Can citizens be wrong in predicting EU:s social and economic future? This seems to be the case when looking at the aggregate results of ECC 2009, that brought together more than 1600 citizens from all 27 EU Member States to debate the question: What can the EU do to shape our economic and social future in a globalized world?
I was the facilitator of European Citizens Consultation in Finland, and we ranked both the issue of climate change and the need of financial regulation on the top. At that time, global financial crisis starting in the US was widely acknowledged, but it didn´t seem to worry European citizens that much at that time: climate change, health care, working conditions were top 3-issues, followed by education, unemployment, agriculture , social inequality, crime and transparency of EU-politics. The financial crisis was voted as rank 10 (sic!) out of 15 recommendations in this all-EU-citizens deliberation at the European Citizens Summit in Brussels in May 2009. This issue was formulated as following:
“The EU should regulate financial markets (actors and products), oversee financial flows of commercial banks operating in the EU and ensure the stability of these flows. It should control this regulation via a European central financial supervisory body or give more power for this to the European Central Bank. It should introduce common terms and conditions in order to ensure the security of private savings and the operational capacity of commercial banks.”
The rest is painful history, too close to be seen in 2009: Greece, Cyprus, Spain etcetera..how was this low ranking possible (well, except Finland and a few other countries)? The text above is highly reasonable, and the EU Commission has taken steps on that direction, but still there is a suspicion of a deliberative bias in the expression of priorities of European citizens a few years ago.
Honestly speaking, I think that these 15 recommendations should be read as a whole: it is obvious that the signs of the crisis were apparent to most citizens in 2009. The issue of illegal immigration, for instance, was ranked 15 on the list of recommendations. My own analysis and advice, after being an active part of a large Europe-wide deliberation, is: don’t trust ranking lists. And be careful when “editing” citizens opinions into deliberative conclusions, as problems and signs are interlinked in complex ways.
Björn Wallén, director Swedish Study Centre (Svenska studiecentralen) in Finland