Citizens Assemblies — an idea whose time has come (again)?

If it is opening-up the pathway for Ukraine, the EU has to advance the accession of countries in the Balkans that have been waiting decades, as well as Moldova and, with a longer timeframe, Georgia.

That means that the EU is looking to go from 27 member countries to 35-plus in a decade or less. How to get agreement about the way to do this?

That this is a security imperative spurred by the actions of a hostile actor from outside the EU only partially helps in forcing the 27 to define a common approach.

CAP budget problems

The recent dramatic refusals of Poland, Hungary and Slovakia to lift grain bans for Ukraine despite the EU as a whole deciding to do this can at least be partly understood as the first moves of a wider negotiating strategy about the details of accession: how the common agricultural budget of the EU should be recalculated in the scenario where a large, comparatively poor country with very large agricultural interests like Ukraine joins is only one of the largest of a thousand compromises that will need to be found.

Decision-making procedures themselves inside the EU need to be rethought to ensure effectiveness with more members.

A recently published Franco-German report of a group of 12 experts ties itself in knots to try to find a method and multiple backup methods for going about accession and potentially treaty change, and the possibilities of one country or another blocking the process.

And almost no one has dared to pose the most difficult and most important question of all — how to get support of the citizens for these changes?

For situations in which the political actors find it impossible to make decisions, there is a tried-and-tested solution in the modern political science toolbox: the use of deliberative democracy and randomly-selected citizens panels has been used with success around the world, most notably in Ireland to agree on the right to abortion and gay marriage.

Conference on the Future of Europe — the sequel?

Can we imagine such a process taking place on the transnational scale, to decide on the redesign of the EU as new members join?

There is a recent precedent of at least trying something similar: the Conference on the Future of Europe between over 2021 and 2022 included randomly selected citizens panels of 800 people from across Europe.

This exercise made a historic error in not including citizens from accession countries, and went largely unnoticed by the larger public largely because it was not tied to any decision that needs to be taken.

But if this exercise was a test-run before running citizens panels on enlargement and the redesign of the EU that will come with it, including this time citizens from the accession countries, tied to really consequential decisions that need to be made with a timetable for making them, then the EU has an innovative tool at its disposal to both help build social consensus for enlargement and to reassert its dearly held commitment to democracy.

Citizens assemblies are of course no panacea, and notably will not compensate for a lack of political courage, moral clarity and leadership from the top. But as part of a toolbox, and in circumstances where Europe's leaders struggle to live up to all that might be expected of them, it is an important part of the toolbox.

This November will be the 10th anniversary of the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine.

These protests were fundamentally about citizens claiming the right to have a democratic say over the future of their country, and this is what Putin's Russia could not tolerate. What better way to reaffirm these democratic principles on a global stage than by involving citizens in the decisions of the future of Europe?