A World Citizens Initiative. The Case for a Global Participatory Democracy

MIchele Fiorillo
Co-founder of the campaign We Europeans. He has conceived the idea of a UN World Citizens Initiative. Former member of WFM Council and UEF-Italy Central Committee

Time is high for a reform of the United Nations, and many proposals are under discussion in the run-up to its 75^th anniversary, which will be celebrated on October 2020.

This honorable institution – born in the wake of the Second World War, with the aim to preserve peace on earth – is nowadays generally perceived like a weak old elephant attacked by many arrows, almost on the point of falling down. An urgent renovation is needed – everyone sees that. But towards which direction?

Raison d’état and inter-governmental methods are increasingly prevailing in the UN system, blocking de facto the necessary development of a stronger global governance in front of the new challenges of the new Millenium. Therefore, what we need is to build up a ‘counter-power’ by the citizens who are aware of the common destiny of humanity and the necessity of cooperation, instead of antagonism. But how could the emergence of such a civic activism on the planetary stage become possible?

As acute observers noticed, the huge mobilizations against the Iraq war (2003) have produced not only the birth of a transnational European public sphere^[i], but also the affirmation of a new world public opinion^[ii] -something similar to what already happened in the 1960s  with the mobilization of young students all over the world against the Vietnam war and the last spasms of Western colonization.

Since then, day by day, more and more citizens became more and more connected on a global level thanks to social networks, increased opportunities of traveling, and growing economic, educational, scientific and artistic cooperation, despite the limitations that nationalisms and authoritarian regimes are trying to impose to the free movement of people.

On this progressive development of a global civil society is based the ‘cosmopolitan’ hope for the democratization of globalization. But it’s likely that this will not happen without a strong help by an institutional approach.

Therefore, one question seems to be central: how to put the citizens at the center of the UN project?

Once more, as always, we need to exercise political imagination.

The World Federalist Movement started  a quarter of a century ago a fundamental campaign towards the introduction of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (UNPA), as a first step towards a World Parliament, finally representing the citizens of the world^[iii].

However, this approach does not seem to be enough in an age where ‘parliamentarism’ is under attack almost everywhere, and the distance between institutions and people is growing, at least in the eyes of public opinion. As many democratic theories have shown, representative institutions alone are not sufficient to bring about a high-quality democracy: representative democracy, to survive, has to be integrated by modern forms of direct and deliberative democracy. If that is true at a national level, it should be even more true at the international one: therefore, if our aim is to reach progressively a global democracy, we need to imagine innovative tools for a transnational participatory democracy.

Such kind of institutional instruments would enable to raise awareness among the people about the complexity of global governance, and would help to mobilize the growing global public opinion towards their direct influence on the destiny of the world community.

One of this tools could be the introduction of a World Citizens’ Initiative (WCI) on the model of the ECI (European Citizens' Initiative). The ECI, introduced in the European Union with the Treaty of Lisbon (2007), is the first example of transnational participatory democracy. The experiment has demonstrated that it can work, despite some difficulties that are now being addressed thanks to the pressure of NGO activists, willing to improve and make easier its functioning.

Now, the idea is very simple: why not imagine that also within the United Nations framework something similar could work? If our aim is to give a voice to world citizens, we will find the technical solutions and the relative institutional mechanisms to be addressed in the appropriate manner, with the help of legal experts. However, we can already start to figure out concretely how a UN WCI could work.

In practice, making due proportions, if, for the ECI, signatures from a minimum of 7 countries out of 28 EU Member States are necessary, for a hypothetical WCI signatures from, for instance, a minimum of 48 countries out of 193 UN Member States would be necessary. With regard to the total number of signatures: if for the ECI a minimum of 1 million collected signatures is required – within a EU population of 511 millions, as of 1 January 2017 –, for a WCI 15 million signatures, for instance, would be necessary, being the world population about 7.5 billions, as of 1 July 2017.

That would be a hypothetical threshold for an initiative to be addressed to the Secretary General, who would have then the role to propose the issue to the UN General Assembly for discussion, on behalf of the citizens of the World.

