Democracy 3.0 in the 21st Century: the Case for a Permanent European Citizens’ Assembly
Yves Sintomer (Université de Paris 8 Vincennes – Saint-Denis)
In her thoughtful essay, Kalypso Nicolaidis defends the creation of a permanent citizens’ assembly (ECA) at the EU level, further developing a proposal she had made with other authors (Carsten Berg et al, 2023) and which has been previously discussed by scholars such as Hubertus Buchstein. Confronting the present legitimacy crisis of European democracy, she claims that the creation of such a randomly selected collective body could be an important contribution to facing the challenges of a democracy under threat. The ECA should not replace electoral democracy, nor be subordinated to it. It should complement it, together with other tools and actors, such as a more powerful European Citizens Initiative and a vibrant and organised civil society. The goal would be to empower the citizenry in a radical-democratic perspective.
Cristina Lafont and Nadia Urbinati reply that the ECA should not have decision-making power and should remain subordinated to the people as a whole deciding through their elected representatives or, in some cases, directly through referendum. Sandra Seubert is sceptical, too: citizens’ assemblies should be routinised but only have an advisory role and should not be permanent in order not to contribute to the devaluation of the legislative power. For Richard Bellamy, the disillusionment with actually existing electoral democracy could be exacerbated by the creation of a permanent ECA and the answer lies in enhancing the responsiveness and deliberative character of the electoral system. In Svenja Ahlhaus and Eva Schmidt‘s view the ECA would be normatively interesting only when it contributes to reducing the opacity of the political system, limiting its capture by particular interests, and helping to get out of its deadlocks. As I share most of Nicolaidis’ argument (Sintomer, 2023), I will propose a complementary perspective to justify the creation of the ECA. My claim is that democracy, especially in the EU, cannot duplicate what it was in the decades following World War Two. In order to face the huge challenges of the 21st century, a much different model, democracy 3.0, is needed. The ECA could be one of its key elements, integrated in a new political system where electoral democracy would be relativised.
For a non-ideal and historically-situated theory of democracy
Too often, political theorists claim to offer a view from nowhere (Nagel, 1986). In this perspective, the main conceptual problems of society and politics can be discussed (1) in a nearly just and democratic world (Rawls, 1999), with no pretension to engage with the challenges of really-existing societies; (2) independently from the analysis of the period in which the conversation takes place; and (3) without reflexively questioning the link between the normative claims defended by political actors and the models elaborated by scholars. In short, ideas have no context.
However, context is crucial. Much too often, the critics of citizens’ assemblies analyse the challenges faced by the latter in a realistic perspective but contrast them with an idealised view of electoral democracy. This conceptual shortcut between ideal and non-ideal political theory is present in the contributions of Lafont and Urbinati, Seubert, and Bellamy. It makes it difficult to balance the specific advantages and problems of sortition and elections.
The kind of democracy which used to be stable in the Global North during a couple of decades after WW2 is in crisis. This is why democratic innovations involving citizens’ assemblies and other minipublics have flourished in the last decades, and why a growing number of theoreticians have proposed institutional models coupling randomly selected bodies and deliberation. The medicine may be wrong, but the disease is real. A strong diagnosis is needed to try to save democracy. In the conversation opened by Nicolaidis, most authors agree that the legitimacy crisis of the Western political system is real. Nevertheless, the causes of the disease are too superficially analysed, especially in the contributions of Lafont and Urbinati, and of Seubert.
Context also plays a decisive role for understanding political models. The history of ideas in context (Skinner, 1978; Koselleck, 2010) has shown how deeply the most brilliant political philosophers were embedded in the conversation of their time. The same is true for more recent scholars. To a large extent, the abstract theories of democracy proposed by great authors such as Rawls and Habermas were idealisations of Western democracies in the decades following WW2. This does not nullify the interest in their theories, but a careful reflexive analysis is required once the Golden Age of these democracies is over and when the empirical and theoretical developments coming from the Global South provincialise the model at stake (Chakrabarty, 2000).
