EU politics 2.0: Getting the citizen into European democracy

The European Union is a proto-democratic polity, focused on the city of Brussels, dispersed over 27 member states and 500 million citizens, based on a story of overcoming centuries of violence and held together by complex administrative procedures and a small number of Europeanised elites willing to invest time and effort in bridging the gaps that are still obvious.

Genuine European Union politics are limited to politicians, officials, and diplomats within the core EU institutions like the European Commission (the supranational political administration of the EU), the EU Council (where the 27 member states are represented), and the European Parliament, which has been newly elected in June and just re-started its activities.

Outside Brussels, these EU politics have always been low key, hardly noticed by anyone not involved in European administrative co-operation, EU-related lobbying, or rare transnational meetings of political associations with a European agenda. The best example was the European Parliament elections this year that passed almost unnoticed by the larger public.

In this centralised, Brussels-focused context, participation of individual citizens in EU politics was close to impossible. Yet, web 2.0 is offering new channels for involvement of ordinary citizens – and we are ready to use them.

When I say “we”, I am referring to a small but growing group of European citizens inside and outside Brussels using blogs, online social networks, and Twitter to communicate, discuss, and organise activities that are not born within the institutional setting of the EU – but still related to questions of pan-European interest.

Most of us are part of the Generation 2.0, but in the end this is more than a generational issue. We don’t want to accept the old top-down politics and we are trying to overcome a European perspective that doesn’t treat us as citizens but as simple beneficiaries of policies made in our so-called “best interest”.

Over the last year, there has been a rising amount of interaction between us, and especially the use of Twitter has finally brought some dynamics into EU politics that appear very static from an outsider perspective.

A good example was the European Parliament election night (7 June 2009): On that night, despite the lack of general interest in these elections, a significant number of people from most member states discussed the election results under the #eu09 and #ep09 hashtags (that a smaller circle of people like us had been using already before) in all major and many minor EU languages – still unthinkable at the 2004 elections.

What we see is the development of a slowly growing Euroblogosphere (summarised on the still developing platform bloggingportal.eu) complemented by a Eurotwittersphere that involves even more individuals (political citizens, journalists, scientists, EU officials, lobbyists, and politicians) who do not write blogs.

Together, we are trying to create a (hyper-)linked European public sphere, researching and spreading information that remained unnoticed so far, thereby creating publicly visible European debates that go beyond the old-style closed-door politics that still rule the Brussels world.

But I don’t want to create a false image:

These developments are still very young, they are not straightforward, and they include a very limited number of people that are already part of the Europeanised elites I have mentioned at the beginning of the article. We are starting what needs to become bigger, we are testing in how far modern technologies are able to spice up EU politics, and we are creating a basis that might be helpful in the future.

This is nothing but a beginning. What we will have to do is to figure out ways to get more citizens into the European democracy, extending our limited circle by creating communication networks and communities in which European politics can be both debated and influenced.

However, one of the major obstacles compared to the USA is the existence of 23 official languages within the European Union. Creating transnational and translingual debates around political processes – that in addition are also largely opaque and poorly communicated – under these conditions is not trivial; the evolution of common blogosphere hardly possible.

So we will have to find creative ideas and creative individuals to overcome these obstacles. But many of us are ready to accept the challenge, and already over the coming year I expect several initiatives in this regard.

From now on, I will use the possibilities of the Personal Democracy Forum blog to discuss with you such issues related to European politics 2.0; I will present my own ideas and the ideas of others, looking forward to input from you who are reading inside and outside Europe!

(The author is a Euroblogger writing about EU and European politics on his blog “Julien Frisch – Watching Europe”.)