Mientras más polarizada está la política, más difícil es encontrar soluciones. ¿Cuál es el remedio para evitar un estancamiento? Reúna alrededor de una mesa a personas con diferentes horizontes y permítales plantear soluciones."
La palabra mágica es “deliberación”: varias posibilidades se discuten para llegar a una decisión común. Este proceso está en el centro del experimento de Jonas Nakonz y sus jóvenes colegas del laboratorio suizo de ideas sobre política exterior forausEnlace externo.
Desde hace dos años, Nakonz organiza ‘PoliTisch’Enlace externo (término alemán que significa tanto ‘política’ como ‘mesa política’), una serie de debates sobre políticas migratorias en los que participan personas de diversos grupos de la población y representantes del mundo político. Durante una comida se discuten diferentes posiciones y opiniones. Nakonz puede observar así la forma en que los grupos heterogéneos encuentran soluciones a las cuestiones políticas.
En el origen del enfoque está el siguiente principio: cuando las personas están involucradas en el debate político, tienen la oportunidad de expresar su opinión con más precisión que el simple “sí” o “no” al final del procedimiento. De hecho, la reducción de la democracia a “o esto o aquello” favorece la polarización.
Written by Participatory Democracy Cultural Initiative on .
Posted in Fundamentos / Basics.
The European Citizen's Initiative (ECI) is an instrument of Participatory Democracy within the European Union, allowing European citizens to collect signatures to propose legislation to the European Commission on matters where the EU has competence to legislate. These initiatives need at least one million signatures of EU citizens living at least in 7 of the 28 member states.
These proposals usually include a request to present them to the voters in referendum.The rules to propose these initiatives may be read at the European Commission's WEB pages containing the Official register of the ECI → HERE
The Participatory Democracy Cultural Initiative (PDCI) has consistently supported these goals through initiatives sponsored by Democracy International (DI) and other democratic organizations. We advocate and promote participatory democracy since 2003 and we support direct democracy whenever it is important to consult the people on issues of their concern.
However, we believe that participatory democracy should function within the boundaries of the subsidiarity principle. This Principle is defined in Article 5 of the Treaty on European Union. It aims to ensure that decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen and that constant checks are made to verify that action at EU level is justified in light of the possibilities available at national, regional or local level.That means that communities, provinces and regions should be empowered to resolve their own problems. But it does not mean that the people in those geographical units must be consulted to resolve important national and international decisions.
It is a travesty of democracy that less than one third of the Dutch electorate was allowed earlier this year (2016) to paralyze the whole continent with their vote on an issue so important as it was to extend closer links of the EU with Ukraine. With less than 20% of the whole Dutch electorate voting NO, a decision painfully taken at the international level was unfortunately swept aside. And that is not right!
We have supported DI and other international organizations on their work in favor of the European Citizen's Initiative, because we believe that Europeans as a whole should have a voice to promote their hopes and aspirations. But at the international level it would be advisable to let parliaments take care of those decisions. The proper practice of Participatory Democracy should not be anarchic and should always function in harmony within representative democracy political structures.
We hope that other international organizations working to promote Participatory Democracy harbor similar ideas and convictions and that we'll all support them to curb -or at least try to curb- such impeding pseudo democratic practices.
We hope that future European initiatives focus primarily on the needs and aspirations of communities, regions and other internal issues and allow legislators representing them the task of negotiating and approving international treaties. There may be rare cases in which the negotiation involves a serious danger to national or regional security or represent an excessive weight to the whole European economy - only in those extreme cases a popular initiative on international issues would be justified.
It's currently a hot topic: "The rule of law". Many politicians and media commentators maintain that in view of current developments in such European states as Poland, Hungary, France or Turkey the rule of law is threatened and both it and democracy itself are being undermined.
But what exactly does "the rule of law/the constitutional state" mean, and what is the relationship between democracy and rule of law? Is it possible to develop an abstract set of questions (not specific to any particular state but nonetheless practically applicable) on the basis of which -depending on the answers- it would be possible to assert that the rule of law, and thus also democracy itself, are endangered?
This paper seeks to shed light on these questions through a sequence of theses, arguments and core assumptions from which can be derived a series of questions which will allow the status of the rule of law in individual countries to be examined and evaluated.
The following theses and arguments are based on the academic paper "Democracy and the Rule of Law - Two Sides of a Coin?" (in German) ...