Some of the UK Agora team members have been deeply engaged in the Conference on the Future of Europe. That’s why we see that experiment in a new democracy as a kind of template for our debates on the future of democracy in Britain. This seems to be rather an unexpected, potentially positive, development in the EU, which may lead to a very rapid federalization of the whole EU. On 27 November 2019 in Paris, President Macron with a nod from Chancellor Merkel proposed the setting up of the Conference, which started on 9 May 2021, and is to be completed in spring 2022.
You may wonder what is the reason for such a sudden need to accelerate the long-overdue changes in the EU’s set up. If you think it is Covid-19 then it some way you may be right, since it is just another evidence of how fast the world around has started to change. It is enough to point to the impact of Zoom conferencing on the education and working from home or Amazon shopping. The world around us has simply started to change at an almost exponential change. what now takes a year, by the end of the decade will take about one week. One of the most significant areas of such change is the accelerated growth of self-learning AI, which many expert believe will be beyond human control by 2030. We have just about one decade, perhaps the last decade, to ensure we can still control our future. Therefore, the reform of the EU is not just about saving the EU from collapse by transforming it into a very shallow federation. We must aim for much more – for the federated EU take a de facto control of teh future of our planet. Of the 10 potential organisations that might do it, the EU came as the most credible to ‘save the world’. You can read more about it here, or if you are in a hurry – here.
That is way the outcome of this Conference is so important. It was finally launched on the Europe Day on 9th May 2021, to be completed by spring 2022. The composition of the Conference is shown below:
The decision-making body is to be the Conference Plenary. The Conference is to discuss 10 subject areas (called Topics). Each of these Topics is to be deliberated in one of the 12 chosen EU countries in a series of debates at National Citizens Assemblies. The Conference legal document is purposefully imprecise, so that everyone on the European Council could accept the text. The real unknown are the Citizens’ Assemblies. If the final result of the Conference delivers just promises but no actions, that may lead to serious unrest in some EU countries and strengthening the motives for a split of the EU into several bits, like the current Eurozone. On the other hand, Citizens’ Assemblies pressure may create an unexpected opportunity to convert the planned conference into a de facto Constitutional Convention for the future European Federation.
