By Lucio Levi

The EU is the laboratory for testing the institutions necessary to govern an economy and a society whose dimensions are far larger than those of the sovereign states. There is a general recognition that the institutional reforms being elaborated by the EU will provide the regional pillar of the building of world peace, and that the constitutionalization of the European area will represent the model for governing globalisation.

The world crisis represents a great opportunity to promote this federal project. The crisis shows quite clearly that the alternative is to “federate or perish” and this is the objective condition that may lead some of the EU member states – first of all France and Germany – to pursue choices converging on federal objectives. But the initiative of the governments cannot manifest itself in a political vacuum. To be effective, it has to be sustained by a popular movement. What is needed, to give impetus to the federal project, is popular support, a movement from below. European politics show an increasing gap between the citizens and European institutions, including the European Parliament, which nonetheless represents the only serious attempt to extend democracy across frontiers from the national to  the international level. In addition, Europe’s inability to play the role of global actor deprives the world of a potential force in the process of strengthening and democratizing the UN.

2. We have tried several times to put ourselves at the head of a popular movement to obtain a Constitution for the European federal people. This has been the fundamental orientation of our actions:  from the Congress of the European people, to the campaigns for the direct election of the European Parliament, for  a single currency and for a European Constitution. This must become our absolute political priority once again. We should take pride in being the initiators and the vanguard of this movement, but we must also be modest enough to acknowledge that this task cannot be performed solely by the federalists: it requires widely-expressed support from civil as well as political society.

3. Civil society movements are a great reserve of both moral resources and political will. They are new forces that have their raison d’être above all in the great global challenges (peace, climate change, poverty, human rights, control of the global market and so on). Global issues activate new social forces that act on a worldwide scale. The political originality of global civil society movements lies in their attempt to innovate without any reference to national or class base. Consequently, the political parties and the states, which are the respective political expressions of social classes and the nations, cannot control the historical process, which is overthrowing the old and falling nation-states but are subjected to it. As a result of this, awareness is rising that the new goals cannot be pursued by the old powers. The new forces that want to change the world are looking for new formulas for organisation and action on a global level.

4. Civil society movements have become the interlocutors of governments in the context of diplomatic meetings and international organizations. They exert a concrete influence over global policy, shown for example by the role of the movement for human rights at the conferences that approved the Treaties to ban anti-personnel mines and for the institution of the International Criminal Court.

The organizational formula which allowed these movements to influence negotiations at those meetings, is the creation of coalitions of movements. Furthermore, in significant sectors of movements for peace there is growing awareness that peace is an institutional objective, and that the strengthening and democratization of the EU are part of the peace-building project. The historical task that we have to address is promoting a federative process of the global civil society movements which does not deny the autonomy of the individual members, but which decides to acquire a common direction that will thus become “the Movement of movements”. It is a flexible formula which allows to organize campaigns promoted through collective alignments, in which each movement keeps its autonomy and no one plays a hegemonic role. This is an essential condition for the Movement to be able to act and to influence European and global politics in an incisive way.

5. The commitment of non-governmental organizations to peace-building, to the protection of the environment, to international justice and to the defence of human rights emphasizes a militant style of action like that of the political parties when they were revolutionary actors. The organizations of civil society are the most genuine expression of the movement of unification of the world and of the requirement, felt in the first place by young people, to devote all their energy to the solution of the great dramas of humankind. For the moment, they are a heterogeneous mass of big and small groups, united by a common situation (globalization). This movement is swept along by the current which leads towards the unification of the world, but it has not yet identified the tools for governing this process. It is not fully aware of its own institutional aims, nor has it defined a political strategy. Being an actor on the international political scene, it has come to acquire the role of interlocutor of governments. As far as it interprets new needs in a global era and it is the protagonist of a process which tends to redefine the actors and roles of political life, it is the vanguard of international democracy.

