In late May, a member of the editorial
team of this newspaper was sitting outside a café sipping water and perusing
her iPad, when old-fashioned sheets of paper dropped from the sky on to her lap
– the printout of a journal or blog. The odd thing was: the dates of all the
entries were in the future, all the way to 2020. Despite the cynics, as
newspaper producers we know that miracles of timing (and mistiming) happen now
and again. We thus present you with extracts from these fascinating reports
from the future.
4 July 2013: Thugs stab to death
three young immigrants in Athens. Although the vast majority of Greeks despise
them, support for Golden Dawn has soared. No surprise: we ‘saved’ Greece by pauperising its citizens.
11 Sept
2013: When times were good, the EU could play with high-sounding, ‘happy
family’ ideals; when things came down to money, realpolitik came to the fore: elite power, national interest,
individual interests and, trumping everything else, international finance. Instead
of a Europe of Citizens we’ve a Europe
divided between lenders/gamblers and debtors, north and south, natives and
foreigners …
1 Jan 2014: One in five young people in the EU are
unemployed – the future citizens of Europe. Happy New Year!
26 Feb
2014: Still no growth in the EU. These harsh economic remedies worked out by
some of the best minds in Europe are superb. Just a minor problem – they’re not
working. The weaker countries are spinning down an economic death spiral.
Citizens have little or no say in the policies adopted, but have to take the
pain. Not knowing what’s good for them, they don’t think that’s fair. The ‘good
citizens’ feel alienated, the ‘crazies’ thrive. Attacks on immigrants from
Finland to France and Hungary to Greece. Let’s blame strangers for all our troubles, in proportion to the darkness of
their skin. Then everything will be wonderful, and we can all go to the beach
to deepen our tans (and tattoos).
27 May
2014: Shock, yet predictable, results in the Parliament elections. Many eurosceptics
elected. The far-right can now make up a formal political group (they’ll get funding
for promotional activities!): 47 MEPs representing more than a quarter of
member states: French Front National (17 seats), Jobbik in Hungary (4), Golden
Dawn in Greece (3), Italian New Mussolini Party (4), Bulgarian Ataka (3),
Greater Romania Party (4), Deutschland Allein (3), Austrian Freedom Party (4), Belgian
Vlaams Belang (1), British National Party (3) and Swedish Democrats (1). Where
the far-right hasn’t gained votes, it’s because mainstream parties have stolen
some of their thunder. Parliament’s going to be a much noisier forum. But right-wingers
like going on the attack; maybe they’ll start fighting each other before long.
1 Jan 2015: One in six young people in the EU are
unemployed. Happy New Year! The withdrawal of the financial tide revealed the
rocky wastes of European democracy. But the good thing is that citizens are now
demanding to be taken seriously. They’re working out new ways to engage in public
discourse and influence decision-making. Thousands of them, all across Europe.
And the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) has been
hugely improved. …. The far-right are screaming, but many more citizens are
talking. Hopeful signs!
4 Oct 2015: Catalonia has
declared independence. Madrid’s up in arms (though not literally, mercifully).
That’ll weaken the Spanish economy.
12 Feb 2016: A huge gathering of representatives of
citizens organisations from every member state, organised by the Evens
Foundation, meets in Antwerp – the biggest such event ever organised. They seem
to mean business.
7 April 2016: Aviva Eskenazi, leader
of the Greek Citizens Party, looks interesting. “We are not an economy. We are
citizens. We are Europe,” she says, and: “A totally free market leads to
slavery.” Her work behind the scenes shows these aren’t empty slogans. She’s
meeting citizens organisations all over Europe.
21 July
2016: A report says up to 27,000 people in the EU have died as a result of
the ‘austerity’ measures (health cutbacks, suicide, etc). How do they work out
these figures? But being exact is not the point: austerity kills. The good
news, though, is that EU growth overall is now at 0.45%, unemployment is down
1.2% – and sales of BMWs to Greece have risen by 2.1% in the first six months
of the year. Hallelujah!
