Ways to Direct Citizen Participation in the political decision making of the European Union

Some hypothesis and impulses from

Andreas Gross, MP/Political scientist, ZH/CH

Strassbourg 30.sept. 2005

www.andigross.ch info@andigross.ch

How to make yourself a participant :

Read different papers Listen to different people

Get background analyses (Books) Think and understand autonomously

Organise yourself with likeminded people (Smaller groups to think and understand together,

bigger ones to act together) Get in contact wth professional actors, ask and

discuss with them Express yourself with alternative propositions

Passively you cant be free:Freedom means, to be able to act together with others on the common existence: So that life is not a destiny

That’s why we have to enlarge our sovereignty from a only delegated one

(indirect democracy, parliamentary democracy) to one, in which we delegate and

act on our own behalf (Direct Democracy)

Fundamental reforms in Europe still have to be achieved first at home:

The EU is still essentially governed by national governments

1. A more participatory understanding of democracy has still to be realised in most

of the EU-member-countries

2. The conviction, that the EU in order to become more open for participative

citizens, needs a constitution, has to find a majority at home too/first

A human being is not born as a citizen.

The constitution defines if and how much citizenship a person is empowered with.

The basic idea of freedom is not to consume it or to be able to choose.

Citizens are not consumers, but actors. The people is not the public, but the sum of all actors.

Make sure, that your constitution respects these differences.

Lessons from the two referendums on the ECT in F and NL in mai and june 05 :

Citizens feel themselves alienated in the EU They feel to be excluded from the decision making

process They feel unfree, powerless

Central decisions from the past (Euro, Unification) were not digested

They protested against future decisions to which they desagree

The European Constitutional Treaty was more a Treaty than a Constitution:

The difference is essential: A treaty is an affair of governments

and parliaments A Constitution is an agreement between citizens: Who has when

where how much to say

In the 1940’s the Constitution was the basic idea of the pioneers of the european integration….

Until 1999 the Constitution was a negative notion in the EU:

A constitution does not produce a “superstate”: A constitution is a direct

legitimation for power and it’s use on any level (Commune,region,state, europe)

All those, who ask for more democratic citizen rights and decentralisation of power need to ask for a constitution

A constitution from which everybody knows that it has to be agreed by the majority of citizens (and states ?) will respect and include the interests of

these majorities

The hegemony of the EU elites and there policies started to be questioned by the Referenda in DK,F and IRL in the 1990’s

The declaration of Laeken (Winter 2001) was one of the most self critical

declarations in the EU-History:

It was the start for the 2nd convention and the ECT-making-process