Back to the Future: What the Conference on the Future of Europe should learn from the successes and failures of the European Citizens’ Initiative

During the last decade there has been a substantial increase in the politicisation of EU affairs, on issues such as trade, austerity, climate change, immigration or, recently, healthcare due to the COVID‑19 crisis. We have long argued that the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) encourages a fundamentally different type of civil society involvement in EU policy-making, and has channelled constructively several of these politicised issues at the European and national level. The EU policy-making process has traditionally favoured institutionalised Brussels-based peak associations and umbrella groups that aggregate and represent diverse interests at EU level, which in turn has created tensions with grassroots groups based at the national level across EU member states. There is strong evidence to suggest that the ECI has been a useful mechanism for national grassroots organisers, who have managed to successfully politicise EU issues at the national level and bring a wide range of new actors into the EU policy-making process, while also providing strong incentives to some Brussels-based umbrella organisations to join them. In consequence, the ECI has succeeded in further intertwining national and EU politics - even though the policy impact has been minor.

The success of the ECI in linking national and European political debates however contrasts with its very limited impact on EU policies. As the longstanding frustration of most ECI campaigners, even when an initiative was successful in collecting a million signatures, the European Commission has failed to follow up with policies satisfying the requested changes. This is problematic, as many European citizens’ hopes when campaigning and signing an ECI were to be able not just to have a say, but to actually change EU policy.

In the context of the upcoming Conference on the Future of Europe organised in the current European political cycle (2019-2024), there is a lot to be learnt from the successes and failures of the ECI. The Conference on the Future of Europe cannot be yet another Brussels bubble’s exercise in which the traditional stakeholders talk to each other. As phrased by professor of EU law at HEC Paris Alberto Alemanno, “the EU won’t fix its democratic deficit with another top-down ‘conference’”. Among the many dangers of conceiving the Conference as a public relations exercise of the EU is the rise of further distrust towards EU institutions, already seen as distant from European citizens’ needs. Instead, the ECI has shown that it is possible (and normatively desirable) to involve citizens in EU policy-making through connecting EU policies with national political debates.

As the civil society coalition Citizens Take Over Europe have argued in their letter to EU institutions, “new mechanisms for citizens to participate in an ongoing way in the governance of the EU should be explored”. The key in setting up new participatory mechanisms to make the voice of European citizens heard is to bridge national with European politics, meeting citizens where they are. In other words, it is necessary to reach relevant national political actors that are often not involved in EU politics. The politicisation of EU policies beyond the 'Brussels bubble’ into the national debates would be a symptom of the normalisation of the EU as a playing field, where the dominant arguments are EU-critical, rather than anti-EU.

The quality of our democracies depends on the way power circulates between the institutionalised forms of decision making and the informal flows of communication. A crisis of legitimacy will take place if citizens perceive either that there is a gap between the informal claims and institutional decisions, or that the political system is taken over by interest groups representing private companies. At the crossroads in which the EU is, it is necessary to envision democratic participation beyond the nation-state, while also taking into account the national political dynamics. If the gap between informal flows of communication and institutionalised forms of decision-making is not closed in the context of a crisis such as COVID-19, the logical outcome will be further distrust.

More concretely, what we suggest is the construction of democratic processes in the framework of the Conference on the Future of Europe that are sensitive to the national political debates, while maintaining a pan-European logic. If the objective is to generate public deliberation – understood as an open, inclusive and reflective debate aiming to achieve the best decisions, taking into account the force of the arguments - we have to conclude that there is no concrete mechanisms to produce it, but it will be the result of the various different debates taking place within institutions and outside them.

In addition to the careful articulation of a closer relationship between national and European politics, the Conference on the Future of Europe should operate as a space for citizens to set the agenda on issues that ought to be tackled from a perspective going beyond the nation-state. For instance, in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the lack of a coordinated approach to it, it is likely that many citizens would be in favour of providing more EU competences on healthcare, which is currently a policy area legislated uniquely by national governments. The Conference should therefore not focus only on the institutional questions, but also be an open ground for citizens to set the agenda at the EU level. In the ECI, the Commission performs a legal check on all the initiatives, as only initiatives that are within the powers of the Commission to act are to be allowed. The Conference is an opportunity to break this limitation, and allow citizens to set the agenda on any issue, even if some proposals would require Treaty change. Citizens will be more likely to participate if they can touch upon the issues they care about, and EU institutions would gather precious input about what sort of policy issues citizens want legislated at EU level.

A critical analysis of the successes and failures of the ECI will help to improve the organisation of the Conference on the Future of Europe. Mobilising citizens not traditionally linked to EU policy-making, connecting national and EU politics, and allowing the possibility of setting the agenda are in our view the most important lessons to be learnt.