Rejoinder: A Permanent Citizens’ Assembly is not a Magic Wand for Europe. But…
Kalypso Nicolaidis (European University Institute)
“We have reached a time at which we can finally get rid of the conviction common to Plato and Marx that there must be large theoretical ways of finding out how to end injustice, as opposed to small experimental ways” (Rorty, 1998)
I am extremely grateful to the 23 authors who engaged with the topic I offered for the GLOBALCIT Forum, and most importantly, also engaged with each other. I am lucky to have the last word here, an unfair feature, I admit, of the format. But I have no doubt that this is not the last word, since this symposium is meant to continue and extend a long-standing debate over the conditions and modes of renewal of our democracies.
To simplify, the commentaries, many of which my co-editor Rainer Bauböck and I have already engaged with bilaterally, range from ‘deep sceptics’, who put forth cogent arguments outlining the flaws of the proposal to ‘conditional sceptics’ who have doubts about the proposal but would consider supporting it, conditional on a number of demanding amendments that are hard to implement, to ‘conditional supporters’, who offer additional arguments in favour of the proposal but also refinements to it and, in doing so, have already done much of the work necessary for responding to critical commentators. My sense is that if they there is one theme in common to all contributions, it is that whatever its merits, an ECA will not be a magic wand, a point illustrated by Camille Dobler & Antoine Vergne’s remark that Rome was not built in a day, Anthony Zacharzewski’s advice not to run before we can crawl, or Sandra Seubert’s warning about illusionary promises.
It is worth repeating that the case at hand concerns only a specific subset of the debate, which considerably narrows down the remit of the proposal. For one, citizens’ assemblies are just one element in a panoply of democratic innovations in our time of planetary politics, or what I have discussed in a recent publication as “the third democratic transformation”. Second, we are dealing here with assemblies of the transnational rather than local or even national kind, i.e., a category with its special features which remains incredibly rare.
And thirdly, within this subset, no permanent transnational assembly actually exists anywhere at this moment, although, as I argued, such permanence offers a number of advantages which ground my defence of the proposal: continuity, independence, learning, embeddedness, publicness and social imagination. It is for this reason, I surmise, that a small coalition of actors in the European Commission and European Parliament hope to create a permanent youth assembly on biodiversity, for which a pilot assembly is now under way focused on the topic of pollinators.[1] For the same reason, the Council of Europe’s Committee on Political Affairs and Democracy and its rapporteur, George Papandreou, have penned a report and a resolution supporting the same idea (see also Bertelsmann’s report and CTOE). And it is for this reason that the Democratic Odyssey has sought to ground its campaign for a permanent European Assembly on a travelling pilot assembly, which has now met for the first time in Athens in September 2024 and from which I will continue to draw empirical insights.
It matters to this debate that I don’t defend assemblies in general but a permanent transnational assembly in Europe (and beyond, but that will be another debate). In doing so, I will come back to my original question: under what conditions can a hypothetical European Citizens’ Assembly’s (ECA) relation to the European Parliament (EP) be synergetic rather than one of either subordination or substitution? Here I will employ a kind of jujitsu method of argumentation, namely that both the negative and positive symposium commentaries on the proposal offer a range of conditions under which a permanent ECA could overcome the “false alternative between consultative powers (subordinate model) or the sovereign powers of parliaments (lottocratic model)”, in Cristina Lafont & Nadia Urbinati’s apt formulation. The core of my rejoinder, therefore, will be to consider ways of improving the proposal and suggest issues for further discussion and research.
I will engage below with the range of arguments, using the three main criteria proposed in the second section of my kickoff essay to structure my response. As the reader may recall, these are what can be considered as three standard dimensions of democratic legitimacy, namely popular sovereignty, participatory governance, and, more broadly, civic culture, which offered the grounds for debate and contestation on which the comments have built.
Popular sovereignty: Can the Assembly really claim to instantiate the people?!
Many of the authors address the “who” of the Assembly and, as such, the extent to which it can best instantiate the amorphous idea of “popular sovereignty” alongside the European Parliament – in other words, the question of input legitimacy. I find these arguments powerful but suggest that our benchmark ought to be not the opinion of the scholar but the perception of public opinion across member-states. Let’s consider a number of arguments in turn.
First, I would adopt without hesitation the brilliant amendment to the proposal by Graham Smith and David Owen that “the ECA should be really big” while meeting mostly in sub-configurations. Indeed, we have had extensive discussion on the issue of size in the context of the Democratic Odyssey assembly. Why not go higher, to 5,000 or even 10,000 for 6 months with one-third rotation? To be sure, the assembly could then not easily meet in plenary except online, but why not meet in a football stadium or a concert hall? That would certainly differentiate it from the institutional feel of the EP. In this way, a big number would certainly appeal to the social imaginary of democratic togetherness in a very different way than the EP, even if most of the time the ECA would meet in small committees. And, as Dobler and Vergne demonstrate at the end of their contribution, the costs associated with the European Parliament will continue to dwarf that of an assembly of any size.
Second and nevertheless, even reaching such a size might not alleviate the fundamental critique in several comments that citizens in a polity of 500 million would have such a tiny chance of being selected that it makes risible the idea of equal chance (Zacharzewski’s one in ten thousand lifetimes). Rainer Bauböck expresses it most forcefully: “Different from the equal right to vote, equality of probability will hardly strengthen a sense of equal and common ownership of political institutions among citizens if chances to be called to serve are infinitesimally small for each individual”.