Provincialising Western democracy
The kind of democracy which provides the basis upon which most of the critiques of the ECA rely is a historical parenthesis rather than a universal model. During its Golden Age, the Western political system had three political pillars: a competitive party system based on free elections and mass political parties; a division of power protecting the rule of law, human rights and a free public sphere; and efficient meritocratic public administrations with strong state capacities.
In the third decade of the 21st century, the first and the third pillars are weakened, and the second is under threat. This is not only due to populists or authoritarians. This model used to rely upon a number of economic, social, geopolitical and ecological conditions. Political parties were able to include the subaltern groups in the political system. The West was the centre of the world, economically and politically, and could take advantage of the human and natural resources of the whole planet. National states could be efficient, at least in the Global North. With the ‘social market economy’ and the welfare state, important resources were redistributed to citizens. This had quite a high price: a mode of production and consumption that produced the ‘great acceleration’ and the anthropocene. This model was not (and still is not) universalisable, and the West was therefore an exclusive club.
In the 21st century, all these conditions tend to disappear due to the cumulative outcome of different structural crises. The ecological disaster demonstrates how our socioeconomic development is unsustainable. Neoliberal capitalism threatens democracy. The welfare state is destabilised. The nation states are weakened by globalisation – especially in Europe, with its small or middle-size states. Elections do not take place at transnational level. The old postcolonial and postimperial world order is subverted by increasing development of China and other emerging countries. Extra-European migration shakes old identities. The social acceleration of changes (internet, social networks, gender trouble…) contrasts with the inertia of the structures of institutional politics.
The EU is particularly vulnerable. Its strong welfare states are under threat and inequalities are increasing. The continent is exposed to geopolitical turmoil. The EU has quite a weak centre, with only 33.000 civil servants, compared with 2.1 million for the US federal government, and several million for the Chinese central government. It has strong normative power but weak financial and implementation power. The European economy is less innovative than the US or the Chinese ones. Politics is characterised by increasing polarisation. Multiculturalism works well among Europeans but migrants from the Global South and Muslim countries are instrumentalised as scapegoats.
As a result, the gap is growing between a vibrant civil society and the subaltern groups on the one hand, and institutional politics on the other hand. The crisis of Western democracy is structural. The Golden Age is over. The political system is largely broken in the Global North. The extension of Western democracy to the world after the fall of European communism has largely been a failure, with the partial exception of Central East-European and some Asian countries.
Global governance and citizens’ assemblies
Confronted with this landscape, the normative model of reference implicit in the contributions of Lafont and Urbinati, Seubert, and Bellamy is one-sided when referring to the past, and mystifying for the present. It forgets the dark side of the Western political model, and it is far away from actually existing western democracies. Let us give three significant examples.
The traditional division of power is largely gone. With the rise of global governance, crucial decisions are increasingly taken by non-elected bodies such as courts, transnational organisations such as the IMF or the World Bank, bureaucratic agencies at national and transnational levels, and transnational corporations. (The algorithms that deeply shape the public sphere are mostly a corporate choice.) In this context, the concept of sovereignty is archaic. This is even more so in the EU where, as Nicolaidis convincingly argues, no one body can sovereignly make the decision. This is why the debate on “who shall decide, the people or citizens’ assemblies?” is misleading. It reminds me of the one Marxists had decades ago about how to “solve” the dual power between the elected assembly and the Soviets. It is possible to empower the ECA on certain issues without necessarily entering in a zero-sum game with the European Parliament. As Arendt wrote, one can increase power through its separation. This is widely accepted for constitutional courts and legislatures; why should it be a problem with the ECA? This is all the more the case in the EU where, as Nicolaidis argues, the decision-making process is shared among various bodies. Contrary to what Lafont and Urbinati claim, 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.
