The ECI as a Democratic Innovation: Analysing its Ability to Promote Inclusion, Empowerment and Responsiveness in European Civil Society

Abstract

This article analyses the effect of the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) in the EU's participatory model. It considers first its origins in the process of participation of civil society in the Convention to point out the importance of considering the debates on participation in the last decade. It then builds on the expectations of other papers in this special issue that the main users of the ECI will be a constituency of civil society organisations so far weakly involved in European affairs and focuses mainly on the ECI's innovative effects on the relations between the European institutions and organised civil society. The article analyses whether the ECI may make the EU participatory model more inclusive, empowering and more oriented towards the public sphere than it has been so far. It finds that the ECI may make European civil society more diverse, representative and oriented to the public sphere, although it is not clear that the initiative grants them a more salient role. In this sense the financial, organisational and political costs associated to the initiative seem more important than the potential gains it offers, although it is also expected that the ECI will become a sufficiently salient tool in political terms to be neglected by the EU institutions.

Key Words:

• European civil society
• public sphere
• European Citizens' Initiative

Notes

Susana del Río points out the importance of considering the process from the Constitutional Treatyto the Treaty of Lisbon in ‘2002–2012: El proceso de la Iniciativa Ciudadana Europea’: http://www.euroefe.com/1375_euroblog/1554863_2002-2012-el-proceso-de-la-iniciativa-ciudadana-europea.html

See, for instance, the salience of the ECI among the characteristics of the Lisbon Treaty on the Europa website: http://europa.eu/lisbon_treaty/glance/democracy/index_en.htm

Article 10 Regulation (EU) No 211/2011 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 16 February 2011 on the citizens' initiative (11 March 2011) Official Journal of the European Union L 65/1.

European Disability Forum, Brussels, 2 July 2008 ‘European Commission Non Discrimination Legislation Proposal Fails to Protect Disabled People’: http://www.1million4disability.eu/news_detail.asp?pk_id_news=28&langue=EN

The website of the Initiative for the European citizens' initiative provides a high number of results in a Google research http://www.citizens-initiative.eu/?page_id=23

Protocol (No. 6) on the location of the seats of the institutions and of certain bodies, offices, agencies and departments of the European Union.