Kalypso Nicolaidis is the Chair in Global Affairs at the School of Transnational Governance (EUI) and one of the co-leaders of the Democratic Odyssey project. Its aim? to create a permanent European citizens’ assembly. It was launched on September 26th on the iconic Pnyx of Athens!
Missions Publiques: Several organisations will be working together to design this permanent European citizens’ assembly. What are the objectives and challenges?
Kalypso Nicolaidis. The idea is already to set up and grow a network. Think of it as a journey across time and space. We have a beacon and we are charting a course to get there as our flotilla is joined by more and more ships, a widening “constituent network”. We are not starting in a vacuum. Missions Publiques has played a crucial role in designing and applying its vast experience with deliberative processes around the world to help facilitate the Conference on the Future of Europe in 2021-22, and last spring, through the second generation of EU panels. But this process has remained more technocratic than democratic, witness for one, the semantics: ‘panel’ evokes mega focus-groups while ‘assemblies’ evokes power to the people. The idea is to link the familiar bargaining that goes on in the EU’s corridors of power of the EU with an appropriation by citizens themselves of the tradeoffs and difficult choices involved.
Then, it’s important to distinguish such ad-hoc panels and a permanently established Assembly within the EU, a standing body which would become a recognizable part of the European political landscape, essentially a new branch of government at EU level. I am aware that the term ‘permanent’ can be misleading since the randomly selected members of our European Assembly would rotate every few months, but permanent means that it would not be convened at the whim of politicians. A standing body buys democratic respect. We can draw inspiration from the ongoing Citizens’ Assemblies in Ostbelgien, Paris, or Brussels. But this has never been done at the transnational level, which is why the EU experiment is so precious, whatever its shortcomings and ad-hoc nature.
Crucially, our Odyssey is not just about the beacon. This is an exciting project because we are actually making it happen through a ‘proof of concept’, a pilot assembly that we hope will be equally bottom up and top-down, both supported by civil society and connected to EU institutions, eventually demonstrating that democracy cannot only be a gift from above. This is the journey that will lead us first from Athens 2023 to Athens 2024, and hopefully beyond, to many other ports.
Missions Publiques: If we continue with your ocean metaphor, how do you plan to navigate a sea full of complexity and obstacles?
Kalypso Nicolaidis. Hence the metaphor of an Odyssey, which can take forever while encountering many storms and monsters along the way. We face public inertia, People who, let’s face it, no longer understand the democratic pedigree of chance and rotation in democracy, as a way to protect against the corruption of power. We will have to invent a new “pedagogy of randomness,” with a truly inclusive, transparent and fun sortition design. And the composition of this dynamic body will need to appeal to people’s political imaginaries.
But if transnational is not to be equated with ‘remote’ and ‘opaque’, we will need to resist the sirens of centralized headquarters in the “Brussels-bubble”. The Assembly should meet in diverse locations across Europe, ranging from theaters and parks to local parliaments and museums. We may even explore the exciting possibility of a ship-Assembly, sailing on seas or rivers, with each stop along the way becoming an integral part of its interconnected journey, and local festivities greeting the incoming vessels.
But the greatest obstacle is structural and lies with the prevalent political culture. If this assembly is to have a tangible impact, political and technocratic elites will need to accept to give up some control and allow for a modicum of self-determination by citizens – uncertainty and contingency is the essence of democracy. Sure, the Assembly could be formally established without treaty change through an inter-institutional agreement. But if so, will politicians and Eurocrats take it seriously?
The stakes are undoubtedly high, and the journey may be arduous, but we believe we have the wind in our sails. There’s no better time to start this journey. With European parliament elections on the horizon and a new Commission agenda to come, we have a unique opportunity to gather support for this initiative and bring many friends of democracy on board.
Missions Publiques: The launch of the Democratic Odyssey project on the historic site of the Pnyx in Athens is highly symbolic…
Kalypso Nicolaidis. The choice of the Pnyx on the slopes of the Acropolis as our launch site is deeply symbolic and exciting. This is where Athenian citizens gathered over two millennia ago to participate in direct democracy and decide on government affairs, laying the foundation for the democratic principles we value today. And of course, they relied on random selection or government by lot, a practice all but forgotten in the intervening era but being revived in our times. It’s a powerful reminder that democracy is not static but fluid and evolves over time in fits and starts. But crucially, we seek to learn from these old stones with the distance and irony of modernity, reminding ourselves that these guys fell short, excluding women, slaves or foreigners, and that we are exploring new frontiers on vastly different scales and with vastly different technologies. Moreover, Athens may like to call itself the birthplace of democracy, but this birth had other parents too in other places beyond the shores of Europe. Therefore, the Pnyx serves as a double reminder of the inspiration we may draw from these ancient times and of the radically new horizons we must explore in reshaping European democracy.
"Permanent means that it would not be convened at the whim of politicians
Kalypso Nicolaidis
Co-leader of the Democratic Odyssey project
Missions Publiques: Your personal background and plural nationalities have played a significant role in shaping your perspective. How has this influenced your approach to the Democratic Odyssey project?
