by Kalypso Nicolaidis
In 2020, Alberto Alemanno, Niccolo Milanese and myself called for the upcoming Conference on the Future of Europe to create a permanent citizens’ assembly for Europe (Alemanno et al, 2020). Subsequently we launched the Democratic Odyssey project, committed not only to articulate this vision but also to provide an actual proof of concept for it. In a recent publication with GlobCit, twenty three authors debate this vision, offering a great range of arguments for and against. If you accept the rationale for citizens’ assemblies (CAs), however, and even while many would agree that Europe needs more than ad-hoc panels, the idea of a new permanent body for the EU meets with much resistance. Permanent CAs may make sense at the local level, in cities like Paris and Brussels, objectors argue, but adding yet another institution to the already very complex EU edifice simply adds to the complexity (Berg, et al, 2023, Abel et al, 2022). In the book, I provide five reasons why citizen participation needs institutionalization, not on-off or ad hoc processes, which I reproduce here:
Continuity. The term ‘permanence’ can be misunderstood. It does not mean that the assembly would be permanently sitting or that its members would hold their mandates for a long time. On the contrary, the ongoing nature of the ECA’s existence will be combined with intermittence through rotating membership (of a few months), a feature which has nearly always characterised bodies selected by lottery in democratic and republican history. Members would meet intermittently and in different places. Nevertheless, such a standing body would become a genuine fixture of the EU institutional landscape, and its stature would be continuous as institutions are meant to be, with a privileged relation to the EP.
Independence. A permanent CA would escape the vagaries of the political cycle. It would avoid falling prey to arbitrariness and cherry-picking as to when and how citizens are convened to form a temporary assembly (or panels for the Commission). As an independent space within the EU institutional structure, it would be well placed not only to provide policy input as do the current panels but could become a source of sunlight shining onto the whole EU edifice – an open monitoring body whose vigilance could enhance the legitimacy of other EU institutions, including the EP. And its independence would be sustained through its own budget. While power cannot just melt in deliberation through the force of argument, institutional staying power can help mitigate power asymmetries.
Learning. Permanence would also correct for one of the drawbacks of ad-hoc assemblies, namely the lack of knowledge consolidation, by promoting collective learning over time and refining from experience the way the assembly operates by collecting best practices. Its translocal character would allow for what is sometimes referred to as side-scaling and thus mutual learning across political systems. The learning dynamic through different iterations would not only benefit facilitators but the citizens themselves.
Embeddedness. Permanence would allow the ECA to become more embedded over time. Within EU institutions, both the Commission and the EU would draw its Citizens’ Panels from the ECA membership. It would also be able to develop relations with national parliaments, a crucial dimension of embeddedness. At the same time, its permanency will facilitate the ongoing involvement of civil society as interlocutors, collaborators or counter power. This, in turn, would empower advocates of citizen engagement within EU institutions in a virtuous circle of connected political spheres. Publicness and social imagination. Finally, by existing as a standing body labelled ‘assembly’ rather than the more obscure term ‘panel,’ this body would be public in the proper sense, visibly part of the institutional landscape (with or without Treaty change). Permanence would allow it to acquire a status understood and valued by the citizenry as citizenship in action, while the very label and look and feel of the assembly would hopefully appeal to their democratic imagination. There would be a story to tell about the long march of democratic progress, a new way to enlarge the franchise ushered by the third democratic transformation, however tentatively (Nicolaidis, 2024). In this way, the ECA would be a tool for systemic change, not only a footnote to electoral democracy. By giving effect to popular power in a non-ephemeral way at the EU level, it might even convey the message that the EU is becoming more democratic than its member states. And beyond the EU, it could strengthen the EU’s claim as a global norm-setter on new democracy, adding to its growing clout on data protection and the governance of digital platforms, thus strengthening its ability to support citizens fighting autocratic control.
Kalypso Nicolaidis is Chair in Global Affairs at the EUI’s School of Transnational Governance and leads key initiatives on democracy and global governance. Formerly at Oxford, Harvard, and ENA Paris, she has advised EU bodies and focuses on European integration, global affairs, and post-colonialism.