But can’t we find ways to disentangle the statistical fact of (tiny) “equal chance” from its political import? If we are dealing with the sense of ownership by citizens, part of the answer surely lies in what I have called “the pedagogy of sortition”.
Here we must start by giving a chance to chance. There is equalizing power in chance, even if it is symbolic. To the critique “equal but tiny”, we can reply: “tiny but equal”. Most people, especially young people in Europe today, believe that they have zero chance of being elected or even being a candidate for election – at the national level, let alone at the European level. Hence, even on purely factual grounds they may see lottery as a more transparent equalizer than elections. To be sure, voting, not candidacy, is a power distributed equally and inclusively and conveys a sense of ownership linked to an active form of participation for which there is no equivalent in sortition. Moreover, candidates in elections are self-selected and picked by parties, not by citizens. Thus citizens who do not want to become MPs never ask themselves what their chances are to be picked. But the hypothesis here is that the very existence of an ECA linked to EU institutions would make citizens come to see the quality of delegation to fellow citizens as a different thing all together, both more ephemeral and closer to home than EP elections.
In short, the chance to be “picked” in the EP and the ECA may be comparable and actually compared in the eyes of citizens even if tiny in both institutions. This is why the sense of representation afforded by a permanent assembly needs to be considered in tandem with that of the EP, the existence of each compensating for the limitations of the other. This is in keeping with what Antoine Vergne refers to as the intersubjective character of sortition, which I discussed in the context of the Who is Who of the Democratic Odyssey.
But we cannot stop at chance. The pedagogy of sortition needs to address the challenge of scale head-on. We are not in ancient Athens. The probability game at 0.001% rests on a more collective idea of representativeness: the statistical representativeness of the assembly as a whole, which brings to the fore Seubert’s question as to which ascriptions are used to measure representativeness. How do we better convey such a statistical and, thus, abstract story?
In this perspective, many authors support the idea that complementarity calls for a different ground for legitimacy between the EP and an ECA. One such difference is that in this story, the perception of “equality” can fruitfully be augmented with the “inclusion opportunity” offered by an ECA or a “more than equal” chance for people hitherto left out of our politics, including that of the EP. Bauböck frames this concept differently but to the same effect, namely that of an ECA better in tune with the affected interests principle, the very intuitive idea “to offer a stronger representation of the interests of those who are not presently citizens of the Union but are deeply affected by its policies”, meaning in particular equal opportunity to be selected for all those in the EU territory regardless of their citizenship (also Alvaro Oleart, Andrea Gaiba). In short, “nothing about us without us”, the slogan of the European trade unions.
But this argument leaves us with at least two problems:
First, can MEPs recognize the fact that they would need the experimental nature of an ECA to push forward this inclusiveness frontier? But how far do we want to extend this exigency of greater inclusion of the affected to cover in time also future humans and non-humans, which seems impossible to do in the EP? As Yves Sintomer says: “Future generations and non-humans neither vote, nor authorize, defer to, or control the rulers”. Do we make up for this vast defect through membership in the Assembly or through its conduct, as I will argue in the second part of this rejoinder?
Second, should the question of who is affected stop at our territory? What about people living in candidate countries or even in countries on which EU standards apply in the social and environmental grounds through trade agreements with the EU (see Nicolaidis, 2020, 9-17). Should the ECA, therefore, also include delegates from countries outside the EU affected by its policies, as Bauböck proposes? Oleart takes the ambition of overcoming anthropocentricity and Eurocentricity a step further, arguing that the ECA can allow us to think globally and in solidarity, provided it is itself inclusive. I tend to agree that the move from transnationalism within Europe to a global scale is only a matter of degree, given the porous nature of the EU. At least unless the EU becomes a state structurally and a nation in terms of identity, this will continue to be the case. But would such a mission not risk breaking the Assembly’s back when embarked on in the first moments of its life?
While only a handful of authors (Richard Bellamy, Alberto Alemanno, Andrea Gaiba) explicitly support a demoi-cratic understanding of the EU polity, it is notable that no contributor approaches the question as if we had to deal with one European demos. Instead, we must endorse more explicitly the ideal of pluralism, i.e. the presence of a very wide range of ideas, political cultures and languages that need to better co-exist, hence the need for a greater emphasis on attitudinal and other criteria for random selection to include more non-Brussels bubble people, and among these not only euro-sceptics who are already strongly present in the EP. Can we become more creative in this regard?
I sympathise with Oleart’s suggestion that one way to ensure the involvement of actors usually left out of mainstream politics is to give a more prominent place to civil society actors and social movements in the Assembly, perhaps even through membership itself rather than presence in its meetings. This is what we have tried to do in the Democratic Odyssey with a membership quota for members (not representatives) of local and transnational NGOs randomly selected from sign-ups (see discussion here). Critics object that such membership of people with greater skills of argumentation can skew the debates of the Assembly or its representativeness. Moreover, activists might be over-represented among those who say yes. Conversely, activists are a very small proportion of society and might not make it at this first stage without some attempt at over-inclusiveness. Let us not forget that two-stage random selection is grounded on a second-stage selection process (stratification) based on some specific criteria. Why, for example, socio-economic status and not the number of languages spoken? My own belief is that the “life experience” of an activist should eventually be captured through the direct random selection process itself – as one criterion alongside, say, “level of education” (this is a kind of education, after all).
