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ALESSANDRO DELLA VALLE/AP
HELPING HANDS:
Bridging Europe hopes to draw people into the European debate
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Today, the European Union is faced with Euro-skepticism and the widespread belief that it suffers from what E.U. jargon refers to as a "democratic deficit." This stems from the perception that the debate on the future of Europe is too technical, driven by a handful of politicians and senior officials in Brussels who make far-reaching decisions without necessarily taking into consideration the wishes of the general population. Perceptions do matter, because in the end they help shape reality: if European citizens feel they are not involved in the way Europe is changing, they will become even more disengaged than they are today. The idea behind the whole European project will become endangered, and in a worst-case scenario the European Union might even collapse. This extreme outcome was explored in 1999 by the European Commission itself, with one scenario envisaging Europe-wide rioting and the headquarters of the Commission set on fire after plans to reform European welfare systems failed.
So it is crucial to engage people — to make Europe the Europe of its citizens by giving them an opportunity to say what they would like their future to be. In order to do so, it is necessary to reach well beyond the élite to find out what ordinary people really want. A conceptual framework to do just that was originated by the political scientist Jürgen Habermas at the turn of the 1980s. Habermas came up with the notion of "participative democracy": a model of democratic legitimacy grounded on discursive situations in which participants have to persuade each other by the force of argument alone.
Relying on this methodology, the prescription to cure Euro-skepticism is straightforward: improve communication through bottom-up, active dialogue rather than top-down dissemination of information, and give people control of their own agenda and the opportunity to use new democratic tools such as deliberative polling and electronic democracy. The idea of deliberative polling is modeled on the ancient Athenian Council, in which a large representative sample of citizens assembled in an effort to model what the electorate as a whole would think if it could be immersed in intensive deliberative processes.
Typically, a sample of citizens is brought together for several days to discuss an issue. They complete a survey, read materials and have an opportunity to pose questions to experts and politicians with different opinions. After participating in several sessions, they are polled again to determine how much their opinions have changed. People always demonstrate they have developed a more complex understanding of the issue than they previously held. Electronic democracy depends on information technologies: properly used, they can reinvigorate democracies by providing cheap and instant access to a network of knowledge and communication by providing links among governments, institutions and citizens.
It was with these objectives in mind that Bridging Europe was created as a joint project between the World Economic Forum and the Danish think tank Monday Morning to help promote democratic sustainability in Europe. This project rests on two very simple and yet powerful ideas. The first is that dialogue is the driving force of progress to reduce skepticism and promote understanding. A simple, decent dialogue can go a long way toward reconciling seemingly irreconcilable differences. Unlike a debate, a dialogue is a collaborative exercise: one looks for strengths in opposite positions, helping to build an open-minded attitude and a willingness to change position. To use the analogy of game theory, a debate is a zero-sum game (the gain of one side is the loss of the other) while a dialogue is a positive-sum game — it allows both sides to reach a better solution than either of their original ones.
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