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The Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) concluded on May 9 with mixed results for democratic reform. EU officials worked hard to design an innovative process that gave citizens a voice in key debates over the EU’s future. However, ambitious and wide-ranging follow-up will be required if the conference is to generate tangible progress toward democratic renovation. While the CoFoE was undoubtedly the most open and participative exercise of this kind that the EU has ever held, it did little to address the broader state of European democracy. The conference may lead to one or more regular EU-level citizen forums; the even more important advance would be if it serves as a catalyst for wider democratic improvements across Europe.
Despite its rocky start, the CoFoE offered a refreshing contrast with previous elite-dominated intergovernmental conferences. Initially, the conference preparations were tense, prolonged, and fractious. The start date was pushed back due to considerable interinstitutional wrangling. There were moments when many member states seemed intent on retaining so much control that the citizens’ input would have been largely symbolic. It is remarkable that the CoFoE ultimately gave European citizens a far more meaningful role than might have been expected, even if it is governments that will now decide how the conference’s proposals are taken forward.
The conference’s four thematic citizen panels gave 800 randomly selected citizens the ability to explore an extremely wide range of topics and policies. Citizens were able to deliberate on new agenda items and ideas, and then presented 178 policy recommendations. Over a hundred of the citizens involved in the panels also participated in the conference plenary. In parallel, a digital platform enabled thousands of citizens to offer further input, with Decidim software (pioneered in Barcelona) enabling interactions across different languages. Also, after initially being frozen out of the conference, civil society organizations were included in its plenary, albeit in limited form.
Some deliberative experts expressed concerns that the randomly selected citizens were considering overly broad sets of issues in a short time frame and that the panels felt more like open conferences rather than carefully targeted deliberation. Critics also pointed out that there was no role for minority rights groups, pushing aside rights-oriented agenda items. Another concern was that some (although not all) of the EU institutions and experts guiding the panels tilted debates toward their own desired outcomes. Input on the digital platform came mainly from well-organized pressure groups with technical expertise rather than the so-called unengaged citizenry.
Citizen panel recommendations fed into the plenary that included citizens alongside government and EU representatives—this hybrid form standing in contrast to standard citizen assembly processes. It was not clear at first how these recommendations would be dealt with in the plenary, as there was no predetermined process that guaranteed they would be taken on board. Several filters existed between citizen deliberation and the outcome: so-called working groups chose their favored recommendations from the panels; the plenary could then pick and choose from these working groups; an executive board could in turn pick and choose from the plenary; and finally, governments are likely to pick and choose from the final set of recommendations.
Despite all the shortcomings, however, the CoFoE undoubtedly put the need for citizen engagement more prominently on the EU agenda—adding to the momentum created by other initiatives like the union’s new Competence Centre on Participative and Deliberative Democracy. Some teething difficulties in creating the first transnational panels were to be expected, as tried and tested national- or city-level citizen assembly processes cannot simply be cut-and-pasted to the EU level. The conference’s final report calls for citizen assemblies to be held “periodically” in the future. The exercise has raised expectations around citizen participation that will be hard to rebottle. Surveys suggest that citizens are certainly interested in directly participating in EU-level decisionmaking beyond the conference. The European Commission plans to reassemble the citizen-panel participants later in 2022 to review what progress has been made on their recommendations....
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