Legal and Historical Aspects of Civic Activity in the European Communities and in EU

Abstract

Civic activity in the European Communities and the European Union has never been the priority. This is visible in the legislative acts which emanate a lack of political will of the European decision-makers in this respect. The project of European Communities had an elite character from the very beginning. Increasing integration, which meant that the sovereignty of national states was gradually ceded onto the institutions of the Community, enforced gradual involvement of citizens in this process. This was supposed to show in direct elections to the European Parliament (since 1979) as well as in the possibility of expressing the will in treaty referendums. Together with the formal establishment of the European Union, its citizenship was established too by introducing the European Citizens’ Initiative. Theoretically, it was supposed to be an instrument allowing the Union citizens to get directly involved in its legislative process. In practice it proved to be a highly imperfect legal tool whose provisions had to be amended. The few attempts to give the vote to the citizens, such as the referendum over the Maastricht Treaty, the referendum over the Treaty establishing the Constitution for Europe, or the Treaty of Lisbon effectively discouraged the legislator from this type of democratic experiments. When the EU citizens noticed that the legally available forms of civic activity were but a façade of democratization, they focused on other models of operativeness.