European integration meets deliberative citizens assemblies: Critical challenges and ways forward for European democracy

Abstract

Numerous examples of deliberative citizens assemblies have emerged at national and local scales, most successfully to address thorny political issues where the traditional representative institutions have been blocked, such as modernising abortion regulations and electoral reform. But until the recent cases of the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFE), the ‘global assembly’ accompanying COP26, or various civil-society led initiatives, citizens panels and assemblies have rarely been deployed to address political issues with a transborder, cross- or non-national dimension. Yet such issues - including how to address climate change, how to design fair and just regional migration policies, how to deal with the risks of war or how to relate to new technologies which open up new dimensions of reality – are of a growing importance in everyday lives that national democratic governments insufficiently live up to. Hence, under what conditions could transnational citizens panels help democratise the ways planetary issues are being addressed in Europe? Against the backdrop of contemporary cross-border challenges, and informed by demoicratic perspectives, the panellists critically engage with the EU’s most recent democratic experiment CoFE to analyse what it takes to institutionalise deliberative democracy at the transnational level. To tackle this project, the presenters bring together political theoretical, sociological, performative and legal perspectives in response to four sets of questions: ▪️ First, how to bridge the gap between deliberative democratic practices and transnationalism, that is to articulate deliberative democracy as the key to a demoicratic understanding of the European Union? ▪️ Then, do deliberative citizens assemblies merely provide consultative “add-ons” to established politics, or moreover offer a credible potential of recalibrating power relations, even reformulating the basic rules of European democracy? ▪️ Moreover, for being successful on transnational stages of politics, which repertoires of performing deliberation on planetary issues could transnational citizens panels choose from? ▪️ Finally, what would it take to embed a deliberative mini-public format, such as a randomly selected citizens assembly, within the EU’s legal order?

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