14th December, 4-6pm, London School of Economics, Room H216, London

This debate is one of the first opportunities for citizens, civil society groups and academics to feed into the Commission’s thinking on democracy in Europe under Lisbon, and with a newly-elected European Parliament.

Sarah Lambert, Head of European Commission Representation in the UK, and Richard Corbett, former MEP, will lead the debate, with strong audience participation and opportunity for civil society organisations to share their views with the Commission.

Other confirmed speakers include Simon Burall, Dierctor of Involve, a public participation organisation, and Niccolo Milanese, Founding Director of European Alternatives. Piotr Kaczynski, Research Fellow, will come from Brussels from the Centre for European Policy Studies.

Key questions that we will address include:

How will individuals and campaigning groups be able to best use European Citizens’ Initiatives?

How should the European Commission be (s)elected? Has democratic scrutiny of Commission candidates improved?

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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.

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Gender Equality: Beyond the statistics, let’s create a democratic Europe!
European Alternatives is committed to gender equality: it is a fundamental issue because it is the most patent indicator of respect for equalities more generally. It is not a question of quotas for every distinguishable group, but rather a question of democracy and representation.

The European Commission should be representative of the European people: the next European Commission looks likely to include even less women than the last.

European Alternatives finds this situation unacceptable and launches a campaign to change it (click here to go to campaign page). The creation of a more equal political space at the European level must be done in a way that is more egalitarian than the construction of national democracy was.

European Alternatives proposes 5 measures to promote a more equal European political space:

• The President of the Commission should take an active role to ensure Gender Equality.
So far national political spaces have not proved successful in ensuring diversity and equality. They have been largely built by men and they remain largely governed by men. Europe must lead the way in terms of equality and diversity, and this means it cannot be dependent on the nation states alone to propose candidates for the important posts of the Union.
If the list of candidates proposed to the President of the Commission does not respect gender equality, and the commission proposed is unequal, then the President should reject it.

• The European Parliament has the power to reject an unequal European Commission nominated by the European Council and the President of the Commission.
If the Commission includes less than 1/3 females, the Commission should be rejected by the Parliament

• European political parties must ensure the construction of a more equal political space.
If the Parliament does censure the Commission, the European political parties themselves should propose and support candidates for the Commission, as several have done actively with the appointment of the High Representative for Foreign Affairs.
More generally, European Political parties should take an active role in proposing candidates for the commission, and should promote equalities issues throughout their activities.

• The newly created post of Commissioner for Justice and Fundamental Rights must have it in her or his brief to improve the situation with regards to equalities and diversities issues at the European level, and the respect of the relevant rights defined in the Charter for Fundamental Rights.
She or he must actively make the other members of the Commission take equalities issues seriously and must propose a plan for tackling equalities problems at the European level.

• The Observatory for Gender Equality created in 2006 by the European Council and the European Parliament can no longer be delayed.
The Observatory must be given a meaningful brief of proposing more gender progressive policies at both the European and national levels. In addition its brief should be enlarged to consider equalities and diversities issues more generally.

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(Image: Icarus by Francis Drake)

The 20 or so leaders who met at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in Singapore yesterday are just a fraction of representatives of 170 or so countries that will meet in Copenhagen between the 7-18th December at the UN Climate Change Conference. But they included the leaders of the two biggest polluting countries in the world, the US and China, and therefore felt in a position to declare that the long-awaited legally binding deal at Copenhagen will not happen. So long as global issues are decided by negotiations between nation states, only in the rarest of circumstances is an agreement not in the short-term interests of the most powerful nations going to come about, let alone a legally binding constraint such as that required to reduce emissions.

Climate change is an issue that brings out the structural shortcomings of the current global system of national negotiation particularly acutely, because burning carbon is so important in the world’s largest economies, and the effects of climate change seem so distant from the immediate interests of the most powerful in those countries. Persuading those who benefit most from burning fossil fuels of the overwhelming evidence of potentially catastrophic side effects at some point in the future in some part of the planet is not straightforward: there is a complete mismatch between the sphere of national deliberation and the global nature of the problem.

