What has fascinated me from the very first moment that I embarked on the European Union Student Council adventure, was the innovative character of the Council’s strategy of representing students: asking students directly what policies they want European Institutions to carry out in the field of higher education, and in doing so enabling them to act as a pressure group and speak up about issues that concern them through their own ‘mouthpiece’, the European Union Student Council.
Democrazia Diretta promotes the same concept and attempts to spread it to all citizens in Italy, thus creating support among the constituency to convince institutions and media to give more attention to issues such e-democracy, referenda, law proposals drafted by citizens and so on.
In the European Union something like this exists already, although in a very basic format. A few weeks ago the Greek Presidency of the European Union launched an e-voting portal (http://evote.eu2003.gr/EVOTE/en/index.stm ). Through this portal citizens can express their vision on the future of Europe, on drugs policies, on various running items in the European Parliament and, very topical, on the war in Iraq.
The European Union is also one of the few supra-national bodies which allows citizens to participate in the decisionmaking process by giving them the opportunity to present petitions and moreover to monitor the state of the presented petition while it is being discussed in the European Parliament.
The European Union member states will most likely present the European Union Constitution that is now under construction, to the European citizens via a referendum in order for them to ratify it.
The European Union is working with the United Nations and the International Telecommunication Unit (ITU) on different issues concerning e-governance and information society issues. Civil society is mobilised in order to make citizens aware of how valuable and convenient it is to cast their vote directly instead of via their representatives in the European and national parliaments or local city councils.
So, it looks like the communication between citizens and institutions is already very advanced or at least much more advanced than could ever have been expected before the emergence of Internet. Is this all true then? Are we silently approaching a direct democracy era? Are citizens really involved in the decisionmaking process? NOT YET, AT ALL!
The problem at stake here is the implementation of the policy decisions: after the opinions of the citizens have been collected, the political representatives , the most important symbol of a parliamentary democracy, do not put forward these opinions. The proposals are not discussed and voted upon. In a parliamentary democracy the opinion of the people should be the starting point for the legislator when representing the interest of the people.
Nowadays, commissions and assemblies work on the basis of interest groups and lobbies, completely forgetting the people’s voice. A first strategy to make the voice of the people count in the political system could be to start from the local level authorities.
In Brasil for example, the municipality of Porto Allegre allows 20% of the budget to be discussed by Citizens, amended and finally voted upon while in Italy more than 400 people have presented petitions to the Parliamentary assembly during the present legislation and only 19 arrived to the parliament or the committees to be discussed. None of them yet being voted.
Returning to the examples presented above we have to admit how , for instance, the work done by the ITU and the United Nations towards creating an Information society for all is still in progress. In the Preparatory Committee one can easily see how the national interest is still the most important objective to be pursued. The action plan of the World Summit for the Information Society is still vague and without any clear implementation strategy due to lack of funds.
The same declaration drafted by government representatives from all over the world is also unclear and cannot easily implemented.
The e-vote portal discussed above is ,furthermore, only a poll-led initiative designed to involve citizens in the work of European Institutions without any clear follow-up about what will be done with the opinions cast on this portal.
The referendum that will take place all over Europe to ratify the European Constitution will not be blinded for governments that can still act without taking care of the People’s voice since the acceptance of the advices given by the European Constituency assembly must only be signed by the Inter- ministerial body. Not even one pan-European debate on the issues concerning the Consitution has been held.
When critically examining the examples presented before, it becomes quite clear how those projects are only smoke in the eyes, a superficial response to a clear demand. Key issue here is the desire for control: governments tend to dismiss the will of the citizens in order to maintain control over the agenda-setting process
E-democracy has been reduced to discussions and proposals which never arrive to the practical level. Direct democracy has been postponed until the moment that politicians declare the will to leave their bureaucratic jungle of power-politics: never in a month of Sundays!
Citizens organise manifestations, they protest, march or yell, but the only thing politicians do is instrumentalising this voice. The more people raise their voice, the more politicians use this voice to keep power.
The Iraqi war could function as an example of how the voice of the people is loud and can become strong and powerful. But looking at the reality of national interests in this war, one sees that in France, for example, a key role has been played by the already signed oil contracts with Iraq. The anti-war manifestations in the streets were ignored. The same line of reasoning can be applied to Russia, Germany and China . A different approach of how direct democracy is only smoke in the eyes nowadays is clearly the USA where many people protested against and declared their aversion to the war (during the first days of war only 40% were pro-war), without politicians taking their opinion into account.
In an era of true direct democracy a clear ,direct consultation of voters would have been followed by a corresponding decision.
This is the ambiguous discrepancy in our current society between political representation and the amount of information that is available to enable citizens to take an autonomous decision.
Let us keep all in mind that the representative system was born in order to allow citizens to commit themselves to earning their daily food without having to take care of technical matters such as politics, of which they did not know much anyway.
Political representatives were their voice while they sold bread and meat in a society where the amount of information available to the people was low and mostly not accessible at all.
Nowadays it is the other way around: information is accessible for all, there is an increasing desire for direct participation in the res publica and mainly the third sector (services) participates in public/private joint ventures. Politicians however do not give up their power positions because they are afraid of seeingheir own powers diminished.
It is time for democracy now to approach its second, more direct, stage: responding to the will of the citizens, fostering citizen participation through polls and government action in accordance with the outcome of those polls.
The reason politicians will respond to these popular demands will mainly be to preserve their own power without eventually carrying out the real will of those citizens who voted them into office. At a first moment there will be a sort of misunderstanding between Political power and citizens will until citizenes take up the challenge and ask for direct power.
So, what is the solution to this problem?
I believe that the described lack of legitimacy should be researched by academia, public sector consultants, ICT professionals and NGOs. In addition, it should be truthfully documented by the media.
These projects could be carried out under the auspices of and with support of a sponsorship programme of those institutions mentioned above to make it clear that the partnership between public and private sector is important.
In this way a platform for a strategy will be created and then research projects can be organised on many different topics such as security issues and voting systems, citizens participation and democratic governance, the sociology of direct participation, the change of the democratic paradigm, and last but not leastthe issue of access to clear and complete information. After a successfully evaluated piloting period we could really start campaigning direct democracy as an effective paradigm for our society.
True direct democracy is about participation, about being listened to and about seeing the will of the electorate be put into practice.
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