Alternative Institutional Proposal

[Wayne Hall]

This is the substantive proposal contained in my article written some years ago and entitled: "European Convention, European Constitution"
www.spectrezine.org/europe/waynehall.htm

The basic change I would now make to the text would be to say that it is perhaps not worth trying to argue these proposals through the existing social forums, or wait for the social forums to understand them and adopt them.

"Let us propose the formation of a European Sovereign Council, partly made up of existing heads of state, whether presidents, monarchs or whatever. The European Sovereign Council could also have fifty percent representation from civil society, including one representative of the national social forums of each of the EU member states. The European Sovereign Council, half civil society, half existing heads of state would, by ballot, election or any other means they chose, themselves decide who, for a certain period, would be European head of state. And this European head of state would be a constitutional referee, like the President of Greece or like Queen Elizabeth, not like the executive President George Bush of the ATTAC model. He would swear in a government headed by a Prime Minister of the European Commission, a body formed either from parliamentarians enjoying the confidence of the European Parliament or from members of the European Social Forum, whichever body obtains a fixed-term mandate from a Europe-wide referendum based on universal franchise.

What is involved in this proposal is that we get serious with the social forums we are currently creating and not merely see them as part of a participatory-democratic “relay” process in the service of representative democracy. (This formulation is quoted from ATTAC’s contribution to the European Convention). Representative democracy is in any case, as Ellen Meiksins Wood points out in her Democracy Against Capitalism an American innovation, an idea with no historical precedent in the ancient world: “English Whiggery,” she reminds us, “could have long remained content to celebrate the forward march of Parliament without proclaiming it a victory for democracy. The Americans had no such option.”

If the European Union is to be provided with a Constitution it must institutionalise not a token participatory-democratic input into a representative-democratic polity but orderly competition between representative democracy and direct democracy. This is the arrangement that should have come into the world in Germany and/or England in the first half of the twentieth century, but was instead derailed by the First World War and then, after the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, replaced by geopolitically-distorted military competition between communist and capitalist blocs. This in its apocalyptic final phase has now degenerated even further into a gigantic one-player profit-driven war game against glove-puppet enemies all over the globe. How long can it continue?

The Social Forums

Already-existing practice of the forums dictates that they should not divide on party lines but instead strive for consensus, making no decision until consensus or near-consensus has been arrived at. It was clearly explained to us by Bernard Cassen at the November 2001 inaugural meeting of ATTAC-Hellas in Athens that the search for consensus and avoidance of voting have been central organizational principles of ATTAC since it was first established. Competition in the European polity with the more summary methods of party-based legislatures applying majority rule would serve to sharpen up procedures of consensus-orientated assemblies, which would be permanently aware that political paralysis could lead to loss of mandate. On the other hand the threat of being voted out of power in a referendum would act as a powerful deterrent to the demagogy, the numbers games and the pretend-politics we have come to associate with multiparty parliamentarianism. The frequently-cited disadvantage of consensus-based procedures that they encourage trade-offs and corruption would likewise be greatly diminished by the presence of squads of representative-democratic party politicians permanently on the lookout for precisely such misbehaviour on our part.

The biggest initial problem that the social forums would face would be securing recognition as assemblies rather than a party. The citizens’ movements from whose numbers the social forums would be drawn would never include everyone in the population, and although it would be impermissible for us to exclude people on the basis of ideology, there would always be opponents of direct democracy eager to claim they were being excluded from social forums because of their ideas rather than because of their obstructive, destructive or insincere behaviour. This would place great demands on heads of state and/or constitutional courts, the arbiters of the polities we seek to construct. They would be required to rule which claimants to the status of direct-democratic assemblies (social forums) would have to be classed as political parties and so be required to seek their mandate in that way.

If one bears in mind that the present monopoly status of representative democracy, while assuring citizens as would-be political producers of the right to stand for political office and the right to vote for any representative they choose also restricts their rights as political consumers, confining them/us essentially to one choice: government by mass-media-driven universal-suffrage politicians, it is obvious that under the existing system of representative democracy we are truly being denied important rights. Surely the right to be governed by a polity comprising active citizens and only active citizens, answerable to electorates not as individuals and not as party members but as an assembly and its support network (and certainly NOT answerable to extra-institutional middlemen such as the owners of television channels), is a right that we should be demanding..

The model of the professional, non-political civil service that has been developed with some success in certain countries suggests that would not be impossible - given the political will - for the deliberative-democratic behaviour our social forums would require to meet with high levels of acceptance and support and become a source of social status.

