I started answering the comments to my last post when then I realised my comment was being too long and that I was going to a further development of the questions - so I’m writing a new post instead.
I agree with Bogdan but I do think Andrei is rising a very important and interesting point about citizenship and democracy.
I want to go on talking about democracy and the democratic legitimacy of the EU on future posts, but I’ll say now that -even though I essentially agree with Andrei’s first paragraph- I’m afraid “the people” as such tends to be a generally “passive actor” in the current democracies - until there is a extreme situation and an actual general mobilisation may take place.
That is starting to change thanks to the so-called social media and social web and new means of more targeted social mobilisation, but I still think that in democracies the people is an actor which usually acts passively. By this apparent contradiction I mean that the people’s democratic strength is its public presence as potential voters and information consumers (or just consumers in the widest sense of the word) with a choice between different options.
This means the public powers -political, economic, the media, all of them- try to gain the people’s vote, the people’s choice, mainly in order to keep being a power (I used to believe in the well intentioned nature of the human being - but not anymore). This generates competition between those powers, and if that competition is responsibly regulated and takes place in a public arena, then that competition tends to produce a socially positive outcome.
The progress of such a society may then be slower than if it were led by a single, really well-intended actor - but as we all know in real life a single actor with a monopoly of power tends to behave only in its own interest and not in the public one. Democracy as public control is a warranty, a means to avoid a monopoly in power and a means to produce a more or less stable progress - the price being slowness in this progress and liar and selfish politicians on our TVs. But hey, that’s life, and it’s not bad at all a situation given how we human beings are.
That’s why I talked of democracy as an aspiration, as a process rather than as a state of things. Democracy as the place where there is a democratic control of the public powers. That’s why the struggle to have a democratic state never ends and the people always needs democraticly active members - not to talk about the role of socially responsible free media, without which there can be no democracy.
All that is too simplified and it might even sound like Milton Friedman’s extreme market libertarianism - but it’s not. I’m talking about competion in a very broad sense and about a socially resposibly regulated competition.
And my point would be that that competition does happen -more or less and better or worse- in the states members of the EU - but not in the EU as a political actor and a governmental body. And if there’s no public or civil demand for it it’s not because “they are thought to be functioning acceptably” but because they aren’t barely thought at all.
There is a lack of publicity and information, the mainstream media and the mainstream public don’t talk about the EU as process, and so there’s a general public and civic perception of the EU as something alien, foreign, and so the political actors in the EU institutions are not very subject to public scrutiny and there’s no real competition between them - and that’s why I think there’s a democratic deficit in the EU.
And, again, the social web and the social media -that’s us, fellas- have a very important role to play in the advance of democracy in the EU.
And to finish, have a look at this short and nice clip about what social media are (and please do share it with your friends who, unlike us, may not be as much into the whole journalism and politics 2.0 thing).
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Outstanding post however I was wanting to know if you could write a litte more on this subject? I’d be very grateful if you could elaborate a little bit more. Bless you!