I have no doubt that this point will remain controversial. Brett Hennig also points to the potential counterproductive impact that the involvement of civil society activists might have even when they are in a position of informing the assembly rather than deciding in it.
But of course, the draw itself is not the end of the story. Beyond the (tiny) equal opportunity to be selected, Bellamy cogently notes that the inclusiveness challenge is even greater when it comes to the opportunity to accept an invitation to participate. Those who can afford to take time off from work will come. Others will not. But is this problem insurmountable? Can compensation and support, as well as eventually civic pride, not be sufficient to at least in part overcome this challenge?
With the Democratic Odyssey, we have come up with one approach to this problem by partially composing the assembly so that it reflects its travelling nature. Yes, it will have a core of “transnationals” that will have to use planes or trains to participate. But it will also pick up members in the cities that it visits, nationals as well as expats/migrants for whom participation will therefore be less onerous. This approach (and as a spillover, the “buddy system”) has already worked in Athens (September 2024) and will be sustained in spring 2025 in Florence, Vienna and Warsaw. Membership is then sustained through hybrid participation and ambassadors.
But no response is a magic wand. In particular, I did not engage in the proposal with the roots and implication of social cleavages in our societies, an issue evermore present in the shadow of the US presidential elections and the entrenchment of Trumpism. Hennig is, therefore, right to point out that while an assembly travelling from city to city sounds attractively cosmopolitan, it risks leading to a skewed overrepresentation of urban over rural areas, while Jelena Dzankic cautions us that if rural areas were to be included in the itinerary, there might not be the infrastructure in place. How can a commitment to inclusiveness better take in all relevant groups at the periphery of Europe?
The most radical critique on the composition of the assembly and the sortition process comes from contributors who propose replacing random selection with liquid democracy and creating what Chiara Valsangiacomo and Christina Isabel Zuber call a “liquid ECA” (see also Dzankic). “[A]long the lines of Alexander Guerrero‘s single-issue legislatures, it would consist of a predetermined number of independent and autonomous sub-assemblies each made up of different delegates, allowing citizens to delegate their vote differently on different issues”. I wonder, however, why they present this approach as an alternative to our ECA proposal. Liquid democracy is a proposal to “replace” traditional electoral democracy. But the more specific ‘liquid ECA” presented here is under-specified and the authors do not explain how electronic voting on issues can connect with deliberation and decrease polarization. As Gaiba argues, a liquid ECA “would broaden the scale of participation, but not necessarily that of mutual recognition across different demoi, as it forecloses trans-European meetings on-site as a central part of the ECA”. We do know, in particular from discussing with the Decidim meta-community, that participation is greatly enhanced by actual agonistic deliberation and that people engage much more thoroughly when in-person and online participation interact. This goal can only be achieved at a large scale through a plethora of decentered in-person interactions. These, in turn, can be inspired by the fact that they meet around a hub that would be our rotating ECA. Why not imagine an enlarged ECA that integrates liquid democracy? Liquids need containers, after all. The onsite meetings of the ECA would be the hook for the decentered networked social imaginaries on which more direct forms of electronic participation could be built. The rotating members of the ECA could energise a liquid participatory network by shaping the issues under consideration that would then be channelled to the network. This debating and compromise function is all the more important in that the issues in question are transnational and, therefore, subject to vastly different yardsticks. Clearly, such a combination requires further conversation.
In the end, we are still left with the question asked by Lafont and Urbinati: “Why would citizens believe that it is democratic to let a few individuals exercise unilateral power over them so long as everyone has an equal chance to do so?” There is no easy answer, but at least we can say that it does not lie only with “who” are these few people but rather what they do and how.
Democratic Governance: How should the ECA work?
This brings us to the second category of conditions, those related to throughput legitimacy and the argument from integrity. Under which conditions will people have trust in the integrity and authority of the assembly? How will they complement each other (Lafont and Urbinati)? If the ECA held co-decision-making power, how would we proceed in moments of disagreement (Valsangiacomo and Zuber)? Is it the case, as many commentators argue, that close collaboration will be easier with a clear division of labour between the EP and the ECA? Some of these hard questions can only be addressed organically and experimentally. In the next iteration of this debate, we will need to engage with the productive tensions between the commentators. Here are some of the questions (among others) that I see arising.
Decisiveness vs decisions: Powers is where we need to start. Against a prevailing sense that citizens’ assemblies will only be taken seriously once they have decision-making powers, on the whole, the commentaries here make a strong case against giving such powers to an ECA. At least not if chosen by lottery (whereas Valsangiacomo and Zuber’s liquid democracy could support such authority arising from delegation to other citizens). On my part, I did assume in the proposal that the ECA should not have sole decision-making power in an EU landscape where no single institution holds sole decision-making power, as also stated by Sintomer. But my argument was truncated to the extent that at least two of these institutions (the EP and Council) hold joint decision-making power and the Commission makes decisions all the time – and even alone – on the EU’s legislative and regulatory agenda. To be sure, a decision on a legislative agenda is, of course, not the same as deciding on legislation. The former is, to some extent, binding on legislators, the latter on citizens subjected to laws. Therefore, the question of who should have authority in decision-making is relevant to both but more democratically pregnant in the latter context.