Political parties are no more efficient channels between the citizenry and the rulers. They have lost membership and legitimacy. They are considered by most European citizens as acting more for their own sake and for privileged groups than for the common good – realist political scientists tend to confirm this view. No democratic mass political party has been created in the last three decades. It is no more only in the Global South that electoral systems increasingly materialise the government of the elite, by the elite and for the elite. To say the least, they are not very efficient in taming transnational capitalism. To pretend that actual electoral democracy enables the expression of the sovereignty of the people is misleading, and to claim it could be so in a near future is naive.
It is also striking that none of the critiques of Nicolaidis’ proposal (with the partial exception of Seubert) discuss one of her most important claims, namely that citizens’ assemblies could help represent non-human entities. They could perform this task together with public agencies with a special mandate, but would add a political dimension that is quite reduced in the latter. The ecological crisis is the most crucial challenge humanity has to face in this century. A coherent answer can only be given when combining local, national and transnational scales. The electoral system tends to focus on the short term and has not been implemented at transnational scale. The elections for the EU parliament are a sum of national votes. The founding fathers of electoral governments could not forecast global warming. Future generations and non-humans neither vote, nor authorise, defer to, or control the rulers.
In relation to these examples, the ECA and other citizens’ assemblies and minipublics could play a crucial role. It is easier to conceive of them as adequate representatives of the future generation and non-humans than of elected assemblies and executives. They could be officially given this function and would be more protected from short-termism and vested interests than a Brussels bubble where lobbies have a major influence in the conception of public policies.
A similar argument can be made about the taming of transnational capitalism and the defence of the common good and of the interests of the vast majority of the people. Without having personal political career or partisan interests to defend, and reflecting the social diversity of experience of the citizenry, the members of the ECA, chosen by lot for a short period of time, could deliberate under much better conditions than MEPs. They could be fair interlocutors for mobilised civil society and subaltern groups, which are marginal in electoral politics.
The ECA could also increase the global legitimacy of politics. Global governance is here to stay, which means that we live in a world beyond sovereignty, where no single entity has the last word in a given territory (with the partial exception of the USA and China). In order to challenge the relations of power and domination that structure our societies, it is necessary to multiply countervailing powers (Fung, 2003). The ECA would embody a descriptive representation of the people, much less distorted by fake news, political manoeuvres and private interests than the elected European Parliament. It could be a strong platform for the voice of subaltern groups. Its outcomes could be amplified by multiple minipublics, on specific issues or contribute to the monitoring of EU agencies. Other authorities could gain legitimacy when the permeability of the political system towards citizens’ demands increases.
For sure, the ECA and other citizens’ assemblies will face many risks: capture by lobbies, technocratic drift, instrumentalisation by the executive, difficulty to connect with the wider public sphere. But these dangers are mostly empirical and should be faced pragmatically in a go-between experimentation and theoretical analysis.
The ECA and randomly selected bodies are not a magic bullet. They should be part of a broader transformation of the political system, including the taming of capitalist corporations, the development of the European Citizen Initiative, the multiplication of participatory tools, and important reforms of EU elections. A mere lottocracy is unrealistic and undesirable. But as Nicolaidis convincingly argues, “[s]ince an ECA is meant to augment participation beyond the self-selection of electoral candidates, it could spearhead such non-elitist participation elsewhere. As itself a school of democracy, it could galvanise a civic culture in schools, firms and neighbourhoods across the continent, contributing to a growing participatory ecosystem.”
Conclusion: Democracy 3.0
In Europe, democracy was invented by hunters-gatherers and reinvented in city states. Much later, it developed within big nation states – a long and painful process that implied wars, empires, and revolutions, and had huge cost for the rest of the world and for the planet. But history does not end. We should look at the Western model after WW2 in the same way as we consider Athens: a fascinating but non reproducible experience. In the 21st century, the status quo is not an option. Nor is a nostalgic dream of going back to an idealised Golden Age. A Democracy 3.0 is needed. Elections are only part of it. New venues have to be created, which can counter-balance the limits of electoral politics, the rising power of technocratic bodies, and capitalist transnational corporations. The ECA as a real utopia (Wright and Gastil, 2019) should play an important role in the new system. It would be better not to wait for forthcoming disasters before experimenting with it.