In 2017, the European Commission described the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) as ‘helping to build a European public sphere’ which ‘contributes to bringing citizens closer to the Union’ in a working document accompanying the document Proposal for a Regulation on the European citizens' initiative. Three years on, to what extent has the ECI contributed to this endeavour? How do we assess what a European public sphere might be?
According to the political scientist Marianne Van de Steeg, ‘public spheres emerge through the public debate of controversial issues…the more we debate issues, the more we engage each-other in our public discourses, the more we actually create political communities’ (Van de Steeg, 2010, p.39). Maximilian Conrad, head of the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Iceland (2016) draws a distinction between campaigns which challenge the EU polity as a whole, and those which challenge aspects of EU policy. In specific interpretation of this work, among the former would include four initiatives whose registration was refused on the grounds of being outside of the scope of EU treaties: ‘A Europe of Solidarity’ (cancel Greek Debt); to ‘hold a confidence vote in EU government’; ‘Abolish the European Parliament’; and (initially) ‘STOP TTIP’, with its wider anti-globalisation critique. Examples of initiatives which challenge specific policies include Ban Glyphosate, One of Us, Stop Vivisection, and Free Vaping. These all fulfil the criteria of Andreas Follesdal (Professor at PluriCourts, Oslo) of offering ‘competing policy positions based on a contested conception of the European interest’ (Follesdall, 2015, p.261), but the wider question is to whether measures which contest the EU polity, such as Eurosceptic driven proposals, really can help to create a European public sphere.
In assessing the impact of ECI’s at national level, the European Commission noted in 2018 that in the four cases at that time where the signature threshold has been passed, there was a common element: Germany, Italy and Spain all exceeded the national quotas, with Germany notably ‘in front’ with 2.3 million signatures collected. ‘Minority Safe Pack’ notably drew most of its signatures from Hungary and Romania, where there are issues about the treatment of these nationals in the other country, and attracted signatures from regions where national identity and linguistic minorities is an issue (e.g. Sud Tirol). 75% of the signatures collected for the ‘Right2\water’ campaign were from Germany, where a comedian gave the issue a high public profile through a TV show and a YouTube video which went viral as Julian Plottke (Political Scientist at the University of Passau) highlighted in 2016 . The campaign later gained a high saliency in Ireland, following the decision of the Irish government to introduce water charges for the first time (Greenwood and Tuokko, 2017). Lowest of all in the signature collection tally for the four measures is Estonia, with a meagre 6,023 signatures collected. These factors suggest the presence of ‘segmented national spheres’ rather than a common ‘European public sphere’.
Commission Executive Vice-President Timmermans has already declared that the ECI is not a tool of direct democracy, but an agenda setting measure and a tool for participation (European Commission, 2017). Thus, a final consideration here is whether the ECI could better be classified as a contribution to a European political public sphere as referred to by Alvaro Oleart (Free University of Amsterdam) and Luis Bouza (College of Europe) in 2017 and by Erik Longo (University of Florence) in 2019. The measure is used most by those who already have a strong EU orientation and knowledge as found by Anna Kandyla (European University Institute) and Sergiu Gherghina (University of Glasgow) in 2018, while there is low coverage of the ECI in the traditional media (highlighted by the Bertelsmann foundation in 2018). All of the five initiatives which reached the threshold required for institutional consideration were created by established organisations. These factors suggest that the ECI mostly makes a contribution to debate in Brussels, and in localities acutely affected by the topic of an ECI, rather than an EU wide public sphere.
Thus, in conclusion, the contribution of the ECI to a ‘European public sphere’ seems much more limited to a series of national contexts where an ECI is of particularly acute local relevance, rather than to stimulating EU wide debate, and to where debate is more restricted to a European political public sphere concentrated around the ‘Brussels bubble’.
Author
Justin Greenwood is Emeritus Professor of European Public Policy at the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK, and a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe. He has contributed articles on the European Citizens’ Initiative to the peer reviewed journals Comparative European Politics, European Politics and Society, and Interest Groups and Advocacy.
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