Kalypso Nicolaidis. The personal is political, yes, but with hindsight. I can tell a story about growing up as French and Greek, with German and Spanish origins, and later acquiring British citizenship, and how this has meant learning early to navigate the prejudices, ascription and love-hate relationships between various cultures, languages, identities. Others with similar life stories dream of turning Europe into a single nation. But in my case, engaging with the complexities of identity and belonging awoke early the pluralist fiber and my love for Europe as a community of others, a place where I feel at home abroad. The European project has fascinated me from an early age for its attempt to weave together these different political cultures in a transnational democratic fabric. It may be preordained that my experiences and commitments combined with those of my wonderful friends and colleagues, would eventually lead me to the adventure of the Democratic Odyssey, a hands-on experiment in bringing the horizontal nature of European democracy all the way down to its peoples, its citizens, beyond electoral democracy. I think of these innovative ways to do transnational democracy as mutual recognition in action. In this spirit, the Democratic Odyssey will create interconnected spaces where citizens from diverse backgrounds recognize each other as equally capable of writing a collective story, acknowledging the value of different perspectives without denying conflict.
Missions Publiques: Why is such an initiative needed at this moment in Europe’s democratic history?
Kalypso Nicolaidis. It feels as though Europe, like many parts of the world, is out of breath. Or rather I should say it’s ‘electoral democracy’ that is out of breath, because it tends to impose simplistic binary choices on people, create polarized camps and ban nuance and ambivalence. As a result, our countries are no longer democratically resilient in the face of threats such as electoral interference, mass surveillance, disinformation. On top of that, the rise of socio-economic precarity and environmental vulnerabilities combined with increasingly weak social protections have fueled anger and distrust in traditional institutions, leading to political disenfranchisement and apathy, and alas the rise of a new kind of reactionary democracy or electoral authoritarianism in Europe and around the world. But let’s not lay the blame on the electorate. Democracy is out of breath also because the demos feels out of the picture. Plato’s cherished rule by the guardians, or epistocracy, alongside state and algorithmic capture are hollowing out the essence of democracy, namely self-government. And of course, transnational challenges are not matched by transnational democracy.
However, there’s a paradox: even though civic spaces are under attack, they are also changing. We’re witnessing new forms of democracy in both physical and online civil society engagement, informal activism, intergenerational democracy, and community experiments. This marks a third democratic transformation, following the first time around in ancient times with democratic city-states and the second time in the 18th century with national parliaments, as Robert Dahl would describe it.
The question with us today is which of these two trends will win out. The European Union, often seen as a bastion of liberal democracy, demonstrates at one and the same time the fragility and the resilience of democratic norms and the rule of law. It is up to us to embrace the third democratic transformation and change the odds. Imagine our strength if we became a ‘Citizen power Europe’ capable of mobilizing collective intelligence and agency at all levels -local, national and European, to respond more decisively to pressing global issues! The Democratic Odyssey project rests on this democratic bet.
Missions Publiques: In your “Decentering Agenda”(2), you’ve strongly emphasized the need for Europe to decolonize and decenter itself. Will this concept of decentering be incorporated into the Democratic Odyssey project?
Kalypso Nicolaidis.
After the events of 9/11, I initiated a program titled ‘Rethinking Europe in a Non-European World (RENEW),’ which I pursued for two decades alongside my brilliant doctoral students. Today, the challenge posed by non-Western powers to Western dominance is a central element of global geopolitics. It’s essential to recognize that our perspective is shaped by our own location, but it’s worthwhile to consider how the world might look from other vantage points.
In truth, Europeans sometimes inadvertently frustrate others with their persistent arrogance, whether it’s in trade negotiations, conditional aid, or so-called “democracy promotion.” To address this, we must ask ourselves: What viewpoints emerge in places like Accra, Lilongwe, Manila, Delhi, or Brasília? Decentering requires acknowledging the limitations of our Eurocentric viewpoint, humbly engaging with others on their terms, and learning from diverse local democratic practices, rather than imposing our own templates. This process, which I call ‘reversing the democratic gaze,’ begins with drawing insights from how countries have negotiated their social contracts and utilized innovative constitutional and citizen power-sharing mechanisms, as seen in South Africa and India. It also involves studying participatory methods and the strategies employed by young people and civil society, including their use of social media for engagement. And there are also lessons in how other regional organisations deal with the democratic pathologies of their member states.
Our journey starts at home although we hope to have the momentum to take it beyond our shores soon, piggy-backing on the work of Missions Publiques and other global democratic networks. We are incorporating lessons from non-Western countries as we design and facilitate our pilot assembly. This is especially relevant since countries in the global south are less traditionally attached to electoral democracy and more open to experiments in participatory democracy. Holistic democracy, or the ambition to combine electoral, participatory, deliberative and direct democratic practices thus becomes a shared agenda between Western and non-Western people.
In the end, we recognize that European experiences are neither homogenous nor uniquely ‘European’ given the constitutive contributions of the colonized subject through labour, resources and migration to the consolidation of European nation-states and the EU project.(3) If a transnational permanent Assembly is as a vital part of democratic renewal in Europe, we need to open up our imaginations to radical political change, here, there and everywhere.
(3) Read more about The Democratic Odyssey project on EUI website here: https://www.eui.eu/en/academic-units/school-of-transnational-governance/stg-projects/transnational-democracy-programme/the-democratic-odyssey