We can imagine that in particular cases also the Security Council could be addressed by a special WCI, with a higher threshold, say for instance 100 million signatures. Moreover, the debate on the proposal issued by a specific WCI could be established as mandatory within the sessions of the General Assembly or of the Security Council – under condition of a twofold threshold of signatures – say 30 million for the issues addressed to the GA, and 200 million for the ones addressed to the SC. A very high threshold – say for instance 500 million signatures- could be required for the citizens to urge the Security Council to (re)consider peace-keeping interventions and stop the war in every point of the planet.

By an organizational point of view, we could imagine online registrations and signatures to be collected on a specific web platform set-up by the UN Secretariat. But also offline registrations and signatures through the UN offices (and peacekeeping missions) all over the world, and – when an agreement is possible – through national and local authorities of the Member States. NGOs would be allowed to collect signatures too, under special authorization. This integrated online/offline approach could enable even citizens of countries governed by authoritarian regimes to participate in WCI campaigns and be part of a growing democratic global community.

In this respect, the WCI could be seen as a powerful instrument for the long-term objective of a global democracy. A cosmopolitan tool in the hands of the many – not the few wealthy global elites – to counter big corporate interests, that are at the moment governing the world together with the will of hegemony of the great powers and the natural egoisms of the nation States.

Movements like the one represented in the World Social Forum could use the WCI as a counter-power to global capitalism. Ecological activists could have one more instrument to use when campaigning against climate change and environmental crimes, moving from square and street mobilizations like the “People’s Climate March” to international institutions. Civil rights battles could try to achieve their goals in a specific country through the active solidarity of many people from all the corners of the world.

Civic platforms like avaaz.org, experienced for years in public opinion campaigning, could transform their big potential in terms of data collection and civic mobilization into a decisive support to citizens and organizations willing to engage in a WCI.

Influential intellectuals, famous artists and other global personalities would be easily involved as sponsors of the different campaigns, catalyzing the media attention and spreading ideas about a different shaping of global governance among national and global public opinion.

By a legal point of view, the main road to introduce a WCI in the UN system could be found – precisely as for the UNPA – in invoking Article 22 of the UN Charter: “The General Assembly may establish such subsidiary organs as it deems necessary for the performance of its function”.

Giving direct voice to the citizens of the world would help the General Assembly to improve its “performance” and credibility in its commitment to keep peace in the world, showing itself as the place where global issues raised by the people are heard and taken into great consideration.

All that could be seen as ‘fantapolitics’. But what today appears just as a fruit of imagination could become a tangible institution in the future. It has been so for the International Criminal Court: from a powerful idea to a reality, thanks to a broad coalition of NGOs campaigning for its establishment and ratification. Nothing less has to be made now: build up a broad coalition of civil society organizations and create a growing civic mobilization, pushing politics to do a step forward towards a brave renovation of the UN system, in the pursuit of participation.

The strength of the democratic ruling idea will do the rest, as always in history, in the short or long term.

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* The idea of a World Citizens Initiative, modeled on the example of the European Citizens Initiative, was first proposed by Michele Fiorillo at the European Parliament during the session of the UNPA campaign meeting in Brussels (16 October 2013 - see www.mfe.it/site/fileMfe/archivio/UE/UE_2013_05.pdf (in Italian)). More recently, the proposal was adopted by the last WFM Congress held in The Hague on July 2018, and a campaign has been promoted by Democracy Without Border together with Democracy International and CIVICUS (worldcitizensinitiative.org ). Time is high for a reform of the United Nations, and many proposals are under discussion in the run-up to its 75^th anniversary, which will be celebrated on October 2020.

[i] Juergen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ‘February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together: A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of Europe’, Constellations, 10 : 3, p. 294 – issued originally in the Frankfurter Allgemeine on 31^st May, 2003. 15^th of February is the day of the simultaneous demonstrations against the imminent start of the Iraq War in many cities, that for the authors were “a sign of the birth of a European public sphere” (p. 291).

[ii] “The fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and the huge antiwar demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.” (Patrick Tyler, ‘A New Power in the Streets’, New York Times, February 17, 2003)

[iii] www.unpacampaign.org