Creating the European Citizens’ Assembly. A New Institution for the Future of Europe

Michele Fiorillo
Co-initiator of CIVICO Europa and the Citizens Take Over Europe coalition and former member of UEF-Italy Central Committee and WFM Council

European unification is locked: conflicting raisons d’Etat are long since blocking the Council  and the Union cannot make decisions as it could with a more democratic and federal governance. This undermines EU’s legitimacy, fostering nationalist forces. Without a civic transnational counter-power able to make pressure on EU institutions, we will not move in the needed direction. Therefore: why European citizens should not gather to deliberate directly about their own future, facing the consequences of Coronavirus, which are intertwining with the never-ending euro-crisis and climate crisis brought about by the inaction of governments?
Citizens assemblies are a tool of deliberative democracy becoming very popular, since the Irish one or self-organized experiments like the Belgian G1000.
Today the creation of a European Citizens Assembly (ECA) appears to be a historical necessity to save the European project. But this shared idea will become reality only through citizens self-organization.
How to shape the ECA? 500 randomly selected citizens - 500 as the Athenian boulé- could gather to deliberate in person and online, coming from each country of Europe and different socio-cultural contexts, after a continental online agenda setting. The ECA would meet at least twice a year and have national and local articulations - always maintaining the trans-nationality of deliberations. Out of the ECA could be created by sortition a European Citizens’ Council – maybe composed by 27 women and 27 men, from every EU country- gathering days before each EU Council meeting and electing 10 spokespersons - 10 as the Roman tribuni plebis- in order to influence the media and the Council.
This self-organized ECA -which the Parliament may host in Brussels and Strasbourg– could be a pioneer experimentation of a new EU institution: a third chamber with the ability to give inputs in the law-making process, maybe with the power to initiate pan-European referenda, intertwining with an empowered ECI.
Such an institutionalization will clearly need radical Treaty-changes. The Parliament could become an ally, but citizens have to take the lead. A self-organized Citizens’ Conference/Assembly on the Future of Europe could be a powerful start, allowing people to have a say about our common destiny. This process may lead also to the birth of a civic pouvoir constituant towards a democratic EU Constitution.