6. The limitation of these movements lies in the fact that they adopt a sectorial perspective: each movement deals with a single issue. They are expressions of civil society, that is, the pre-political sphere of social life, which is the field in which private interests assert themselves and clash, but they do not produce those mechanisms for mediation between different interests, which give rise to the need to promote the common good. What is lacking,  in order to bring to completion the formation of a genuine a movement for peace and international democracy, is the awareness of its own political objectives and some form of unified direction. What distinguishes the federalist movements is an approach which is essentially political and institutional, allowing them to bridge the gaps left by the limitations of the civil society movements. Their primary objective is the construction of supranational institutions, which are necessary to convert the demands of society into political decisions. Potentially complementary roles may therefore be outlined between the federalist movements and the civil society movements in the field of political strategy. A powerful alignment of forces, including labour organisations and the peace movement, can breakdown the resistance of governments towards the federalist project. The political operation to which we should dedicate all our energies at this time is the building up of a single alignment which would include these forces and which would allow us to achieve the critical mass required to impose political unification of the continent as a step towards world unification. The prospect of a large-scale mobilisation of civil and political society will open the way to the selection of a new generation of political leaders of which Europe and the world are in great need.

7. The most effective formula for promoting a movement from below is through “Citizens’ Conventions”. Starting with coordinated action alongside federalist forces (UEF, JEF, EMI, CEMR, AEDE, Federalist inter-groups at national and European Parliaments, etc.), we should concentrate our efforts on the extension of this alignment of forces to civil society movements, but also on political parties, trade-unions and local authorities, in order to build up the necessary critical mass to stimulate the transformation of the EU in a federal direction, and launch a similar reform of the U.N. and the economic organizations created at Bretton Woods.

The construction of the Movement of movements should start from the cities through local Conventions, promoted by the federalist local sections, leading to national Conventions and culminating in a European Convention. This will be something different from the Agora meetings promoted by the European Parliament, because it will be the result of a mobilization from below and an expression of an impulse which starts from European civil society’s roots. But, like Agora, it will gather within the European Parliament helping the Parliament to come out of its isolation in which it is confined, despite the European elections. A new channel of communication will thus be opened between the Parliament and the European civil society, which the political parties have not hitherto been able to activate, because they are prisoners of their national dimension. Through this channel, the building of a new European public space will materialize, where a permanent dialogue will develop between the elected representatives and the European citizens about the future of Europe and of the world. At the world level, the proposal of institutionalizing the Global Civil Society Forum must be reconsidered. This Forum should meet each year before the opening of the UN General Assembly and transmit the demands of civil society to this Assembly. The Forum convened only once in the hall of the General Assembly in may 2000 and its proposals were taken up by the governments, especially the millennium development goals.

8. The Conventions’ political stand will be the result of a discussion on the major European and global political issues, such as peace as the supreme political value of our time, a real supranational European citizenship for EU citizens and a residence citizenship for non-EU citizens, which is the first step towards cosmopolitan citizenship, a European civilian service, a basic income to eliminate poverty, a European government of the economy, a policy for immigration, a plan for research, technology innovation, employment and sustainable development, the institution of a UN Parliamentary Assembly, a European seat in the U.N. Security Council with the intent of transforming this body into the Council of the great regions of the world, the creation of a Global Environment Organization financed through a carbon tax, etc.

These proposals should be included in petitions to be transmitted to the national, European and global authorities and should be the means of collecting consents  within civil society on the federalist project in its regional and global articulations, thus giving the Conventions a clear institutional aim. In other words, petitions should become the vehicle through which the claims and demands raising from civil society can be set within the framework of a federal reform of the EU and the UN.

9. The functioning of the EU is essentially based on representative democracy. However, the European Parliament recognized the inadequacy of European elections and of the representative organs to fill the gap that divides European institutions from its citizens, by summoning two civil society Assemblies (Agora) during the past term in office.

The Treaty of Lisbon (art. 11) introduced the principle of participative democracy, allowing citizens to be associated with the EU legislative process. One million citizens can ask the European Commission, which has the right of legislative initiative, for the presentation of a legislative act proposal. With the prospect of using this institution - the European Citizens Initiative -  the European Citizens Conventions can become the framework within which indispensable alliances and networks can develop between civil society movements and other forces of European and world orientation, to unify the efforts towards citizens' mobilization.