Full elaboration of active citizens’ networks throughout the European Union would make it possible for a kind of reverse subsidiarity to be practised whereby a referendum victory for direct-democracy at one level of government would automatically entail transfer of the mandate from representative-democratic to direct-democratic at all lower levels of government, subject to an opt-out clause making it possible for citizens on submission of a certain number of signatures to hold a local, regional or national referendum challenging that transfer. This arrangement would naturally cut two ways, the same transfer occurring in the event of representative-democrats obtaining the mandate. Thus in the event of power passing to a Prime Minister of the European Commission with his base in the European Social Forum rather than the European Parliament, it would be possible, if enough Greeks, say, were discontented with the prospect of being governed by the Greek Social Forum, for them to demand a referendum offering the prospect, if approved by the majority, of the mandate returning to the familiar party politicians of the Greek Parliament. If the European Social Forum lost its mandate in Europe as a whole to the European Parliament, then the Sovereign Council would be made up of heads of state and delegates appointed by European national parliaments (except for member states where a national referendum had restored the mandate to the country’s social forum).

This evolution towards institutional integration of the social forums now being created throughout Europe (and the rest of the world) could in Europe start from today. The first step would be for the social forums to demand establishment of the Sovereign Council, comprising existing heads of state and an equal number of representatives from the social forums of European Union member states. Following establishment of the Sovereign Council it would be open to parliaments in European Union member states to challenge the mandate of the social forum representatives and propose alternative representatives of their own for the Sovereign Council. This would automatically generate the competition between parliaments and social forums that we would be seeking to incorporate into the European Constitution."

[Wayne Hall]

*4. Not less than one million citizens who are nationals of a significant number of Member States may take the initiative of inviting the European Commission, within the framework of its powers, to submit any appropriate proposal on matters where citizens consider that a legal act of the Union is required for the purpose of implementing the Treaties.

Article 11, paragraph 4, Treaty on European Union

[Wayne Hall]

Here is another synopsis:

An Indepent Citizens' European Assembly

There is a general recognition even in the mass media today that the liberal democratic political system is in terminal crisis and that what is needed are new forms of citizens’ democracy, direct democracy, deliberative democracy. There are many names for it.

What one unfortunately never sees, though, is specific, easily understandable blueprints of the forms that this citizens’ democracy might take, what its relationship would be with the existing forms of multi-party liberal democracy or parliamentary democracy and what its relationship would be with existing forms of direct democracy, such as referenda, plebiscites, the activity of citizens’ groups, non-governmental organizations and so on.

The Swiss model is often cited and here I think it is worth a mention that the forms of democracy that exist today in the Swiss confederation, and indeed Swiss neutrality, are very largely the work of someone we mention frequently: the first governor of modern Greece, Ioannis Capodistrias. The specific type of polity of modern Switzerland was designed to keep the country out of the sphere of influence both of France and of Austria, which in the nineteenth century was of course among the great powers. Capodistrias was the foreign minister of the Czar of Russia at this time, and Russia of course had the most rational of geopolitical reasons to try to reduce the influence both of France and of Austria.

In any case, does the Swiss model of direct democracy have anything to offer us? Does it suit our specific needs now? I would argue that it doesn’t, because it does nothing to curb the power of mainstream mass media. The mass media can influence the outcome of a referendum just as easily as they can influence the outcome of an election. This is particularly the case if the subject of the referendum is in any way complicated or technical.

What is the situation with the mass media? Quite simply that the priority is on deceit and distortion. The most important realities will be subject to media blackout. What cannot be blacked out will be distorted to guarantee confusion and non-comprehension to all but the tiny minority that has found out the reality by other means. Issues that are given systematic high-profile media attention are very often fictitious.

Politicians who rely on this mass media for their election, that is to say virtually all politicians, cannot be expected to bring it under social control. The only solution then is to organize around it. In the age of the internet, unless it too comes to be controlled as tightly as the media, this is technically possible.

The desideratum, then, for the citizens of the European Union countries, is for an Independent Citizens' European Assembly (ICEA) to be established. Free citizens are citizens who can communicate with each other and with political supporters directly, not via channels that are mediated and under the control of others who can give and withdraw support whenever they want to, and also distort, change and manipulate content whenever they want to. Politicians and public figures who appear on the media that is not under citizens’ control should not have the right to a vote in the ICEA. They should have the right to act as advisors if their advice is sought, but not to participate in voting. This amounts to nothing more than restoration of a convention that used to exist in Westminster democracy before the age of the NGO in the form of a professional civil service. Civil servants were not supposed to speak directly to the media, but only through their responsible minister. The ICEA would restore, and indeed itself assume, some of these functions that used to be assumed by a professional civil service.

