THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION REPORT. Europe in a period of transition

THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION 26 tion, the European Conference has the added value of the predominance (in principle) of open and free debate via the Multilingual Digital Platform. What we can expect from the Conference From a more or less critical standpoint, it could be said that the true political value of the Conference ends with its mere staging, given that the Conference is, as we said, a simple exercise of opinion, which means that it could be a response to the fear on the part of the institutions and Member States (European representative democracy) of losing power to European participatory democracy, whose present legal limit of influence is marked by Arti- cles 10.3 and 11 of the Treaty on European Union 8 . Be that as it may, the very fact that, in addition to the institutions and Member States, the Union has given European civil society direct access to the exercise of decision-making power in a Conference on the Future of Europe for the first time is something to be celebrated. Given that the ultimate purpose of the Conference is only to draw up a Report for the attention of the Joint Presidency (Parliament, Council and Commission), in the short term we should not expect any profound transfor- mation of the process of European integration or of the Union’s institutional structure, though the possibility ex- ists that the final report from the Conference will propose to the institutions the holding of the Convention provided for in Article 48.3 of the Treaty on European Union. If this is the case, the Conference, as an exercise of participatory and deliberative democracy, will have demonstrated its maximum power to influence the institutions and it will represent a major reinforcement of the civil legitimacy of the Union. Even if it does not end in a reform of the Convention for the Climate: https://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/societe/ on-a-ete-pris-de-court-les-comites-citoyens-voulus-par-macron-racon- tes-de-l-interieur_2153612.html#xtor=CS5-888 8  See the text of Articles 10.3 and 11 of the Treaty on European Union here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/resource.html?uri=cellar: 2bf140bf- a3f8-4ab2-b506-fd71826e6da6.0005.02/DOC_1&format=PDF treaties, the proposals on each of the topic groups that arise from the Conference can increase the legitimacy of European governance and policy. Meanwhile, we must point out that at the time of writing, just two months after its launch (on 19 April), the futureu Multilingual Digital Platform had already logged (in descending order): 841 ideas on the subject of climate change, 782 on European democracy, 570 “other ideas”, 539 on the economy and jobs, 464 on foreign policy, 415 on values and rights, 376 on education and culture, 305 on health, 289 on digital transformation and 262 on migration. Notwithstanding the relative statistical, sociological, or political value of these figures, we can say that the Digital Platform, the true added value of the Conference com- pared to previous European experiences of participatory democracy, has been a great success. Likewise, the order of interest that European civil society (organised or not) is showing in the Conference’s topics is already a quite sig- nificant indication, from the start, of what we can expect from the Conference in terms of deliberative content and inputs to be gathered in the final Report for presentation to the Joint Presidency. In other words, barring an unex- pected change in the course of its work, the Conference on the Future of Europe 2021-2022 will provide ideas and proposals chiefly, and in this order, on: 1. climate change, 2. European democracy, and 3, the economy. We will have to wait until February 2022 (the es- timated time for holding the final Conference Plenary, with the possibility of holding an extraordinary plenary in March) to know how many and which of these ideas and proposals are innovative and, above all, how many and which are taken into consideration by the Union institutions. It remains to be seen, finally, whether after this his- toric milestone of European participatory democracy that is the Conference on the Future of Europe 2021-2022 sufficient political will arises in the corresponding Eu- ropean Council (to be held, perhaps, under the French six-monthly presidency) to enable launching a Conven- tion with the power, in that event, to improve Union legislation and policy.