If each of the other institutions shares in the decision-making power, at least as a veto actor, why not also the ECA? Following Lafont and Urbinati, some commentators seem to assume a tradeoff between such powers and the EP/ECA complementarity. If democracy needs more institutionalised and publicly visible deliberations about the common European good –deliberations which showcase more inclusive participation as discussed above – there may be a tradeoff between the quality of this deliberative forum and its partaking in decision-making. And there is certainly a tradeoff between the EP’s embrace of an ECA and its ringfencing of its own painstakingly acquired powers. Bauböck explicitly grounds this complementarity in a distinction between two demoi: a legislative and a deliberative one. But does the EP not also draw a great deal of its legitimacy from its role as an advocacy and debating forum in the EU? And would it not enhance its own powers if it could play a “hands-tied” strategy vis-a-vis an ECA that would provide compulsory agenda points and monitoring edicts, and to some extent, policy recommendations (even if not translated into law)? Would it not make sense for the two bodies, EP and ECA, to hold a joint power to induce the Council to act? As a visible part of the EU landscape, holding to account – the very essence of peoples’ sovereignty – could be framed as the assembly’s primary function. Its reports would be prominently advertised with an obligation of response on the part of the Council and the Commission that could become more authoritative than that of the Ombudsman alone. And such an obligation could be literally embodied by adopting Dobler & Vergne’s proposal of mixed deliberative committees through the convening power of an ECA.
Multi-functionality of the formal kind: Do we need to choose? I agree with Smith & Owen that the assembly should be multi-functional and that such multi-functionality can be structurally translated into a plethora of sub-committees. Multi-functionality is based on the changing demands for any governance structure, however ‘soft,’ and the idea that functions are synergetic. Upon reading the contributions, three formal functions (as opposed to normative or political functions to which I will return) continue to make sense. Under the right conditions, some committees can engage in concrete policy recommendations, institutionalising the role currently devolved to the Commission’s European Citizens’ Panels (ECPs), as called for by Daniel Freund. With such root existence in an ECA that is permanent yet routinely renewed, these panels will become more prominent, democratic and easier to organise. I remain convinced that probably the most important function of the ECA might very well be the power to set the agenda – the crucial power to insert agenda items not only in the EP agenda but also in the Council, as Joao Labareda argues. This is also where an EP-ECA alliance could be crucial, as it would strengthen the pressure on member states to act on issues raised by the joint body or alternatively oblige them to justify their lack of action, including due to blocking actions but specific states. Such an agenda-setting function chimes with Bellamy’s focus on “constitutional issues of principle rather than the highly technical regulatory economic policy issues”. However, it is a third “monitoring” function that has received the least attention and yet has the clearest potential to renew democracy in Europe.
“Counter-capture” institution: how do we honour the radicality of sunlight? Interestingly, the justification of citizens’ assemblies based on their “impartiality” is widespread – when combining lottery and rotation – and yet we still need to articulate what this may mean in terms of functions. Svenja Ahlhaus and Eva Schmidt speak of counter-capture, a core theme of Samuel Bagg’s powerful advocacy of sortition as anti-corruption, which has just been published as a book. But doesn’t the challenge of “capture” provide a powerful case for an experiential translation of normative claims in an era when citizens still widely remember Qatargate and similar EP corruption scandals? And, more broadly, when they distrust institutions of electoral delegation precisely because of perceived capture (or whatever equivalent term is used in the public discourse)? If it were to help alleviate these perceptions, wouldn’t an EP/ECA alliance benefit both institutions, especially if it involves publicly visible confrontations with conflicts of interest? Would the EP buy it? An ECA is apt to pursue the common good because, simply put, citizens join the Assembly on a rotational basis, meaning they do not have a political career nor party interests to defend, especially in a transnational context that is even further from their lives. They do not have enough time to be captured by special interests, lobbies, and factions and are more immune to corrupting influences than career officials or politicians. They can balance the power of lobbies and interest groups, a hope now instantiated with the creation of a youth assembly for pollinators by the EP, an assembly that we hope may counter-balance those that are hollowing out measures to protect the natural world. I would add that if the ECA could help the uncaptured viewpoints of large sways of the population to make it onto the EU agenda, this rationale will come into its own in its monitoring functions, as articulated in the recent report on the radicality of sunlight. With the ECA’s claim to be a “transparency guardian” alongside the Ombudsman office, citizens could learn to push the ECA – or some of its sub-assemblies as proposed by Smith & Owen – more in the direction of citizen oversight juries (Bagg, 2022). In this spirit, we could imagine the ECA acting as a kind of democratic backup to the independent Ombudsman office, strengthening both its credentials and the public visibility of its crucial functions.
