit at a small scale, the EU political conversation, a citizens’ assembly could nurture the emergence of a genuine and distinct EU political space, and that regardless of the scale reached (Dzankic, citing Bua, 2017), the exact division of power between the EU Parliament and the EU Citizens’ Assembly (Lafont & Urbinati) and without necessarily devaluating parliamentary processes (Seubert). As such, the establishment of a citizens’ assembly could partly make up for today’s structural shortcoming of EU democracy, including the absence of a pan-EU electoral competition inhabited by truly European Political Parties (as opposed to today’s loose federations of ideologically heterogeneous national political parties) as well as a pan-EU public sphere.
A citizens’ assembly to Europeanise EU politics
While several reform ideas aimed at democratising EU integration and its decision-making have been put forward over time – from the legal recognition of the democratic principle in the EU political order to enshrinement of citizens’ right to participate in the Union’s democratic life, not all of them carry a Europeanisation potential. This quality should be measured against their ability to resume the cumulative dynamic of integration at the political level, where it has historically never had a chance to play out (Alemanno, 2024).
This potential can in turn be inferred from the ability of reform ideas to: (i) generate cross-border political interactions about EU issues between both citizens and their representatives; (ii) bring knowledge and insights among citizens and their representatives that would otherwise not arise in national settings; (iii) connect the two electoral channels available to citizens, that of national elections selecting who represents a Member State in the Council (domestic route), and European Parliament elections (EU route), and unveil how these two arenas are inhabited by the same political actors wearing different hats; and, eventually, (iv) generate some transnational democratic legitimation, ranging from agenda-setting to a feedback loop on ongoing legislative proposals.
That’s exactly the sort of dynamic that a permanent transnational deliberative mechanism, such as the proposed citizens’ assembly, could prompt. Rather than promoting yet another ready-made model of EU democracy – be it parliamentarian, presidential or other –, an EU-wide citizens’ assembly could re-launch a process capable of generating such a model. It aims to ultimately create the conditions for EU institutions to go beyond symbolic references to democratic principles and allow both citizens and their representatives to experience – for the first time – an EU-wide political space. This democratic emancipation of the Union from the nation-state could provide a unique opportunity to acknowledge the limitations of a system and structures created without and regardless of people – not to mention future generations (Alemanno, 2023) and non-human entities (Nicolaidis, Sintomer) –, and ultimately to bring the democratic question to the forefront. A permanent EU-wide citizens’ assembly could free the EU from the model of the nation state as the exclusive source of inspiration for the democratisation of the Union, thereby – perhaps for the first time – creating space for the EU’s democratic self-expression.
From such a perspective, Europeanisation could be seen as a prerequisite for any genuine attempt at democratising the ever-evolving Union. A permanent EU-wide citizens’ assembly could free the EU from the model of the nation state as the exclusive source of inspiration for the democratisation of the Union, thereby – perhaps for the first time – creating space for the EU’s democratic self-expression. It responds to the recent call to move away from the traditional nation state-based model, in which the EU either becomes more state-like or will not democratise, to a broader process aimed at “rescaling of power, function and authority” (Keating, 2021). According to the latter perspective, democratising the EU through a citizens’ assembly “involves much more than restoring the classic model of polity in which demos, sovereignty, representation, and functional capacity coexist within the same territorial boundaries, whether of the European Union, its Member States or new secessionist polities” (Keating, 2021). This perspective responds to the concern of a possible zero-sum game between participation and representation, and more specifically between the citizens’ assembly and the EU Parliament (Lafont & Urbinati).
Europeanisation may simultaneously prompt several different types of processes of change that, instead of coming from the nation state, remain to be imagined. The lack of Europeanisation of EU politics is probably one of the most important and hitherto overlooked reasons for the EU’s democratic malaise. It not only denies citizens the right to participate in the democratic life of the Union but also deprives it of legitimacy when it needs it most.
For many, transforming a Union of demographically and economically heterogeneous states into an emerging political space may seem unrealistic. Yet, while the lack of genuine democratic capacity has accompanied EU integration from the very beginning, this problem is only set to deepen. Amid the continent’s epochal transformations, the EU is expected to gain—not lose—power, thus increasing its influence over citizens without offering them a corresponding expansion of democratic capacity and opportunities. As the relationship between the influence of the EU on Member States and the ability of citizens to hold policymakers accountable is set to grow increasingly asymmetrical, the costs of non-democratisation may undermine its viability and survival.
This begs, however, the question of why national leaders who have thus far resisted calls for any significant institutional reform would eventually give in. Ultimately, the proposed ‘democratisation-through-Europeanisation’ represents a dual threat to the national political class: to lose power both at home and in the EU. As Jan Zielonka presciently predicted a few years ago, “unless there are some powerful external shocks forcing dramatic changes, a spectacle of false pretentions can continue for a long time”. It is no exaggeration to argue that those shocks are now in full swing. Amid the continent’s epochal transformations, the EU is expected to gain—not lose—power (de Vos, 2024), thus increasing its influence over its citizens without offering them a corresponding expansion of democratic opportunities. Meanwhile, according to recent polls, over 70% of Europeans expect more regular and meaningful engagement with EU-level governance (Conference on the Future of Europe, Report on the final outcome, 2022). While this does not suggest growing support for the Union, which remains static (Eurobarometer, 2023), it does indicate a growing awareness of the extent to which decision-making at supranational – rather than national – level affects people’s life chances (Alemanno, 2021). In these newly created circumstances, both the case for the democratisation of the EU and its timing might be unusually ripe. A political window of opportunity is opening, imposed by unfolding events within and outside the Union, from the war in Ukraine and the prospect of a new invasion – this time of EU territory – to the inevitable eastward expansion of the EU.
A permanent deliberative mechanism seems very well suited to re-launch the cumulative dynamics of integration by Europeanising both the EU electoral competition and party system. This could ultimately blur the artificial boundaries between the national and EU political arenas that currently hold the EU back, thus contributing to the emergence of a distinct EU-wide political order at a time when the Union and its citizens need it the most.