Stronger United-Stronger UK@United Europe: Remain & Transform!

Active Citizen Participation

Mahatma Ghandi’s principle of satyagraha – soul power, translates into the modern principle of “autonomous accountability” of individuals willing to take responsibility for their own and their communities’ futures, and ready to get involved in making the choices, taking the decisions, and implementing the solutions needed to address the challenges we all face at the dawn of the 21st. This is the cornerstone of the Stronger United Campaign and of the very concept of multi-level governance; for without active citizens willing to participate in deciding the future course of their own lives, there can be no functioning, effective, legitimate and accountable institutions.

Therefore, our aim is to achieve an 85 per cent participation rate at the BREXIT Referendum that will send a clear message to both the “Out” Campaign and to Team Cameron : "Yes" to a reformed Citizens’ Europe – not to a EU run by national politicians.

We have touched on the concept of ‘ParticipActivity’ - of active citizen participation - as one of the fundamental principles of the TEN REPAIRS that Britain can only achieve if it remains a full member of the European Union. Active citizen participation is all about putting the focus of political life on the routine public activities of citizens themselves as opposed to only on those of their elected representatives.

This move away from a strictly representative democracy which Britain has been now for many hundreds of years, to a more flexible, creative, dynamic type of democracy combining representative with direct elements, face-to-face with virtual interaction environments, presents us with an entirely new vision of “active citizen participation” - one built around the twin notion of “autonomous accountability”, more suitable to who we are today as individuals and to the problems we have to face at present and in the future.

To engage in this transition from the old national representative democracy that Britain has personified until now to a new, deliberative practice of a multilevel democracy representative of the British and European citizens of tomorrow we must seek to implement six specific transformative goals:

  • from spasmodic to continuous participation;

  • real and virtual, synchronous and asynchronous tools;

  • renewed role for direct democracy;

  • deep deprofessionalisation of politics;

  • a new role for civic education;

  • from strategic to deliberative agonistic politics.