Unboxing the Conference on the Future of Europe: A Preliminary View on its Democratic Raison-d’être and Participatory Architecture

Abstract

As the European Union undergoes a major, self-proclaimed democratic exercise – the Conference on the Future of Europe –, this article offers a preliminary assessment of the Conference’s participatory architecture and, more broadly, its democratic raison d’etre. After reconstructing the genesis of the Conference by rehearsing the standard account of this initiative, it offers an alternative account, aimed at contextualizing the Conference within past attempts at reforming the Union and framing it as potentially compensating for the lack of a genuine, pan-EU political and media space. The article then moves to unpack the Conference’s participatory design by discussing its legal basis, overall architecture and governance. While it would be naive political solutionism to expect that this ad hoc democratic innovation initiative will magically address the EU democratic malaise, the Conference’s embedded experimentalism can be seen as a promising first step towards the realization of the legitimacy-enhancing potential of participation, as it was originally conceived in the Constitutional Treaty and eventually resurrected into the Treaty of Lisbon. A few concluding remarks suggest that the Conference’s success should not be measured against the sole prospect of Treaty reform, but rather its ability to offer both EU institutions and its citizens a foretaste of a more intelligible, deliberative, and therefore more inclusive, transnational Europe.