The European Union, if not all its member states, has seen the potential and necessity of the climate change issue in ushering in a new era of global decisions based thoroughly on reasoning that cross-cuts national boundaries. The European Union is the leading if highly imperfect example of a transnational decision making body in which short-term national interests are increasingly placed aside in favour of the greater common good. With its Communication Towards a Comprehensive Agreement on Climate Change, the European Commission tried to play a leading role in the lead up to Copenhagen, which would not only have led to a legally binding agreement but also to a paradigm shift in international relations, based on respect for the law, not on economic or military might. As too often the EU has lacked the political agility and coherence to outplay the other actors, and it is clear it also lacks the respect of other global leaders. The last minute invitation of the Danish prime minister – the chair of the Copenhagen Climate Conference – to fly overnight for a breakfast meeting in Singapore to try to salvage some justification for pressing ahead with the negotiations, seems indicative of a kind of disregard for the process.

In the face of such hubris perhaps the protest of citizens and NGOs against the stealing of the Copenhagen agreements from the world might start to provide the conditions for profoundly remodelling the mechanics of global politics to match our legitimate expectations for saving our planet. The world doesn’t need another Icarus, nor a Prometheus. And let us hope there are not so many ashes that we start hoping for a phoenix.

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The agreement hoped for by the Swedish EU presidency was thus not reached during the meeting and any decision-making has been postponed to a European meeting of the heads of states and governments on 29th and 30th October in Brussels.
There is a divide between European Member States, not only on individual contributions, but also on the general amount for an EU funding pot of between 2 and 15 billion euros, which might be decided upon then.

Farm land in Ethiopia: link to the picture in context

The European Commission had nonetheless stated early in September that developing countries will need at least €100 billion a year from 2020 onwards in order to be able to take part in the global effort to fight against the greenhouse effect and its dramatic consequences.
So far, the EU has not been able to specify the amount of the pot of funding, so,sadly enough, no progress was made in the negotiations.

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It is somehow ironic to witness how strong is the demand for the European Commission to become anew a driving force in European policy making and at the same time how strong is the defiance towards the ability of Barroso to do so when his designation as the next president of the EU is almost acquired.

Demands for stronger stands taken by the Commission have led to requests from members the European Council and Parliamentarians for Barroso to present a political project or at least to define priorities for action. Before they vote for or against its designation, the Socialists & Democrats and the Greens have announced that they have numerous questions to ask regarding the proposed guidelines. Think tanks, interest groups and civil society organisations also reacted. Bruegel states in newly published Memos to the new Commission for instance that “the ongoing commission has not been successful in demonstrating what the EU stands for” and that “at a time of retreat into the national sphere and disenchantment with the EU” if the next commission wants to avoid the drama of the EU becoming “less relevant”, it “will have to fight in defence of common agreed rules, to propose new solutions, to redefine the European narrative, and to make the EU an effective player in a fast-transforming world”.

One might then think that going through such a painful process of justification to be nominated for another mandate and issuing such a document may lead José Manuel Barroso to undertake more decisive actions in the next five years.
So let’s now have a look at these guidelines, which are presented as an ambitious programme to help Europe get out of the crisis and to strengthen it.

The ‘novelty’ of this document is that Barroso proposes to create a “partnership for progress and ambition” to the European Parliament. One can only welcome the proposal of the commission to work more closely with elected representatives of European citizens even though one might have hoped new proposals to concern also new policies or priorities.

Indeed the document also claims to present a “transformational agenda” and a vision for Europe, of an ambitious Europe, “a Europe that puts people at the heart of the policy agenda and projects European values and interests in the world. A Europe that nurtures new sources of growth and drives forward smart regulation of sound markets that work for people”. It defines five priorities, i.e. to make a good exit from the crisis, lead on climate change, develop new sources of sustainable growth and social cohesion, advance “people’s Europe and open a new era for Global Europe, that appear quite sound and relatively consensual.

One may nevertheless be worried that the ambition to create “A Europe of freedom and solidarity” become a ‘dead letter’ if the means to match them are not put into place. And most proposals in the Guidelines are just the extension of existing policies, like the renewal of the Lisbon strategy and its turning into a strategy for an integrated vision of “EU 2020”.