A broad remit: Can the complementarity of the ECA to the EP also come in the shape of topics, for instance, with an ECA agenda focused on the EP agenda for thematic focus as well as institutional backing (Dzankic)? Daniel Freund’s point is well taken that learning from previous deliberative processes, agenda setting will need clear objectives, such as questions of principle in Ireland’s assembly on abortion or in France’s on social climate protection, rather than broad complex ones as in the Conference of the future of Europe (CoFoE). Yet if the Assembly meets over time in a decentralized manner, its agenda can indeed be as broad as Europe’s political agenda. I would add that we can sustain the idea of a multi-issue body while at the same time “offer an alternative imaginary to those who advocate for a permanent European Climate Assembly, or national sortition legislatures for that matter, who tend (implicitly or explicitly) to think in terms of a single body where members work together across multiple issues” (Smith & Owen), as the assembly meets not only in different committees but also in different spaces and places, hooking to topics chosen locally.
In this landscape, the critical functions Smith & Owen underline are, well, critical, in line with the goal of anti-stuckness promoted by Ahlhaus & Schmidt. I agree with Schmidt and other commentators that environmental issues are a key topical candidate, but I also believe that most issues would benefit from democratising foresight. As Labareda argues, a permanent assembly not only allows to incorporate the multiple perspectives of so-called ordinary citizens and identify paths to reconcile some of their disagreements, but it could also “challenge policy dogmas that are hard to contest and abandon, even when their shortcomings are apparent”. He points to areas of high transnational interdependencies like energy supply, migration or international security, but an assembly is precisely also the place where more hidden interdependencies and potentials for turning zero-sum games across borders into positive-sum games can best be developed.
Consensus vs Mappings: If the assembly is to go beyond a technocratic approach to policy recommendation, there must be a greater emphasis on political dilemmas, tensions, and contradictions (see House of Deep Democracy and Deep Democracy). As Bauböck argues, this may be the best strategy against disinformation and polarisation. If we want to avoid “unpolitical democracy” in an ECA, as argued by Seubert or Oleart, the space it provides needs to offer discussions on the winners and losers of a proposed policy being debated within and across countries. Perhaps paradoxically, mapping citizens’ opinions on how to address the cleavages which the assembly can embody through its stratified composition can help protect politics from the tribal or affective polarization we witness these days. If citizens are to “respect each other as equals and are willing to listen to each other, to compromise and to prioritise the common good” in a multistakeholder “cooperative space of mutual recognition and co-creation,” they cannot do so without truly getting to know each other’s grievances, thus honouring the agonistic dimension of politics. But assuaging Oleart’s warning against depoliticisation calls for a different kind of agonistics. In part by debating over the operationalisation of this amorphous thing, “the common good,” and outlining the political dilemmas that are at stake in pursuing it. Can the assembly help pursue depolarisation without depolitisation? Can it articulate disagreements in ways that overcome affective polarisation? Oleart is right to argue for the ECA to serve as a place where structural inequalities are recognised rather than papered over. This is all the more important that EU politics do not benefit from an institutionalised, let alone “loyal” opposition. Whether the transnational character of the ECA offers the opportunity to stress a “strong decolonial understanding of the underlying material structures” (Oleart) or simply reflect other frames for oppositional politics, it would fill an important hole in EU politics.
The question of accountability. Like Owen and Smith, many commentators question the legitimacy of a handful of citizens taking decisions “as they see fit” (Lafont & Urbinati, Bellamy, Freund). If the selected members are seen to help keep the political elite accountable by monitoring EU institutions, they ask, who will keep the members themselves accountable? One kind of valid answer is provided by Sintomer’s warning against idealising electoral democracy and its pseudo-accountability (“the real relations between the citizenry and the various rulers is less accountability than deference – at best when it is not indifference, distrust or anger”). Moreover, if none of the present EU institutions can make unilateral decisions and work without the scrutiny of the other institutions, why would the ECA not also be part of that larger system of feedback and control (Sintomer)? Can we not draw some solace from the astonishing alignment between citizens’ views and assembly outcomes as a kind of ex-post accountability (see e.g. the Irish referenda in the wake of the 2016-17 citizens’ assembly)? Ultimately, is the answer not grounded in the permanent nature of the assembly and its continued endorsement by public opinion?
Civic Culture: Can the ECA really reach the demos?
This brings us to what is probably the biggest challenge for an ECA, which has to do with the shape of our democracies in general, and arguments from epistemic democracy or output legitimacy. Can an alliance between the EP and ECA make a significant difference to the broader public’s democratic engagement with European affairs? To be sure, there is much scepticism on this count, which Lafont & Urbinati articulate beyond this forum in their recent book. We converge in our wariness about citizen-washing that ultimately can be seen as an institutionalised form of brain-washing: both sides collude in pretending that citizens can make a difference. This is what Gaiba refers to as assemblies’ “original sin.”
