THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION. Reforming Europe in a time of war

The Conference on the Future of Europe 15 Panels, without the possibility of eliminating or opposing any of these proposals. This meant that the Conference on the Future of Europe moved further away from this “equal basis”, exacerbating the inequality that existed from the start as a result of the composition described above. It is not acceptable that randomly selected citizens should have a near monopoly on the capacity to initiate proposals, to the exclusion of representatives of the other pillars. This represents a big missed opportunity to undertake a necessary rebalancing of this system, one that has its origins in Athenian notions of democracy but which is starting to influence French academic doctrine. The Conference on the Future of Europe has operated primarily through the Citizens’ Panels, which have been almost exclusively responsible for putting forward the proposals that were reflected in the conclusions, and also provided the basis for seven plenary sessions, and for the thematic proposals developed by the nine Working Groups. Citizens’ Panels Much of the effort of the Conference on the Future of Europe focused on the Citizens’ Panels, consisting of 800 members, supposedly chosen via a random mechanism, one third of whom were younger than 25. These Citizens’ Panels were divided, in turn, into four thematic panels with 200 members each, as follows: “Stronger economy, social justice and jobs / Education, culture, youth and sport / Digital transformation” (Panel 1); “European democracy / Values and rights, rule of law, security” (Panel 2); “Climate change and the environ- ment / Health”, (Panel 3); “EU in the World / Migration” (Panel 4). Each of the panels drew up a series of conclusions which then provided the basis for the Plenary andWork- ing Group discussions. In this respect, it should be noted that in some instances citizens were not very receptive to the suggestions of the other pillars of the conference. Plenaries During the 11 months of the Conference on the Future of Europe, a total of seven plenary sessions were held, with the final session being responsible for approving the conclusions of the Full Conference, subject to review by the Board, on 29 and 30 April. The plenary sessions were somewhat unevenly distributed over time, with the ma- jority of them being held in 2022, and only two sessions in 2021 (in May and December), while the third of the sessions scheduled for 2021 had to be postponed due to the deteriorating health situation. The remaining five sessions were thus held in the first four months of 2022. One of the weaknesses of the process was the fact that the plenary sessions of the Conference on the Future of Europe (from the third session on) were based on the agreements and proposals of the four Citizens’ Panels, and the initiative lay almost exclusively with citizens. In addition, they were not prepared to substantively reform or modify their proposals, with the result that the other pillars and the other members of the Conference on the Future of Europe did not play the role envisaged either in the initial proposal or in the procedural rules for the conference approved in May 2021 and modified in June. In other words, citizens had a prominence which went beyond what had been established in the initial proposal. The first plenary session was held on 17–18 July and consisted exclusively of a presentation of most of the registered members, without the participation of ran- domly selected citizens, as the random selection process had not yet been held. The second plenary session took place almost three months later, on 22–24 October. The third session was held on 17–19 January, by which time the health situation had improved markedly, making it possible for participants to attend in person. Both initially and subsequently, there were signifi- cant discrepancies in the method and operation of how the Plenaries were conducted, both from a doctrinal perspective and from the perspective of the different stakeholders involved with respect to some themes. Per- haps the most important of these, in our view, is the