3 Jan
2017: Millions of citizens demonstrate in all the capitals of Europe, demanding
a voice at the highest levels of the EU … more than a million in Brussels, 600,000
in Paris, 350,000 in Warsaw, and so on. A key demand is the creation of a new
position: an elected Citizens President of the EU.
28 June
2017: In the UK referendum on EU membership, voters narrowly support staying
in – despite decades of daily rubbish in newspapers about Brussels dictators
and funny foreigners. Mixed reactions in the EU. Relief for newly independent
Scotland!
1 Jan 2018: One in seven young people in the EU are
unemployed. Only 14.286 out of 100. Progress. Happy New Year!
16 Feb
2018: Golden Dawn thugs, shouting anti-semitic slogans, threw rotten eggs at
Eskenazi last night. More mildly, some say she’s ambitious, rising on a wave of
populism, etc. Others say it’s ironic that the drive to increase citizen power
is based so much on a single person. It’s not. She is simply the pinnacle of
the citizens movement that took off in late 2013. She genuinely, precisely reflects
the needs and wishes of Europe’s citizenry. And she’s been fighting tooth and
nail, through hours and hours of discussions and debates, to turn her/our
vision of Europe into reality.
27 April
2018: In Parliament, one of the Mussolini-ite MEPs came up with a
provocative ‘Balkan’ insult; Bulgarian and Romanian far-right MEPs walked out
and are expected to quit the Free Europe far-right group. More insults, please!
12 Aug
2018: Eskenazi has been elected as the first Citizens President of the EU, winning
overwhelming support from e-voters all round Europe. She says the big problem of democratic reform is, first, how to promote “mass
deliberation” – “How can we bring people into the political process in
conditions where they can be engaged to think seriously about public issues?”
Secondly: “How can we advance democracy by empowering citizens to make key
policy decisions.” Thirdly: “What institutions and processes do we need that
can aggregate and balance divergent citizen interests into a coherent policy
programme?”
15 Oct 2018: I AM EUROPE has
proposed setting up a European Citizens Assembly. It cites the example
of the British Columbia Citizens
Assembly, the first time a citizen body was
given the power to reform fundamental political institutions.
12 Jan 2019: European Citizens Assembly formally
established! Experts will join with citizens in
the deliberative process, to overcome the problems of technical complexity;
citizen representatives will be randomly selected rather than self-selected, to
avoid organised, well-resourced interests; measures to ensure the Assembly’s
decisions will be taken seriously, and so on. Meanwhile, the far-right MEPs are fighting among themselves like cats and
dogs, severely damaging their cause. Quel
dommage!
22 June
2019: Already, the Citizens Assembly has provoked major changes in the
running of the EU. Sensible regulation of the financial system, progressive
taxation, citizen-centred decision-making, etc. Politicians are tripping over
each other in a competition to emit the most references to ‘citizens’ in their
speeches. Trust in the EU has soared.
3 Nov 2020: Eskenazi dismisses attempts to ‘beatify’ her: “Since the participatory
structures for citizens were missing, someone was temporarily required to
represent EU citizens and help to set up these structures. Without all the
active citizens, I’d have been nothing. My job was to make the need for me
disappear.”
16 Dec
2020: So, it wasn’t the bureaucrats, technocrats, austeritocrats, rating
agencies, merkelists or marketists that transformed Europe into a more or less
democratic project. How surprising! It was the citizens of Europe themselves,
with the help of Aviva Eskenazi. How clear it’s become that ‘no man is an
island’, that EU member states and their citizens can only thrive together, The
‘lazy’ southern European states, now they’ve recovered, are helping Germany,
Finland and the Netherlands through their economic collapses. And sales of BMWs
in Greece have soared!
The principle that all decision-making,
whether financial, economic or political, must be citizen-centred now permeates
EU institutions. Even the American dollarocracy is looking to Europe for a new
model of governance.
‘We are Europe … at
last!’
by David Quin, Ireland