Sure, no magic wand it will be. But many commentators seem to take seriously the potential democratic impact of an ECA, the conditions under which an ECA would constitute more than a well-oiled mega focus-group. For all the progress they may represent – and we must never overlook their pioneering character – the ECPs organised by the Commission did not empower the many, but only the few. There is no doubt that we need to learn from and improve on their achievements and shortcomings regarding visibility and engagement (Bellamy). In fact, I think the sceptics overlook the transformative potential of their own critique. As a critical theorist committed to immanent critique, I suggest below some signposts for this alternative route:
Democratic Ownership: normative or empirical? The question of power raised above in terms of the functioning of the assembly becomes all the more complex as we address the question raised by Ahlhaus & Schmidt: How can the ECA “deserve” the citizens’ sense of democratic ownership? The question reminds me of our general debates on legitimacy, a central point in our Federal Vision book (Howse and Nicolaidis, 2002), where we did fall back, after much normative agonising, on empirical benchmarks. Ahlhaus & Schmidt argue that “justified” ownership calls for pursuing certain goals that can be in tension with each other: countering opacity, capture, and stuckness. I refer to these as political functions that are closely aligned with the classic rationale for CAs (e.g. inclusive representation, democratic equality, impartiality and epistemic diversity, as summarised here).[2] It is not clear to me, however, why these normative considerations would not ultimately translate into a collective experiential diagnosis: This is the beauty of the idea of a visible permanent assembly and the iterative nature of citizens’ engagement it would generate; it is also the beauty of virtual, “liquid” democracy in the era of the web. Nor is it clear to me that these are contradictory functions. Above all, we need to consider arguments in support of citizens’ assemblies but in the special context of transnationality, which tends to make them even more potent, as we argued in the Democratic Odyssey blueprint. As per Sintomer, the deployment of qualities like impartiality or epistemic diversity are arguably even more precious in the EU context.
Institutional decoupling and mediating role: In fact, even Lafont & Urbinati, sceptical as they are, articulate a vision for an ECA that, I would is close to what many CSOs supporting Democratic Odyssey’s campaign for a permanent ECA envision: a mediating role between EU institutions and the publics, an intermediary ECA that is not “directly coupled with formal political institutions”. An idea welcomed by Seubert as well as Ahlhaus & Schmidt, whereby the lack of decision-making powers, in fact, enables the capacity of such an assembly to play such a role. Indeed, this is also our assumption in the design of the Democratic Odyssey process, where we have only sought soft endorsement on the part of politicians, betting on a broader public appeal to give weight to the final recommendations. This is also the tradeoff we have assumed when designing the EP’s youth assembly on pollinators: the normative power and potential to affect Europe’s civic culture and to lower barriers to political participation simply by communicating with a public in a language that they understand.
To operationalise this vision, Hennig suggests using mass participatory “deliberate and vote” tools such as vTaiwan. In the same spirit, Lafont & Urbinati, as well as Smith & Owen, envisage “simultaneous assemblies” that would review and improve the initiatives submitted by civil society groups after gathering some low threshold of signatures” through informed and inclusive deliberation…submit them to the relevant public authorities (e.g. the EP, national parliaments, local authorities) for (mandatory) discussion and decision-making or, in the appropriate cases, to general referenda (in the relevant jurisdictions). I believe that indeed such a process ought to be central, but disagree that there is no value-added to a single core assembly acting as a hub or a focal point for review, aggregation, visibility etc. Here are points that I think merit further discussion:
Horizontality and the demoicratic disconnect: I argued in the proposal that one of the core reasons to bring together polycentric assembly processes is simply as a first step to overcome “demoi-cratic disconnect” in Bellamy’s felicitous phrase, or to address the “transnational disconnect” as the raison d’etre of this ECA, as argued persuasively by Melisa Ross & Andrea Felicetti’s. Alemanno writes that the ECA can help “Europeanise domestic politics, opening up EU issues trapped within the nation state,” using “the unique ability of a permanent citizens’ assembly to ‘Europeanise’ the politics of the EU in the current political and constitutional juncture.” The horizontal challenge of connecting our demoi or what Zacharzewski refers to as our overlapping ‘citizenships’ amounts to horizontal, not just vertical, accountability. Here horizontal mediation between peoples becomes the animating force for vertical mediation between institutions and peoples – with peoples not taken in their isolated national or local silos but as peoples who have already undergone some exercise in crafting a Rawlsian overlapping consensus nationally. The Assembly would be there to manage visibly, performatively, a related kind of accountability, which would shape and frame the mediation between the peoples of Europe. One objection is that the ECA members will be in a transnational setting, but the broader public will not. It will take connections “outside the selected few” for the ECA to help connect “peoples” across borders, not just their representatives. In my view, this could happen through the multiple channels created and enabled by the ECA if transnational conflict were made more explicit and addressed as such.
Embeddedness and multiple docking: Perhaps in slight tension with its EU-publics mediating role, many authors view the ECA’s embeddedness in the EU governance system as a condition for the possibility for this virtuous dynamic. Considering Ahlhaus & Schmidt’s diagnosis of the opacity of the EU system, it is unlikely that citizens would acquire a sense of ownership in bits and pieces. If the overall system is so complex and opaque as to not be grasped, no Assembly alone would make up for it. The assembly needs to fit in like a piece of an institutional puzzle. Taking in Seubert’s conditions for CAs systemic efficacy, there is a need for other reforms to happen as well – she cites the transnational ethos of EU-wide election lists for the EP. As a result, commentators should not see a permanent ECA as any other. It will be docking in several different physical places and, thus, political spaces. Sure, the EP itself juggles between Brussels and Strasbourg at a significant cost. So the ECA’s docking challenge (Ross & Felicetti) is perhaps an amplified and positive version of the EP’s experience. Dobler & Vergne argue that the need for “docking” of the ECA can draw from the characterisation adopted by the Global Assembly on the Climate and Ecological Crisis (GLOCAN) as “the process of interfacing in a compatible way with existing institutional structures.” These may be EU structures, or other structures and levels of governance, here again calling for horizontal accountability between countries or regions, as well as vertical accountability all the way down to the citizen.