The ICEA would seek to compete with the universal suffrage parliament through a periodic referendum say once every five years that could decide on whether legislative powers should for the coming five year period be exercised by the ICEA or by the universal suffrage parliament. Whichever legislature lost the referendum would have merely an advisory, not a legislative, role. If the ICEA should win the referendum at the Pan-European level, this would automatically entail transfer of powers from the multi-party legislatures to the indepenent citizens' assemblies at every lower level: national, regional and municipal, subject to challenge at these lower levels, where local referenda could be organized at the initiative of the losing side. This situation would be reversible, applicable also if the pan-European mandate should go to the multiparty legislature.

The head of state of the European Union should be chosen by a body of electors made up of the heads of state of the member countries and representatives either of the multi-party legislatures or of the independent citizens's assemblies, whichever held the mandate. This would help to deal with one important source of the lack of legitimacy of the European Union which treats the national parliaments of the member states as if national sovereignty is vested in them. Sovereignty in Great Britain, to take just one example, is not vested in the parliament. It is vested in the Crown in Parliament.

The ICEA would have to make it clear at all times that it is not a political party. The political party allegiance of members of the ICEA, and other forms of allegiance such as membership of trade unions, employers associations, non-governmental organizations and so on, would be relegated to private status, similar to the status of a citizen’s religion in a properly functioning secular democracy. There would have to be a court with powers to judge when a member’s behaviour in the independent citizens' assemblies was in violation of this rule. Any person behaving in an independent citizens' assembly like the member of a party would be required to withdraw from the independent citizens' assembly and participate in public life through the multi-party assemblies, not the indepdent citizens 'assemblies.

This is just a brief sketch of how an Indepdent Citizens' European Assembly could be feasible and how it could operate. There is nothing stopping us from making the first move towards constructing such an assembly, and seeking powers for it. Under Article 11, paragraph 4 of the Treaty of Lisbon, “not less than one million citizens who are nationals of a significant number of Member States may take the initiative of inviting the Euroepan Commission, within the framework of its powers, to submit any appropriate proposal on matters where citizens consider that a legal act of the Union is required for the purpose of implementing the Treaties.”

[Wayne Hall]

And here is a briefer version:

INDEPENDENT CITIZENS' EUROPEAN ASSEMBLY

The Independent Citizens' European Assembly (ICEA) will seek to break the power of the mass media over the political system.

The liberal-democratic multiparty political system should not enjoy a monopoly, because the result of such a monopoly is that the voter has no real political choice: whichever politician he or she chooses as a representative will behave in the same way, seeking to turn concrete issues into abstractions that can be utilized as political currency in competition with other similar politicians.

The ICEA will set itself the task of abolishing this monopoly by competing with the existing system as a whole, not as one among a number of contending parties but as an alternative non-party legislature. Seeking to apply consensus procedures rather than voting in its deliberations, it puts itself forward as an alternative to the European Parliament, seeking a mandate once every five years through a pan-European referendum. If it wins the referendum, the ICEA will become the European Union’s legislative body, consigning the European Parliament to consultative status, whose task will be to criticize the ICEA and seek to win back the mandate for itself at the next five-yearly referendum.

The pan-European referendum transferring legislative powers to the ICEA will be valid for every lower level: national, regional and local. However, at these lower levels the supporters of liberal-democratic multiparty institutions will be free immediately after the pan-European referendum to challenge the mandate of the ICEA at their specific level through a national regional or local referendum, and if successful retain the mandate at this lower level for the remainder of the five-year period.

The ICEA will be comprised, as the name implies, of independent citizens. This will mean – as is feasible in the age of the internet – that full participants in the ICEA will not be dependent on political middlemen: the media. Any citizen appearing on television or making use of any other medium of communication than those free from external editorial control, or of any medium not under the control of the ICEA itself, will not enjoy full recognition as an independent citizen and will not be acceptable to the ICEA – except, at most, in a consultative capacity. Similar restrictions were imposed in the past, in some places, on civil servants, and the ICEA will indeed seek to exercise many of the functions that were once exercised by a professional civil service.

The ICEA will seek to break the power of the mass media over the political system, and this is one of the methods by which it proposes to achieve this objective.