A European Citizens’ Foundational Assembly
A think piece for the ESPAS 2016 conference by Pierre Calame (@pierre_calame), Honorary President of the Charles Léopold Mayer Fondation and author of ‘Sauvons la démocratie!’
Democracy is in tatters. In a period of rapid change, in particular of the scale and width of interdependencies among societies and with biosphere, institutions and methods of governance, including representative democracy, have shown great inertia, both conceptually and institutionally. This means that we attempt to manage present and coming societal challenges with a conceptual and institutional framework created centuries ago. Talking about governance means adopting a much broader historical perspective, looking for general principles which should guide our badly needed quest for a governance and a democracy appropriate to our needs.
The most urgent issue for the EU is the conscience of being one community. The way forward lies in the organisation of a citizens’ foundational assembly.
Governance is about founding a community — and not
only managing it.
In a very unusual call to political leaders, the French Catholic bishops recently stated: ‘the republican social contract to live together on the national territory is not self-evident anymore’. Since the French Revolution and its deification of the Nation, the ‘republic was one and indivisible’ and the existence of an eternal national community was unquestioned. The bishops’ call reminds us what governance is really about: to found the community — and not only, as we seem to think, to manage an existing community.
This is the deep meaning of the EU crisis. It will not be addressed by national referendums or by controversies among experts on the balance of powers between European institutions or between member states and Europe.
Taking stock of a breakthrough in deliberative democracy, we can reconcile citizens with the EU through the organisation of a foundational assembly in two stages, first local and then European, and we can set out concrete steps to this goal.