Local porousness and translocalism: Building on Ross & Felicetti, we ought to, in fact, i) connect the vertical plurality of lived experience across European communities to European institutions to ii) create bridges across those communities and across other ongoing mechanisms of participation. In effect, we need to develop what I see as a grounded theory of transnationalism, that is, a theory of translocalism applied to democratic innovation. Alemanno’s argument suggests that the flipside of Europeanisation of domestic politics has to democratise domestic politics through Europeanisation: Bringing Europe to town, as we say in the Democratic Odyssey. This is what we mean by “planting democratic seeds” all over the EU as echoed by Dobler & Vergne who see a translocal ECA like a travelling circus, an imagined “web of deliberation of which the ECA is a part” as “each visited locality could spin up its own process encouraging more decentralisation and exponential scaling”. They highlight the importance of energising local democracy with each travelling assembly working with local politicians on the next steps using assembly members and alumni as co-entrepreneurs and pioneers in this regard. The hope is that the democratic respect demonstrated by the Assembly’s existence and performance would prove contagious and contribute to fostering a sense of civic ownership and a more democratic civic culture locally across the EU through “a Europe-wide, permanent deliberation infrastructure… if it can advance the connection with and among publics and meaningfully engage locally anchored actors and demands” (Ross & Felicetti). Who needs a unified European public sphere when we can have a more resilient polycentric one.
Mediation through distrust: I am wary, however, not to see this exercise as simply about “building trust” between peoples and politicians. If the “radicality of sunlight” is to protect the complementary approach from falling into the subordination scenario, as Lafont & Urbinati warn can happen in the absence of final authority, it cannot rest only on trust-building. Democracy, as Machiavelli would say, is about authorising and channelling distrust and dissent. Here, the mediating role would not be as a bridge but as a perceived guardrail against the polity falling into nepotism and corruption, in short, capture. This is also an implication from Lucile Schmid’s point that the Assembly process should not be coopted into a legal process, because EU institutions have a competitive mindset. The ECA needs to invent ways to connect to the disenchanted citizenry, protesters or other disaffected groups, who would be able, over time, to trust this institution to act on their healthy distrust of mainstream institutions. If efficient meritocratic public administrations have been weakened (Sintomer) they may enter into a Gramscian alliance to enact such a strategy.
Decoupling vs bringing politics back in: A connected issue has to do with whether and how such a partial decoupling of the Assembly from the central institutional logic of the EU can create a greater space for “bringing politics back in.” Many authors argue that bottom-up change must accompany the top-down sort if EU official institutions are to partly give up control of this democratic process. Oleart’s highlight of the EU’s unique ‘citizens turn’ tries to use sortition to combine representativeness and citizen engagement to weigh the balance between risk and opportunity. Technocratic approaches bring a greater focus on consensus than on compromise alongside the risk of undermining an agonistic democratic logic. Yet, according to Lucile Schmid, observer of the French Assembly on Climate, many members became attracted by political responsibilities afterwards in part for the lack of politics in the Assembly itself. As Wilson & Mellier argue, we are living through a crisis of self- and collective efficacy: people feel trapped, and there is nothing they can do in the face of transborder challenges. If citizens’ assemblies can radically increase peoples’ efficacy, they need to perceive themselves as active agents of change and given the “scaffolding” required to act as such. This means framing assembly members as political actors, including by training them to speak and supporting them to be advocates for the assembly, not just in the political areas, but also towards the broader public and private actors. Accordingly, new sources of power and cooperation could come from an ECA if it “could open up to public-private partnerships, new diplomacy actions and new social movements emerging from the process” (Gaiba).
Digital civic engagement: Clearly, alongside other analysts, we need to spend more time questioning the relationship between on-site ECA meetings and digital civic engagement. Dzankic and others rightly advocate the use of new digital technologies to lower the financial costs and ecological footprint as well as broader participation in the spirit of ‘liquid democracy’ – a particularly inclusive system with low barriers to political participation. But as discussed above, it is not clear how too much reliance on liquid democracy would serve engagement horizontally across borders. Gaiba defends the “idea of a digital platform as the enabler of this scaling out function through structures of transcalar polycentricity, which builds on Nicolaidis’ conceptual framework for planetary politics” while “the granularity of liquid democracy … lends itself to more nuanced final outputs.” Accordingly, this would entail adopting a liquid democracy approach for the final step of an ECA process when a popular vote is called on a set of ECA recommendations. We need to build on such cross-pollination between liquid democracy and an ECA.
Global Porousness: Beyond the EU scene, it is also worth thinking about the ECA from a global perspective, and here I stress that this includes not only discussions about solidarity beyond the nation-state (Oleart, Ross & Felicetti) but also about conflict across borders. If “the unique ability of a permanent citizens’ assembly to ‘Europeanise’ the politics of the EU in the current political and constitutional juncture” can be used to generate cross-border interactions and transnational legitimacy (Alemanno) this transnational character is porous – practising transnationality within opens up for the experience and capacity to do so with Europe’s neighbours and beyond. It would be good to explore further such porousness through what I call “reversing the democratic gaze.”