This is best exemplified if one looks at the means proposed for each of the priorities. For instance, the strategy of exit of the crisis proposes enhanced coordination. This is, considering the relatively uncoordinated responses to the crisis in 2009, quite ambitious but action relies on a set of economic policies that is already in place: implementation of the existing recovery package, low interest rates and regulation.
Similarly, one can only welcome the willingness to continue efforts on climate change and to continue to “invest in low carbon economy, exploit the potential of EU environmentally friendly industries and design the right regulatory framework”. This is difficult and ambitious but somehow this is just the strengthening and deepening of the climate package.

The possibility for ambitions to be matched with actions becomes more doubtful in what concerns the boosting of social cohesion and the emphasis and “new, much stronger focus on the social dimension in Europe at all levels of decision making”. Unfortunately, according to the document, these rely mostly on “supporting industry, putting the emphasis on sustainability, innovation and the human skills needed to keep EU industry competitive in world markets”. But this is no surprise.
It is true however that the document also proposes an employment agenda for a changing workplace and states that “we will not allow basic social rights (…) to be undermined” and “we should never lower our standards” but this does not sound that ambitious anymore. Specific steps towards it remain vague and seem limited to a statement of values: “this needs to be set within a fairer framework based on values and our belief in a fairer, more inclusive Europe”.

Finally a strengthened role of Europe in the world would rely on the adoption of the Lisbon treaty -which is still to date not totally acquired – on the tools it gives (such as a diplomatic service for the EU) and on the inclusion of the external relations considerations to all policies and areas of policies. This does not seem very strong either….

At the end of the document, more specific means are quoted: a closer cooperation with the European Investment Bank, the development of more public-private partnerships, the reform of the EU budget and even the issue of the EU “own resources” but why are they not related to each of the priorities?

And more importantly, as Jean Quatremer (him again) states, the EU does not have the means to live up to some of the ambitions mentioned in the document, like that of a real action on employment, just because the member states refuse to develop real European-wide actions in these domains and to extend the domains of competences of the EU.
As long as the budget of the commission remains the same (1% of the European GDP) and as long as the EU has no real competence in the area of employment for instance, there is little chance the EU can do much more in these areas. José Manuel Barroso could have shed light on it and asked for a change.

But one cannot ask Barroso to be someone else and he has been chosen specifically for his ability to be relatively consensual. Then, one cannot expect his proposals to revolution the way the EU functions and the type of policies it pursues at a time in which member states are reluctant to more solidarity.

However, the publication of political guidelines may well contribute to improve European policies in the next five years. It will be a real achievement if the Commission succeeds in getting EU countries to work more closely together on fighting against climate change, helping European economies to recover and, one would hope, fighting against poverty as planned in the framework of 2010: The EU year against poverty (more than working together at “shaping a new order” as it is – according to me somehow worryingly – phrased in another part of the document).

Moreover, even if this document is not the commission work programme, it may prove very useful, in five years, to assess the work of the new commission and to assess whether the actions it has taken have really lived up to the ambitions announced, or even tried to…

Finally, this could create a precedent and be a good incentive, in the future, for political groups of the European Parliament to present alternative candidates, who sustain alternative guidelines. If that happens, this process would have led to valuable changes in the way the EU functions.

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The journalist analyses the position of the Socialist Group as a strategy of its president, the German Martin Schulz, to secure his own future election as president of the European Parliament in two-and-a-half years. A coalition agreement between the European People’s Party and the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe makes provision for the future presidency of the European Parliament to go to a socialist MEP without stating whom. Schulz believing that Barroso’s re-election is unavoidable, he would be currently trying to please a powerful ally afraid as he is of a revenge of the European People’s Party MEPs when they will be voting by secret ballot to elect the EP president. He is thus preventing further delay of the vote.

A reader’s comment qualifies the post and argues that the determining factor about Barroso’s election as president of the Commission will be eventually lying in whether the Conference of Presidents will put the provision about Barroso’s election on the agenda of the European Parliament’s September session. Hence, a decision made in a Conference of Presidents can be undone by another Conference of Presidents up to the last minute with regards to the agenda at stake. The position of the commentator is that the die is not cast as no one can predict what can happen until September. It is suggested that an analysis of the reasons for or against the vote before the October Irish referendum would be interesting as well as an assessment of the Lisbon Treaty entry-into-force schedule.

