(Photo by Theresa Thompson/Flickr)

By Colin Rowlands

A somewhat overlooked part of the Lisbon Treaty (which has recently squeezed its way past Irish voters and the Czech constitutional court) is the European citizens’ initiative. In a nutshell, the ECI offers the general public the opportunity to “invite” the European Commission to consider any legislation which has the backing of more than one million signatories.

The technical aspects of the initiative – including the minimum age of signatories and time limit for the collection of signatures – are still under consultation and citizens have until the end of January to make their contribution to that debate. Two of the more significant questions being considered are the minimum number of states from which signatories must be found and the minimum number of signatories in each of those states. In its green paper, the Commission recommends that any citizens’ initiative should have the support of at least 0.2% of the total population of at least one third of the member states to be eligible for review by the Commission (to strike a balance between the accessibilty of the initiative to citizens and its relevance to Europe as a whole).

With membership of political parties still sliding (especially among the young) and the growth of single-issue activism, the ECI seems a timely constitutional move. Not only should it bring genuine issues of European importance to the attention of the public in member states (something which national political parties have often conspicuously failed to do), but it should also encourage greater cross-border cooperation among social movements and civil groups. The key objective must be to rediscover the possibility of political debate across a truly broad social base – and, just as importantly, at a European level.

In a recent article, John Palmer warns that this kind of “consultative” democracy could suit special interest groups rather than the broader public. This is of course a real danger. However, there are ways to minimise the risks. A ban on paying people to collect signatures, for example, would help to ensure that any intitiative is truly one of importance to a large number of individuals – to the extent that they would volunteer their time to support it. It should also be noted that representative forms of democracy are equally, if not more, vulnerable to special interest groups, as the size of the lobbying industry in Brussels attests.

The real problem with the ECI is that, as a standalone initiative, it could do more to highlight Europe’s democratic deficit rather than bridge it. A paper by Democracy International notes that similar schemes in individual member states have had limited effectiveness in terms of the actual enactment of legislation, with less than one fifth of citizens’ initiatives passed by any government. If this is a guide for the future of the ECI then the Commission runs the risk of further alienating citizens and attracting probing questions regarding its accountability.

One solution would be to supplement the consultative ECI with further direct democracy. In Switzerland, for example, popular initiatives are reviewed by the federal parliament (who may recommend the initiative or propose an alternative) but the final decision on enactment is made via a referendum. This not only brings the issue at hand to the attention of the wider public but in a European context it could also sow the seeds of truly pan-European political engagement.

Of course, direct democracy is not a solution on its own. Recent budgetary crises in the state of California can be traced back partly to problems with its constitutional setup and its direct democracy component (after all, people don’t vote for cuts to important public services any more than turkeys vote for Christmas). But a truly European representative democracy with pan-European parties and leaders could be a long way off and we do need to start somewhere. Letting the people of Europe vote on political questions that matter to citizens – that could maybe just start to bridge the democratic gap.