Participatory complementarities: Finally, a lot of these questions and debates take us back to what I call “participatory complementarities”, i.e. the need for the deliberative assembly to be connected with all forms of citizens’ participation in public life. This starts with the relationship between the ECA and direct democracy. Gaiba suggests that agenda setting could be enabled by “combining the assembly with an ECI process, which “may be a good way to test and maximise their respective strengths” according to Ross & Felicetti. These authors argue that the connection to direct democracy is “crucial because it implies that the ECA should ultimately be grounded in public spheres, not just attached to institutions”. Drawing on Simon Niemeyer’s “Scaling up Deliberation to Mass Publics”, they promote this other kind of horizontality, by creating bridges across these communities and across other ongoing mechanisms of participation. Can the EP champion European Citizens’ Initiatives (ECIs)? Can it monitor the afterlife of ECIs? Should it offer its own ECIs to European residents? And ultimately how do these different types of complementarities – participatory, representative and territorial, interact?
Conclusion: How to get there?
I have not expanded here much on the case in favour of creating a permanent ECA. Several of the commentators, including Sintomer, Alemanno, Gaiba, Ross & Felicetti or Dobler & Vergne, have done so better than I could. Instead, I hope that this rejoinder has clarified the initial proposal by taking in and further debating as many of the points articulated in this forum as I could take on board. Clearly, this is a small part of the overall puzzle. We still need to offer a theory of change that is not only normatively appealing but politically plausible.
In spite of the cogent arguments of the sceptics in this forum, I still believe that this is an idea whose time has come. And that the EU is its perfect testing ground, as Sintomer and Alemanno articulate.
As Dobler & Vergne explain pithily, such an ECA “is not expensive, not technically impossible, and it does not take too much time.” But bang for the buck does not mean big bang. Any campaign for an ECA needs to start with the fact that an ECA on its own is not able to address all, or even most, problems with the current state of democracy. Democratic eco-systems need to be built and spread, and other reforms need to happen for the assembly to work, reforms that might encourage a cross-border democratic ethos, such as the aforementioned EU-wide election lists emphasised by Seubert. Continued institutional initiatives such as the Commission’s panels and youth councils, as well as the EP’s Agora, will also prepare the ground, above all by convincing European civil servants and politicians that this is a worthy game.
Indeed, we need to be wary also about counter-productive moves. Freund points to the risk of backlash. Without political backing and institutional support to allow for mechanisms for implementation, he warns, this proposal might backfire and lead to further detachment rather than engagement. To stave off this prospect, alliances will need to be built among actors who believe in the sharing of power, civil servants and civil society groups. politicians and parties, as well as EU institutions like the Ombudsman office, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions. First and foremost, a campaign advocating for complementarity between an ECA and the EP needs MEPs!
Timing is paramount. Zacharzewski cautions that it might be too early to speak of an ECA campaign when there is still much to be discussed about participatory and deliberative processes. Let’s first build the necessary frameworks and infrastructure for the ECA to become successful, he argues. We 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. Realistically, he surmises that the media is more likely to report on failures and accusations of undemocratic practices than success. Hence the need to be cautious and incremental: “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.”
But cautiousness should not stifle our imagination. Hennig’s discussion of the pros and cons of a pilot assembly as implemented by the Democratic Odyssey offers precious advice. He persuasively crystallises the challenge as prefigurative politics – i.e., modes of politics and social relationships that strive to reflect the future society being sought by building a new society within the shell of the old. But here again, caution seems to gain the upper hand. If the campaign character of the assembly (in this case, that of a pilot like Democratic Odyssey or the EP’s youth assembly) might not allow it to have a political impact, this could lead to the demoralisation of members who put in their time.
Where does this all leave us? As Richard Rorty has suggested, our journey may need to follow an incremental logic. Yet, at the same time, it calls for a radical shift in mindset for the state to shed the reassuring cloth of ‘consultation’ for the glorious garments of ‘democracy’. These are different worlds, different logics. We are thus left with the ECA dilemma: we may burn our wings with too much hubris, but without pioneering ambition, nothing will happen.
In closing, I suggest that we cannot divorce this democratic conversation from geopolitics. A permanent ECA needs to speak to our times. Our next frontier has to do with the role of transnational and national citizens assemblies in much more demanding contexts than those we find in our consolidated democracies, so as to practice “democracy-under-the radar” in authoritarian settings, or democratic transition after ethnic conflicts. It may be that as Ross / Felicetti stress, “the European Union and European practitioners may be in an unparalleled and privileged position to effectively advance such a democratic experiment,” but the story does not stop here. We will need to reverse our gaze and pay heed to the plethora of lessons emanating from elsewhere. Ultimately, a permanent ECA can take many shapes or forms, and its design can be much improved by the kind of debate we are having in this GLOBALCIT forum. But only its actual existence will allow us to test our scholarly deliberations through trial and error and imperfect approximation in keeping with the very essence of democratic experiments throughout the ages.
[1] For the sake of transparency, I declare here that I was part of the design committee in charge of the pilot project under the purview of the Joint Research Centre on behalf of the European Parliament in 2023-2024.
[2] We would need to investigate further the relationship between formal functions related to the policy cycle (agenda-setting, policy, monitoring) and political functions related to the impact on the polity (counter opacity, capture, stuckness) or as per Smith and Owen, regulatory, generative, critical functions.