Today, in a new post (available here), Jean Quatremer finally assumes that tomorrow’s Conference of Presidents in the European Parliament will leave any possibility open regarding Barroso’s election in September.

See Jean Quatremer’s initial post here.

More information about the current session of the European Parliament is available in the French press.

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The European Commission is indeed preoccupied with the development of an intra-European solidarity with the countries at the southern borders of the EU as they are exposed to high migratory pressure.
Apart from the Scandinavian countries, Netherlands, Great Britain and Ireland, other European member states little contributed to programmes for the settling of refugees so far.

Full Le Monde’s article here.

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Last week Nicholas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel said they would only support Barroso if he set out his intentions for the next term, and it seems like he has followed their instructions. The letter is being sent just before the meeting of the European Council tomorrow and Friday. Barroso is pushing to be nominated by the Council as the President as quickly as possible, whereas there are many other voices arguing that the the council should take time and consider the proposals of parties in the European parliament. The European Parliament has to approve the proposals of the Commission, and although the Conservative PPE party is the biggest party it does not have a sufficient majority on its own. The Socialists have said they will vote against any proposal of the Council if it comes too quickly and doesn’t allow time for the parties to propose their own candidates. The Greens ran an explicitly anti-Barroso campaign and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the leader of the Greens, campaigned in the parliament yesterday for a proper parliamentary debate on the nominations for Presdient. Neither of these parties managed to propose their own candidates before the elections, however, which would have given the peoples of Europe a say.

In the letter Barroso underlines his priorities. They can be summarised as:

- Rebuilding the EU’s financial system. Barroso is careful not to insist on too much reform, although he does mention Commission proposals for increased supervision, which are controversial in the UK (but then all initiatives of the Commission are controversial in the UK)

- Employment.

- Climate Change and the agreement at Copenhagen

- tackling illegal migration and the putting in place of the securitarian Stockholm Program adopted by the Commission last week.

- agreeing on Institutional issues as quickly as possible, such as when the Irish Referendum is going to be, and deciding on the new Commission as soon as possible (of course!)

All in all it is a program designed to please the conservative members of the European Council, from a conservative Commission president who thoughout his term has sought primarily to secure his own reelection by this small group. I have written about this in Europa journal previously (a puppet and his inevitable empire). It is cynical that he writes this letter only a couple of days before the meeting of the Council, and not before the elections themselves, which is to be blamed at least in part on the European political parties in opposition not putting up any candidate of their own. We can only hope that the opposition can conclude their secretive back-room deals quickly enough to field at least one alternative option who will make public his or her own program for the Commission. In that way the peoples in Europe might just about be able to get their word in about what they think before the nomination, if we all work together to shout loud enough.

Poll analysis from Simon Hix at the LSE and a separate analysis show that support for Barroso is low amongst European citizens: see The Parliment website

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The victory of the European People’s Party does not guarantee a majority of the votes for Barroso whose renewal is supported by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy who are asking him to feature a more volontarist programme.

British outgoing leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) in the European Parliament, Graham Watson, wants to become the next President of the European Parliament. To do so, he is more than interested in President Barroso’s programme, but the 85 ALDE MEPs of the European Parliament are not united on the question of Mr. Barroso’s renewal. This could press on or against Barroso being renewed and is thus strategical for Mr. Watson to get the Presidency of the European Parliament for half a term of office in exchange.

There is a race against the clock as Euroscepticism in Great Britain where the leader of the conservative opposition David Cameron promised to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty even though the ratification process is completed in the country. And this could happen following the collapse of Gordon Brown and the Labour as there is “no written constitution and government can do anything it wants” in this country insists Graham Watson.

Moreover, if the Europhobic conservative Presidents of the Czech Republic and Poland manage to postpone their signings of the Treaty up to Cameron’s election and coming to power, then the Lisbon Treaty is dead.

For the full Le Monde’s article click here.

Marion Van Renterghem is a critic at Le Monde and the 2003-Albert Londres award-winner of the 65th French press prize.

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